Slashdot Mirror
Mysterious Website Actually Social Experiment
MaelstromX writes "For six months a website called eon8 (probably down) has carried a countdown to July 1, along with vague and mysterious codes. In addition, strange code-bearing posts associated with the site were made in various webforums, and the site carried a map of the world marked by spots of "deployment". All of this, along with some apparent recorded visits by US military and intelligence computers, led many people to believe this was an imminent terrorist operation or a massive virus to be unleashed on the web-surfing public. Turns out, it was just an experiment by a 23-year-old guy named Chris from Florida who wanted to see how people would react to an absence of information, and he was disappointed that people expected the worst -- even going to so far as to attempt to hack his webserver and make phone calls to anyone with any perceived tangential connection to the site or its host. A mirror of the site in its current state is available with an explanation added by the site owner after the countdown expired."
That's all I can say right now ... just wait.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Don't worry! Chris -- and his family and friends -- are being investigated by homeland security as you read this. :-(
This means that poorly designed web sites with unclear purposes will now be considered a terrorist threat and lead to indefinite detention of the designer(s).
Well, I guess that's at least one effect of the anti-terrorist hysteria that I could get behind; all other efforts to force better web design have failed after all.
Oh, just an experiment, he says. But how do we know? HOW DO WE KNOW?!?
Please, arrest him quickly and torture him so that we may learn the true horror of his plot.
The most I can tell you is I am a 23 year old web designer from Florida named Mike.
Where did the summary get the name Chris from?
When everyone was going berzerk over the countdown, I was all like "It's going to be something dull, it's got to be, nothing with this much hype can be exciting." And I was right!
But whether that's a threat depends on where "here" is. I can see that being interpreted as "in this world" i.e. we don't want you to live. Okay, you'd have to be paranoid to seriously worry about that from an anonymous web site, but I can see how someone would think it's a threat.
I don't see why that should be a surprise or a disappointment. Is he trying to make a case that people should trust people more? Bollocks. In the absence of valid information during a decision making process it would be foolish not to assume the worst.
The owls are not what they seem
How quickly hysteria can travel for unexplained reasons. Remember Y2K? Hysteria. Remember all those times the terror threat was elevated to orange or whatever colour? Hysteria. And now this? People are suckers.
Am I the only one who simply ignored the whole thing? I saw the link posted on many forums and blogs, but it looked like some sort of prank or whatever, only in movies you'd see terrorist organizations publicly providing maps of their targets, or countdown timers...
python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
...for those that can't be bothered looking for them in the summary.
h p. html
http://www.argn.com/archive/000428eon8_activate.p
http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2006/07/eon8-summary
http://louisex.dommox.com/eon8/
theres a few more, but they're mostly over the top speculation of a "world ending" variety.
Which were apparently so subtle I hadn't heard about the site until yesterday, when I saw a link to it on YTMND.COM, and I'm online nearly 24/7. Sometimes you can be too subtle.
This sort of experiment was probably done slightly better by the xbox team with ilovebees.com just prior to the Halo 2 release.
I was watching stories being submitted through the digg-spy tool on digg.com and someone (probably tbe owners of this site) was spamming the links to this story over and over for at least a couple of hours. It was getting rejected. It boggles my mind that it would actually make it to the front page of slashdot.
People are simply afraid of what they don't know or don't understand. In the absence of information or explanation, it is often wise to assume the worst - indeed, doing so helped our ancestors survive, which is why such behavior is now instinctive.
A-Bomb
It does lend some salt to the idea that "a person is intelligent, clever, but people are stupid, panicky." (Bad MIB reference, I know, but fitting nonetheless.) The "uneducated masses" look at a problem differently than the minority on the skirts of an issue. To the few us that saw this thing in the wild and said, "Mmmm, must be nice to be 14 and stupid again," and let it live at that while not being influenced by the "hysteria effect" of the other people reacting differently would explain that quote. People who normally would have thought it through alone were influenced differently by hearing or seeing this information in a group setting.
