Ok this was pretty cool.
https://kottke.org/24/08/secret-message-in-one-million-checkboxes
(Editor's note: we usually do not post videos, but it is integral to understanding the story it well worth watching. I encourage you to watch the whole video! --MartyB)
The Secret Message Contained in One Million Checkboxes
In my XOXO post on Monday, I said that Nolen Royalty, the creator of One Million Checkboxes (a game), had told "one of the wackiest internet nerd stories I've ever heard". Well, Royalty has now put that story online, both in the form of a blog post and a YouTube video: https://youtu.be/OI4DbECnp8A
I panicked. There were URLs in my database! There were URLs pointing to catgirls.win in my database!! Something was very very wrong.
I assumed I'd been hacked. I poured over my logs, looking for evidence of an intrusion. I read and re-read my code, searching for how somebody could be stuffing strings into a database that should have just contained 0s and 1s.
I couldn't find anything. My access logs looked fine. My (very simple) code was ok. My heart rate increased. My girlfriend patiently waited for me to join her for dinner. And then — wait.
Wait!
I saw it.
Watch the whole video to discover what he saw!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 03, @11:19AM (6 children)
Can someone just do the TLDR summary?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Disagree) by deimtee on Tuesday September 03, @11:27AM (5 children)
Nah it's cool. Go watch the video.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03, @02:22PM (2 children)
Why. Do. Some. People. Stress. Every. Word. *with* *big* *hand gestures*
Gives me a headache.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Tuesday September 03, @07:18PM
Why do some people notice that?
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03, @09:29PM
Then don't listen with your eyes.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03, @08:11PM
No. Fuck right off.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 03, @09:23PM
I thought you couldn't mod something Underrated until somebody had modded it down? Does Disagree count as a downmod, even though it doesn't affect your karma?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by stormwyrm on Tuesday September 03, @11:31AM (6 children)
It's really quite simple, and I don't know why someone didn't bother to write a quick summary of what this is all about. As it is I used up 8 minutes of my life to watch it. So basically this guy has a website called One Million Checkboxes where he has a site with literally one million HTML checkbox widgets that anyone can just go to and toggle. He stores the state as one bit in a file of 125,000 bytes. One day he looks into the representation of his checkbox state as an ASCII dump and finds that there are URLs to a catgirls.win website inside the data, which he followed. It was an invitation to a Discord server with fun people who used it to make the URLs appear by twiddling the appropriate bits in his checkbox website who thought it was cool and they wanted to meet him. They did a lot of other interesting things to the bit states of his checkboxes too, such as interesting images and even animations. Obviously you'll need to watch the video to see those but that's about it.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday September 03, @11:57AM
Frankly, as an old geezer, I am simultaneously overwhelmed and humbled as to how many people out there are doing such things.
As an old prof used to tell me "security by obscurity is no security at all". There are a helluva lot of incredibly brilliant people out there.
It's gonna be people like this that save us from digital tyranny.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 03, @12:18PM (3 children)
Don't want to spend 8 minutes of _my_ life getting the ground truth, but this reminds me of the old "buy a pixel" websites that (a very few) kids used to raise money in the 1990s. It's basically made for people to twiddle the bits and encode stuff into it, especially links.
To save others a bit of time: catgirls.win brings up a 404 for me.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday September 03, @01:22PM (2 children)
I don't blame you - I was reluctant to follow the link too. But I am glad that I did.
However, if you don't follow the links you won't know that the full URL is catgirls.win/omcb, and that it is a discourse channel run by some very smart young programmers who did something very clever using his game. The writer of the game (Nolen Royalty) decided to follow the link and was ever so impressed by what they had actually done.
As anubi has already commented, it is good to see that there is some very smart young talent learning the programming ropes as many another schoolkids / teens have done for the past 20-30 years. And they are doing it without abusing everyone else or hacking in to programs - just some original thinking.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 03, @01:28PM
Kinda sad that my attention span is so short these days, but... have a meeting coming up in 3 minutes so can't expand on that thought...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Freeman on Tuesday September 03, @05:18PM
Sounds more like young coders found this one cool trick to increase viewership.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday September 03, @01:06PM
A chan meme for MANY years with uncountable variations. My two favorites were the one that exported to a Minecraft world and the competitive coders writing scripts to dynamically take over areas to post images, sort of like the 1980s/90s codewars competition.
