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Monopoly Man – the same image uploaded to Imgur 3.2M times?
- thebrettd 11y agoIs this your site? Have you tried any https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganalysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganalysis?
- steckerbrett 11y agoThey are comparing SHA256 hashes, so the images are literally identical (and don't just appear to be identical visually).
- geofft 11y agoInteresting, but the analysis is a bit short. This was posted to Reddit five months ago with more discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_that_roughly_1_of_imgur_images_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_th... They found (as I did, with a simple Google reverse image search) that the image was used to illustrate a Forbes article in 2011: http://www.forbes.com/sites/venessamiemis/2011/04/04/the-bank-of-facebook-currency-identity-reputation/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/venessamiemis/2011/04/04/the-ban... https://twitter.com/EricaGlasier/status/563770191440404480 https://twitter.com/EricaGlasier/status/563770191440404480 Doesn't actually answer the question, but the source of the image is I think super relevant. I could sort of imagine some automated process making Imgur thumbnails of images from links shared on some social media site, and going awkwardly self-recursive and getting to 3.2M.
- andyharl 11y agoJust dug up these links too. This comment on the Reddit thread may explain why https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_that_roughly_1_of_imgur_images_are/cpktip9 https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_th...
- agumonkey 11y agoInteresting speculation: "Sorry to be boring, but Webdriver Torso already gave us the answer: it's a test image used in integration tests of Imgur itself. Silly image." https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_that_roughly_1_of_imgur_images_are/cod4cv3 https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/2uzas7/i_found_out_th...
- myohan 11y agowhy would they have test data in production?
- jonhohle 11y agoWhy would they not be testing production?
- myohan 11y agoI guess it makes sense for their case, since who cares an image was uploaded by integration test or it was "real user" generated.
- agumonkey 11y agoSeems like the placeholder isn't supposed to be accessed through imgur interface. Only if you type random letters you'll see it.
- lmm 11y agoWhen you get big enough monitoring and integration testing start to look pretty similar. The most reliable kind of monitoring is the kind that actually uses your system, end-to-end.
- athenot 11y agoOn that topic, never name your child "TEST" if you ever plan to take them to the doctor or hospital...
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- jackgavigan 11y agoFrom the Forbes article: In the longer term, Facebook Credits could become truly disruptive by becoming a currency for peer to peer lending, microtransactions, and for usage by the unbanked in emerging markets around the world. It's amazing how much utter tripe gets written and published about this sort of stuff.
- agumonkey 11y agoweird project link https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=TheGamble&subject=MONOPOLIED%20MEN https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=TheGamble&subject...
- panic 11y agoThis chart is hard to read: http://i.imgur.com/HJYmCLN.png http://i.imgur.com/HJYmCLN.png Since the values are percentages, it's weird that the scale is out of 0.9 -- why not 100? Why leave out the other ~98% from the visualization? The radial arrangement makes it even harder to read and compare the values. The effect (at least for me) was to make it seem like these images appeared much more often than they actually did. I actually found the raw numeric table below more illustrative!
- ossreality 11y agoSeriously? You don't know that 0 = 0%, 1 = 100%, .5 = 50%, etc? Also, it's not "out-of", it's just showing you what a radius of that length is equivalent to. If anything, it's "confusing" because it's a pie chart where the width of each wedge doesn't correspond to the percentage (instead it's the full area of the wedge)
- VieElm 11y agoPie charts are already a terrible visualization, this is way worse. You're supposed to compare the area of these half circle shaped rotated slices easily? Should have just used a bar chart, in fact why wouldn't you use a bar chart? You could just have a single box and illustrate the percentage amounts by dividing the box up into different colors to indicate the percentages of a whole, but this? Nope. Tufte would probably not be pleased.
- jnbiche 11y agoPie charts are excellent for showing parts of a whole, and very poor for any other type of visualization. Just because people are misusing a chart type doesn't make it fundamentally useless, regardless of what Tufte thinks.
- rostigerpudel 11y agoAt a scale of 100% I feel that 0.84% would be awfully few pixels. That said I agree that a bar chart might have been more appropriate but c'mon - pretty!
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- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- joshu 11y agoApparently this is the result of exercising a bug in imgur.
- crucifiction 11y agoProbably some kind of production canary or integration test in their deployments.
- morgante 11y agoI'd bet money that it's their standard test image.
- visakanv 11y agoGood call. What else would you bet on?
- shmerl 11y agoDo they have some kind of data deduplication by the way?
- astrodust 11y agoGiven how an image can be hashed with something like SHA256, it's kind of surprising that uploading the same image twice doesn't result in the same URL.
- shmerl 11y agoYeah, my thoughts exactly.