*shrugs* Whatever -- slow news day apparently.
Xserv
"I love lamp."
The problem is, he didn't "see how people would react to an absence of information". He provided some information, and did it in a way that would make most people think immediately of military operations (using obviously encrypted data, terms like "deployment", etc.)
And he's surprised that people "expected the worst"?
If he had been serious, he wouldn't have left any (immediately) human readable text on the website. Instead, he prejudiced his own experiement by providing just enough information to prompt certain thoughts. If he had labelled his map "Elvis Sightings" instead of "Deployment Map", he probably would have gotten an entirely different set of reacations.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
This was what they left behind before "Mike" restored control:
"Eon8.com gave us a relatively large desire for "more information". It was an interesting social experiment, but the 'reactions of the internet public' cannot be gauged or measured with web statistics. The possibility that this website could have been linked to something much bigger and perhaps more evil was compelling.
We are not lame noobs, just as you are not a 23 year old named Mike from Florida. Your name is Chris Rossi, and you are a 25 year old from Australia.
This has been an honorable challenge, and a wonderful project. Signed w00b,Amun,D.C.,and E.D.D."Just in case you were curious about it.
probably for the same reason that they watch Lost. Replace Eon8 with Dharma Initiative, and the similarities are marked.
:)
It's mysterious, has dead ends and redirections, uses cryptic codenames and strings of alphanumeric characters that hints at something much larger and sinister behind it, complete with a countdown to boot.
Interesting too, is how people also came up with all sorts of wild theories and found connections that the creators didnt originally intend (like the 8th eon being the end of the world).
"The purpose of this project was to determine the reactions of the internet public to lack of information."
Yeah, that seems to describe Lost pretty well too
What is xccr.com ?
Sig: I stole this sig.
More misinformation! The plot thickens...
This comment is another social experiment to see how people react to a lack of information.
This was a clumsy experiment at best. He's sad people assumed evil and says all that was on the site was the phrase "we don't want you here".
That means the only info was negative. This is a commonly studied human phenomen called "framing" (or something similar). If you give a person very limited info, then they will use that tidbit of info will drastically influence their perception of the question at hand. If it has said something less ominous I'm sure it could have had a better reception. As it was, however, if you only give 1 factoid and the factoid is negative, and there's a countdown - how do you expect people to react?
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
That's called the lost of innocence. If we have lost our innocence, has the terror won?
http://buddytrace.com/
In my days (well), we didn't announce when the bomb was going to blow. I guess times are different now.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
people fear what they don't know. Also, what credentials does this guy have beyond being a web designer. i.e., what gives him the guts to carry out an 'experiment' like that and quantitatively derive results from it from an authoritative sociological standpoint? This is practically a myspace joke.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
I was expecting eternal happiness, I want my HTTP requests back :(.
Haiku for you!
For the past four months I have had to endure constant harassment from state, federal, and international agents of law. There is nothing left of my children except a small bag of bones, and my phone line and Internet connection have been cancelled. I do not have access to my lawyer, and for the past three days I have had to subsist on mustard and graham crackers. I am determined to fight this through, even if I have to do it from a public library. The best advice I can give is, don't give up. Fight for your rights. They can take away your freedom, they can take away your entire life, but they can never take away your will. There is always a way.
It doesn't seem fair pin "assuming the worst" on the viewers of this website. It seems to me that the information that was provided was, given the current context, quite suggestive of something negative. "Deployment"? Who uses that word? It is has a largely military connotation. A map with locations targeted? I don't think people assumed the worst as much as his website implied the worst. Yes, none of these things is direcctly indictivie of a negative act, but they are all highly associated with negative acts in the collective consciousness at this point in history. If it were a countdown to a "birth" of something people might have had a different reaction...