The novel part of this one seems to be checkboxes instead of pixels and somehow someone injected strings into his logs.
A multiplayer bitmap editor is an interesting engineering challenge to scale, because you can do all kinds of interesting caching and sharding, often dynamic, so people use it as resume filler. A simple Perl CGI that does one player is easy. Making it work with a couple players is harder. Making it work with a few hundred or thousand simultaneous participants is tricky. Making it efficiently and cheaply dynamically scale while maintaining low enough latency is pretty hard. Although its all gotten easier over the years. Imagine trying to do something like this without using K8S, that would be much harder.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 03, @11:54AM
Basically he says, "The world is full of assholes, so I locked my code down tight to keep assholes from messing with it. But a bunch of kids outsmarted me, and did cool things with my code." Rolleyes emoji
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday September 03, @01:21PM (6 children)
Children, are you serious?
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday September 03, @01:25PM (5 children)
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday September 03, @03:49PM (4 children)
You need to understand very simple encodings like this before you start pushing illusory gallery gems through some funny web protocol.
BTW, do you have expert level explanation for why SoylentNews database crashes so often? Please, enlighten us.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday September 03, @04:15PM
Really? 🙄
When was the last time "the database crashed" even?
(Score: 2, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday September 03, @04:27PM
When was the last time it crashed? "So often"?
We have a problem with the certificates which happens every 3 months. The last 3 renewals have caused us problems. The last crash that needed investigation was a case of the database running out of space, but that was almost a year ago. We are in the processing of moving the site over to a new Board, with new hardware structure, and a new software configuration. I hope that we can do it before the next certificate renewal.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Tuesday September 03, @04:50PM (1 child)
They accomplished what they did while many other users all around the world were trying to do different things with it. The same check-boxes were visible and in use by everyone so others might be undoing what one person was trying to achieve. They managed to animate a Rick-Roll and several other images which were only obvious when the resolution was set to 1000x1000 - all at the same time. They successfully reproduced a QR code which also pointed to their discourse site.
However, I can accept that this is not up to your technical level of expertise and so I look forward to receiving your submissions in the next few days. I am sure that others will find them enlightening too.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Wednesday September 04, @02:28AM
I'd discovered and played with the checkboxes when it was new, and had the thought that something-like might be fun for collaborative art. Then wandered off and forgot about it. So this was really fun to see what happened, and how far it could be taken. Such a simple idea, so much that could be done with it.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 03, @02:24PM (8 children)
*pored over
also this summary is very clickbaity
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 03, @03:10PM (7 children)
You don't seem to understand. He keeps his logs in a 5 gallon bucket, so he poured over them. He doesn't specify what he poured over them, maybe maple syrup? If he gets the bits and bytes all sticky, it will be more difficult for intruders to get in?
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 4, Funny) by drussell on Tuesday September 03, @04:18PM (1 child)
Mmmmm, MAPLE sticky bits!!
What's the option for that, chmod +m ??
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 03, @11:39PM
chmod +ca
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Tuesday September 03, @05:02PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Funny) by Freeman on Tuesday September 03, @05:21PM (1 child)
Sure, next you'll tell me the internet is full and I need to unplug it and drain it into a trashcan.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 05, @12:11PM
... drain it into a trashcan.
... drain it into a bit bucket.
ftfy
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 03, @09:40PM (1 child)
On the old site in the old days it would have been Natalie Portman and Hot Grits, but kidz these dayz think Ms Portman is just another GILF, or old enough to be a grannie anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04, @12:52AM
I usually do one last pour over the logs before wipey-wipey and flush.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03, @08:07PM (3 children)
What the fuck is he taking about??? My ADHD brain just exploded.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 04, @02:18PM (2 children)
There's a certain kind of content / video that just drags the story out so far. It's meant to sucker people in and to keep them watching/reading/etc. The point isn't to get information across. The point is to get the people to watch and not leave. It grates at my soul.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 04, @02:20PM
Assuming SoylentNews was a Super Hero. I would say the type of content created as described above would be the Super Villain.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday September 04, @02:27PM
Noted
.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by KritonK on Wednesday September 04, @06:19AM
For those who don't want to waste their time watching the video, the same information is available as a blog post [eieio.games].