- morcheeba 11y agoWell, the image title would be different, and that's a significant difference. "Smiling guy" and "Justin Bieber at my sister's birthday party" are very different :-) Also, the "author" and comments wouldn't want to be merged -- different comment streams for different audiences.
- arihant 11y agoWhat are the chances that imgur is throwing this image as an exploit prevention technique? Maybe there were 3000+ times the author triggered the rate limit, or some other metric? The next one called "White Line" appeared 2000+ times too, maybe doing the same job. In early days of reCAPTCHA at CMU, Luis von Ahn did a similar thing. There are a lot of sweatshops to type in CAPTCHAs, they detected that, and instead of blocking them, they threw at them longer (sometimes entire sentences) CAPTCHAs to get their help digitizing text.
- JTon 11y agoThis is interesting and it seems plausible. However, at the beginning of the article the author said they stumbled upon this image multiple times by manually entering random 5 character filenames. If it were an exploit prevention feature, I would hope it would be more difficult to trigger
- dluan 11y agoI wish there were more of these little experiments being done! What with just a little more time and resources, imagine what other weird quirky discoveries are out there.
- arantius 11y agoI agree, I've seen lots of fun things like this on the internet. But good ideas are hard to come by. I did something like this a few years back, for favicons: http://tech.arantius.com/favicon-survey http://tech.arantius.com/favicon-survey
- tripzilch 11y agoGoogle `qxapoiu`. Though it was more fun back in 2002 :)
- JohnyLy 11y agoThis is an old story. The answer is: this is a test image used in integration tests of Imgur itself.
- megapatch 11y agoWhy is the author assuming that different URL ids necessarily translate to different images/uploads? The character based id could simply contain redundant parts, which favour certain images over others.
- danneu 11y agoSeems 1:1 http://imgur.com/blog/2013/01/18/more-characters-in-filenames/ http://imgur.com/blog/2013/01/18/more-characters-in-filename...
- fugyk 11y agoThere is a link of DB attached(https://mega.nz/#!WBg1zAIA!dg0g2Q0kDm1q6r1WBMPe0-nrP3wxvokeF5XlNjTctdg https://mega.nz/#!WBg1zAIA!dg0g2Q0kDm1q6r1WBMPe0-nrP3wxvokeF...). Can anyone verify weather the images actually point to "The Monopoly Man" or is a test image.
- imgurthing 11y agoI too noticed that imgur urls were short some time ago so I put some JS code together and let it run in background tab for some time and what I've noticed is that there is ever so often some images that appear from time to time. There are at least that coke/pepsi logo history image and then there is that man with big slash on his face. Never seen that facebook man before for some reason. If you have a hosting place I can share JS. But basically it just randomizes urls and if the resulting image is "if(e.naturalWidth == 161 && e.naturalHeight == 81)" it removes that image as that is the default size of the "image not found" image.
- mosselman 11y agoWhat I find strange is the use of a hash of the image. There are other methods to detect whether images are visually the same while they have a different resolution, etc. From what I remember is that you'd resize all images to a fingerprint of yxy (lets say 100x100 pixels), apply some filtering in order to normalize lighting and then you'd XOR 2 fingerprints in order to see how much they are similar.
- lmm 11y agoThat's more complicated, more likely to false-positive, and I doubt it would provide much more value. Very few people are resizing images and uploading a slightly different version; the overwhelming majority of the time, duplicate images are people uploading the exact same file, byte-for-byte.
- kaivi 11y agoYeah, I've stumbled upon this Monopoly image about 2 years ago, when I was developing a small JS-based website. It dynamically embedded random pics from image hosting sites like Imgur, and this Monopoly guy was everywhere. I guessed that it must have been some sort of massive Facebook spam at some point in time, or something like this. After all, the guy waves dollars in your face in exchange for credentials.
- buddydvd 11y agoClicking the link below creates a new imgur URL: http://imgur.com/upload?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fy18.gif http://imgur.com/upload?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.c... Perhaps someone had included a URL like the one above in some wordpress template.
- jagger27 11y agoI like this theory.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- the_mitsuhiko 11y agoIt's an easteregg? that you get when accessing an imgur album as an individual image. Because the original user is scraping he basically found 3.2M galleries. It only happens with older albums that do not have /a in the URL. //EDIT: source: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3clho3/1_out_of_every_120_images_hosted_on_imgur_are/csx6ho7 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3clho3/1_out_o...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- anotheryou 11y agomonopoly mystery solved, but what's up with DJ David?
- mahouse 11y agoFor those wondering, "TARINGA" is an argentinian forum full of piracy. I assume some of those images are uploaded by users to illustrate their posts.
- hudell 11y agoThat was actually the first image I got when trying 5 random characters on an URL.
- chavesn 11y agoI tried this, and the second random string I tried was the image in question: http://imgur.com/52nu1 http://imgur.com/52nu1