So, people from all over sign hospital papers, docotor consent forms, pay $30 for a gimmic on tv... without reading any of the fine print.. therefore having a costly lack of information. and, it is ok.. but when it comes to someone posting a page on a website with -lack of information - THEN people freak out and think twice and react like this? Seems a little backwards to me.
Number 6: What do you want?
Number 2: We want information.
Number 6: Whose side are you on?
Number 2: That would be telling. We want information... information... information.
Number 6: You won't get it.
Number 2: By hook or by crook, we will.
It was a count down to the bloody canada day parade that woke me UP!
In the absence of valid information during a decision making process it would be foolish not to assume the worst.
So we are going to go about our daily lives and assume just because we don't have enough information about a web site that we are all going to die horrible ebola related deaths while a nuclear fire rains down on us while nano-bots turn us to grey goo?
Its like not getting a call from your wife/girlfriend when you expected one and then assuming she was kidnapped, raped, murdered and thrown into a dumpter and you call 911 for help when all along she just left her cell phone at home by mistake.
Seriously, I thought this thing was viral marketing or a live action game of some sort... Just because a site throws encyrption looking codes and has maps with dots on it does not make a threat to our existance.
Remember, when you assume the worst sometimes you make the situation worse by either poor health from all that stress, getting fined by the authorities for harrassing them over non-issues, or pissing off your friends and loved ones who think your are a paranoid person who won't give them any space.
Until you clear cut evidence that something bad is going to or taking place then that is when you need to act on it. Besides it you act on abscene of information a real enemy would use that against you and force you into doing things because you are paranoid and then striking you when you finally let your guard down.
Example: Boy who cried wolf.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I reference the wrong term. The right term is "anchoring".
Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely, on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that value to account for other elements of the circumstance. Usually once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that value.
This article (and more info) found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
Framing, by contrast, is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(economics)
In any case, experiments that support "common wisdom" (in this case "fear of the unknown") based on bad logic or poor experiment design are just a pet peeve of mine. This is a perfect example of how not to actually perform an experiment.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Doesn't "experiment" implies stuff like theory, hypotheses, controls - all that "science" stuff that keeps getting in the way of good conspiracies?
"Fq2{fbCG cni9 o3hL ?9Q){"
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
I think this is the most fabulous stunt ever contrived on the Web!
It points out once and for all how many paranoid freaks there are running free among us.
Tim
"You can't cure stupid!"
Select everything on the home page and look at the bottom. There's a string of characters, which Slashdot does not allow me to post. Anyone know what this is?
Also, at the bottom of the page (visible) is this:
IP: 70.17.160.238 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
That's not my IP number and I'm not using Windows, I'm using a Mac. Got the Firefox part right, though.
This _IS_ mysterious... excessively so.
--Richard
Imagine the ad revenue :) Less is more, right? So my hairdresser keeps telling me :)
Btw, I could have told you for free that the unknown always leads people to fear the worst. After you grow up a bit more you'll realize that for yourself.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Over here in Europe the do this stuff all the time, but on T minus zero they don't launch a terrorist attack, but a product. And the shady people behind it are not Osamas, but marketing.
Looks like the goverments have finally won in making people believe in all this terrorist hysteria, just to roll out more laws to give the folks in power even more power.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Actually its more like your girlfriend calling you, yelling 'Help m-' and then hearing the phone being crushed before the line is cut. Then calling her home phone, her workplace and her friends to learn no one knows where she is or whats shes doing.
Example: Boy who cried wolf.
Except in some "versions" of the story the boy is killed and eaten by the wolf... Or in the kiddy versions, the wolf eats the sheep/chickens/whatever the kid is supposed to be protecting.
ill tempered sea bass with lasers on their heads...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Put a countdown on a webpage with half-ass myserious writing with nothing explicitly bad whatsoever, and people are willing to take vigilante action to shut it down?
Right now it is funny because it was designed in a bad spy movie kind of way. But if you did the same thing, with mysterious Arabic writing and music, a world map with locations, and a countdown, I am certain the results would be as bad (or most likely even worse), and the discussion certainly would not be as light-hearted. It turned out not that bad because it was such an obviously contrived thing that people thought it could be an ad for a movie or video game.
People, nowadays, have such a paranoid lynch mob mentality, it is getting scary. If it isn't terrorists, it is myspace predators, or crystal meth rampages, or school shooters, or bird flu, or whatever other astronomicly unlikely boogyman. Even people on Slashdot, who love to joke "someone think of the children!!!" are starting to become more and more paranoid within the bounds of their political beliefs (people on the right tend to be paranoid about terrorists and foriegners, where as people on the left tend to be paranoid about sexual preditors and school violence... people tend to discount the other guys paranoid fears, while maintaining that theirs are, of course, rational!).
Is the government promoting the hysteria in order to gain more power? Or is the government just reacting to the popular hysteria of the people? I don't know, but I wouldn't be suprised if we started hunting witches again (real old-school Communists are just to damn irrelevant for some good ol' fashion Red hunting... but the power of Satan is eternal!). Is there some ergot growing in our wheat supply nowadays that is causing people to lose their minds? Is it all that floride in the water? Cosmic rays? What the hell is going on?
The one that Slashdotters might remember is the Transmeta website.
The of course there is Ginger, which was the Segway, which is just an expensive scooter.
When I lived in Charlottesville, VA there was a several month campaign of "the connosiers are coming". When they came, it was a "club" where you paid a flat fee and got discounts at local restaurants.
The pattern with this kind of thing is that it's always anti-climactic. The same thing goes for song count-downs on the radio. Oh. Stairway to Heaven wins again. Even when that doesn't happen, whatever song does win is always a letdown. I think it's just human nature. It always seemed to me that David Letterman's 3 or 4 was funnier than the number 1 on his top ten. Was that on purpose, or is number 1 always a let down? I guess the way to test that would be to have Letterman tape several versions of his top 10, show them to different audiences and ask them if they thought number 1 really belonged. The problem with that is that "delivery" is an important part of comedy, and I suppose that "deliver" is an important part of other information too. In other words, "metadata" is "data" or as an earlier generation used to say, "the medium is the message". In this case, the guy just transmitted nothing but metadata, and I think the results were not too surprising. In the absence of data, people attach the metadata to the context, in this case, our current climate of paranoia and fear provided the context.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
HAH! The evil aliens ALWAYS say that!
I'd like to set up something like that, except on the day of "deployment" have a big header reading, "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US". Also, the guy says his name is Mike, not Chris.
This is just another piece in the vast canadian consipracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285470/)
Here is a site which tests your subconsciousness with regard to hypnotics!
http://r33b.net/
All Glory to the Hypnotoad!
Libertas in infinitum
The problem with the classic libertarian view, as you have expressed it, of taking personal risk, is that the vast majority of the financial risk I take is not personal at all; it is out of my control. I have no control over the investment market, and what little knowledge I can obtain is unreliable at best. In other words, I can't take any personal responsibility for my investments. The so-called free market is controlled by huge conglomerates whose owners are not well known and whose goals, both short term and long term, are invisible to just about everybody else.
When the US becomes a truly capitalist society with no robber barons and monopolists biasing the risk in their favor and limiting my options to rigged investments, then I will be more than happy to have Social Security disappear. But as long as the fat cats rig the system in their favor, I am just as happy to have them finance the social safety net.
Infuriate left and right
RTFA. Chris ermm Mike?
Whats going on here?
I ran across the Eon website in In February, and didn't give it another thought.
n Page.htm
In fact, I'd completely forgotten about it until all the hype yesterday on the web.
Why? Because the gloating, tease you in advance criminal mastermind type that pulls that BS is found only in cheap comic books and novels.
It's the type of plot development that's only taken seriously by 12 year old mentalities.
Geez, if that kind of thing is taken seriously these days, prepare for terror!
http://www.delta-green.com/
http://members.shaw.ca/csstrowbridge/Tulzscha/Mai
http://www.whatisdeepfried.com/zogg/zogg1.html
http://www.cantonweb.com/procrastinators/
and finally:
http://r33b.net/
Run for the hills! BOOGA-BOOGA!
Or, grab some ice cubes, and chill out alrady!
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
The most I can tell you is I am a 23 year old web designer from Florida named Mike. I can't narrow it down anymore than that. When I say 'we', I really mean 'me'.
But he never said we. Aha! Tongue slip!
All Canadians (minus a few militant Quebecers I suppose) were counting down the days to July 1 anyway since it's our nation's birthday! ...insensitive clods!
Sure, the first four Google results on "deployment" are military sites, but the fourth is Microsoft talking software deployment. http://www.google.com/search?q=deployment
Why must you assume the worst? Sounds to me like bad marketing hype. Did you think Ginger (the Segway) was a new thermonuclear weapon? This guy could have been pushing a PC game or a new type of potato chip.
Get your Unix fortune now!
It's some Viral Marketing group associated with MGM. Chris is a paid misinformant who will do anything to keep everyone interested for when the news breaks "for real".
There used to be links on YTMND and Wikipedia but I can't find them anymore since "Chris" came out; everyone's jumping on the "it was a social experiment" bandwagon. Anyone have old links? There used to be a thread on 4chan, shoulda FUKKEN SAVED it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Let's see how many whores, who after seeing the amount of traffic this page has got do the exact same thing but with google click ads on the page aswell. I don't think it's going to be quite as widespread as all the milliondollarhomepage immitations though.
Anyone who's disappointed to learn that "ignorance makes fear" has hallucinatory expectations.
The human condition is underwritten by the negative cycle:
Ignorance -> Fear -> Anger -> Violence -> Destruction -> Nothingness -> Ignorance
When we learn something outside that cycle, greed has a chance to motivate us to learn, create and obtain. That humans have done so much else outside negative cycle shows how much there is to learn, and how flexible we are.
--
make install -not war
that it was a countdown to the release of Duke Nukem Forever.
Why didn't he just ask? Is he truly so cynical as to believe that there are no truthful humans within the scale of his test? If so, I *pity* his lame ass. Of course, you need to actually live through such things while making life-changing decisions with large amounts of sodium pentothal to actually grasp this.
C|N>K
Just to back you up - I once read an interview with one of Letterman's writers, who said exactly what you have suggested about the Top Ten Lists. The best of the 10 is almost always between 2 and 5. IIRC, he talked about the drumroll and the whole hoopla about #1; it would be a waste to save the best laugh for last. Makes sense, there's a whole lot of noise going on after the countdown ends, when they're showing the graphics and everything. You can actually hear the audience laugh after Dave reads #3.
I have no point to make about the website in question. I am sorta annoyed at this guy's self-importance in deciding to run a social experiment with no method at all. But anyway, you're right, it would've been hard for Chris/Mike to live up to most expectations after a successful interest-raising marketing campaign.
Its funny that so many people made such a big deal out of this. I was talking to this one guy on IRC who was paranoid about it - he thought it was going to attack him (lol). There was even a #eon8 channel made on EFnet..Around a hour before it went to 0, it got flooded to hell. I dont understand why people got so worked up about it..
Turns out, it was just an experiment by a 23-year-old guy named Chris from Florida who wanted to see how people would react to an absence of information, and he was disappointed that people expected the worst...
Yeah, because we all know just how trustworthy people online are, and how they never exagerate things or just post some stupid shit pretending to be scared.
I have read comments from people of this type, and they were not really being that serious. Does he actually know the communites and posters he is seeing these comments from? How does he not know that some of those being experimented on know it is some "game" and they are being watched, but pretend to go along and are just pulling his leg? As for me looking at the thing in its last hours, it came off to me as some laughly bad & crummy viral marketing campaign, and I am sure I am not the only person to treat it as one.
I don't doubt some people fell for it or were actually concerned, I also just don't see how he can be "surprised" with the outcome if he was the one giving these puzzle pieces & is responsible for "things get out of hand"(most ARGs seem to keep things under control/on-track). For me it came off as some blah hacker/tech game, but I guess from what was featured(the "mirror" of the current state was no help, so I have no reference point to see where...) some people could see a terrorist connection with the image(which, IMHO, this whole thing would be stupid thing for real terrorist to do, which is why I wrote it off as an ARG).
Yup, "eon8," "Dharma Initiative," same thing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Jesus I am embarassed to find this on the front page of Slashdot. It kept showing up on Digg but... for this to make front page on Slashdot??
I thought it was a countdown to Canada Day (July 1st)?
Actually its more like your girlfriend calling you, yelling 'Help m-' and then hearing the phone being crushed before the line is cut. Then calling her home phone, her workplace and her friends to learn no one knows where she is or whats shes doing.
Something like that practically happened to me. My girlfriend had been living in Paris for a few weeks and on the day she was leaving Paris for another town, I get this phone call. It wakes me up at 4:00AM. It's international, her cellphone, and all I can hear is what sounds like a lot of scuffling and some muffled cries and then the phone goes dead. This was shortly after that girl got kidnapped and killed while on the phone with her boyfriend.
I tried calling her back on her phone with no luck. No answer. I tried her old apartment.. disconnected. I kept calling. No luck.
I started going through ideas in my head - what could I do? Call the Paris Police? And tell them what?
I kept trying to call her cellphone.
After about 30 minutes, she answers with a perky, "Hello?"
Turns out her phone was in her purse and the send button got pushed while she was running for the train and she didn't know about it. The cries were a child in the same cabin she was in. That's the story she told me, anyway.
But, it's a big feeling of helplessness to think someone you care about is in trouble and there's really nothing you can do.
It reminds of the Simpsons episode where Lisa finds an "angel" buried near a mall that was under construction.
What?
Slashdot posts are full of spelling error. This could be a pure random patern, this could be a complexe steganographic way to store informations to launch terrorist mayhem on the american people. Would the DHS take the risk of these code being communications between hotile agents ?
They better capture all slashdot subscribers and send them to some out-sourced torture facility for more in-depth investigations about those suspictions.
Especially since this time, the DHS is getting warning from other intelligence organisation from all over the world telling them that there's a high probability that this spam is comming from terrorists ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Everything according to the Web 2.0 generation is a virus. Everything with a map of the world and faux MD5 is terrorism. Everything with a Javascript countdown timer is the apocalypse.
Mike/Chris wants you to think that this was no big deal. Just a social experiment. Nothing to be concerned about. This is a lie!
In fact, the 6 month timer was a countdown to when Mike/Chris would release a pirated MP3 of Monty Python's Always Look On the Bright Side of Life. The FBI has been notified.
-- dR.fuZZo
The point is this isn't "no information" as he implied, it was a spific amount of limited information, that was likely to produce a result, the one he got. If the site really had no information, it probalby would have been ignored. For years my site contained only one thing on the front page a :P in a large, red, font. Essentially it was just something to have other than the Apache "this guy hasn't configured his site" page. I had no central site it was just a domain for e-mail and for holding pictures and things like that. Unsupprisingly, people paid it no mind. There was no information so they just ignored it. They saw it for what it was.
However this sit was filled with information, just incomplete information. It was designed to implicate something. That people started assuming there was something behind it is unsupprising.
It's like if you show people videos of car crashes, but splice audio of really hard car hits and phrase your questions to imply speed such as "What speed do you think the cars were going when they slammed in to each other?" you shouldn't be supprised if people pick up on the implication they were going fast and over estimate speed. Though you never directly said anything, you biased the results trhough imlication.
Also, with your Segway thing, you'll notice many people were able to correctly riddle out that it was some kind of transportion, hence the Southpark episode.
I think our security's god - just the people responsible for maintaining it are growing weary of this "terrorism" bullshit. And I do not mean the higher-ups, I mean the lower-end people, the grunts. They probably are getting slack, not to mention sick of this crap.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Paraphrased ancient Chinese philosophy: "Don't waste your efforts on war when it is easier to fuck with the enemy's head."
Table-ized A.I.
We want your information We will do what we must But not here or in front of people or on the phone
Keep watching this number: 58
When it reaches 0, you're in for a big surprise. Just keep watching....
Personnel to the field...
Servers to production...
Applications to servers...
Software Updates...
A day doesn't go by that someone doesn't "deploy" something.
Hell, I "deploy" about 75 times per day during testing.
We're deploying ten new sites around the country next week and yes, we have a map...on a big board...and lots of precious bodily fluids.
Oh really. A social experiment. It wasn't just some jackass trying to ruffle a few feathers, but a bona fide experiment complete with research, a hypothesis, control groups, isolating variables, and meaningful results published in a peer-reviewed journal?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm a little dissapointed that the article states "led many people to believe this [eon8] was an imminent terrorist operation or a massive virus to be unleashed on the web-surfing public" but forgets to mention that many people out there tought it was an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) or just viral marketing, we are not all paranoid freaks with tin foil hats ;)
This reminds me of the Vernor Vinge story "Fast Times at Fairmont High."
Some kids tracking the curious movements of scientists think they've stumbled on the secretive beginnings of a marketing campaign for a new movie. That sort of thing being common in the story's universe.
On a different note, one can imagine low-budget terrorists using a scheme like this to scare the crap out of people.
Throw up a page with a countdown and some pictures of prospective targets in, say, New York City. Or pictures taken from prospective detonation/release points.
Maybe add a second counter denoting how far the weapon is from being delivered before use. Drop a few more pointed hints. Throw in some information about the target or its security that isn't secret but also the average Joe doesn't know.
Then nothing would happen and only the most paranoid would take these pages seriously afterwards, until the day one counts down and a bomb goes off.
Don't froget to exclude the Newfies and their Beaumont-Hamel Memorial.
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
You mean I sat up all night trying to decode those messages for nothing? Man. I was hoping it would open a portal to hell and kill all stupid people at each of point on that map or something like that. I thought the whole "This must be a terrorist attack" angle that I saw on various sites was hilarious, especially since there haven't been any terrorist attacks in this country in almost five years. Can a website which unintentionally invokes fear in the stupid be labelled as a terrorist attack in itself?
"How is the server deployment coming?"
or
"Did we initiate deployment on the new software upgrades?"
Deployment has different connotations to different people. To me it means "organized distribution" and is subject-neutral.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
first I heard of this eon8.
And everyone knows that on a true Black Ops Website, the text streams out one line at a time at 30 cps, and goes "deedle deedle deedle".
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
We "accidentally shot" a guy 41 times for reaching for his wallet. I've yet to see that kind of dedication out of you Brits.
Yeah, let's hear him pull that line on the Department of Homeland Security. ;)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
...countdown to being Slashdotted.
...to see how people, who thought the countdown was a prelude to bad things happening, react. Of course, it appears to be equally predictable:
"Oh, it was just a social experiment."
"What a stupid website!"
"Well that was a poorly performed experiment because..."
I'm still looking for a "I was wrong" or "I should not have been so paranoid" admission...
"The purpose of this project was to determine the reactions of the internet public to lack of information."
Here's my mini-version of this experiment:
Please, Remain Calm.
- this is the worst thing you can say to a person... the person will automatically assume that something is wrong, and will NOT stay calm...heheeh
test with a friend.. out of the blue come to him an say "please, remain calm". he will freak out.. trust me.. I tested it..
so, lack of information makes people anxious and nervous...
"he was disappointed that people expected the worst" American are totally framed by their administration and medias to be afraid of everything, they are becoming completly coward and ready to kill everyone to fell safe. they surrendered very dangerous
And the fun keeps on going now that the Wikipedia article for Eon8 has been nominated TWICE for deletion resulting in much flamage and sock puppetry by the SomethingAwful and YTMND crowd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_fo r_deletion/Eon8_(2nd_nomination) o r_deletion/Eon8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_f
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
Ok, I'll bite. Why don't you just admit you'RE a retard, and really don't want to believe that there are those of us who just laughed off the pathetic thing?
Using your tactics, why don't you admit to being the author of this failed & flawed "Social Experiment," and you want to turn those who didn't fall for it into victims?
> school shootings, anthrax, and gays some how destroying traditional marriage
Somehow, I'm not quite sure how school shootings & anthrax destroy traditional marriage?
As a matter of fact, your girlfriend has been abducted and replaced by an android that told you that nothing happened. She is going to kill you as soon as she completes her mission, which is very, very secret...
Mr. Leinad
I never entered the numbers, I never pushed the button.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Anyone who claims to not even understand who the fat cats are is pretty starnge, not for believing that, but for thinking others will believe that he believes that.
Anyone who claims that the fat cats don't have a lot more control over society than the thin ones is incredibly naive. People who have 8-5 jobs simply don't have the control over their lives that the bosses do, and the higher up the food chain, the more control. Trying to blame this on the peons is ridiculous. There will always be more peon jobs than boss jobs, that's just the facts of life. The trick is to prevent the bosses from trampling on the peons, whether directly (union busting) or indirectly (buying congress critters). That's why the current occupant wants to destroy social security and why so many peons have raised such a vote stink that most of those who privately want to destroy social security are keeping their mouths shut.
It's a hoot how you come up with such naive positions and think anyone will actually believe that you believe them. I like this thread. Keep on keeping on, brother, you are a breath of putrid air to enliven the day, and you too shall disappear in the breeze.
Infuriate left and right
Slashdot is by far the greatest social experiement of the 20th and 21st century...
And you too, for having revealed the secret now...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
i never even heard of it.
I've had these discussions before with these types, and while some are interesting, most are just...well, let's call them blind self-made philosophers, to be kind.
;-).
I never had a satisfactory answer yet, from these ultra-capitalistic libertarians (I consider myself to be a libertarian too, though mostly as civil libertarianism is concerned). My question is, much as yours (it's a quite logical thing, after all): if an economic libertarian model is so great for the majority of the people, like in the USA, why is it doing worse (at least in terms of education, absolute amount and relative % of poor(ness), health and health-care, etc.) then countries that follow a less libertarian model, like those in the EU?
Some claim this is due to the fact it's not real libertarianism, but rather corporatism, but I think this is a weak argument for two reasons: it's rather a pseudo-argument, because it can always be used. For example, when communism failed, people said; "it's not communism, it's stalinism that has failed". But...the communism of Chroetsov failed too, and that of all others, including Gorbatsov. Chinese communism failed (apart from lipservice) - was that a failure of the "communism of mao"? When cuba will inevitably fail, will if be 'castro's communism' that has failed? Or is this rather a weak excuse for not acknowledging the obvious, namely that it is communism itself that fails, whomever tries it?
And secondly, even when one would accept the explanation, it still wouldn't explain why a country like the US, who - corporatism or not - still has more libertarian elements in their economy then, say, europe, fares worse then europe in providing 'the best' for the largest amount of people.
Still others respond with a dodge out, like your poster, by claiming the cultures are so different (yeah, right) that it is unlikely that libertarianism would yield better results for anyone exept americans. This makes no sense whatsoever.
And thus, this sort of questions remains immer unanswered by those fanatically believing in the anglo-saxon version of ultra-capitalism - usually USA citicens, I may add.
Most of whome think I'm a socialist, while I'm in fact a liberal, btw
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---