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MIT Hacks XKCD Talk With AACS key
Reader Hanji alerts us to a hack pulled off when Randall Munroe, author of the popular webcomic XKCD, spoke at MIT by invitation of the Lab for Computer Science. MIT hackers dropped hundreds of labelled playpen balls onto the audience from hatches in the ceiling. The labels bore XKCD's logo as well as the recently discovered 16-byte AACS processing key. At another point in Munroe's talk he was stalked by remote-controlled mechanical velociraptors; but fortunately he had been supplied with a squirt gun full of grape juice.
thats better than being stalked by remotely controlled mechanical MPAA lawyers
http://xkcd.com/c202.html
Learn your history, n00b.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Yeah arent college pranks supposed to be stuff of legend?
"Lets drop some things and then set our overpriced RC toys at him!"
"Genius!"
"Yep, we're MIT students!"
The xkcd talk was hosted by the MIT Lecture Series Committee, not the MIT Labratory for Computer Science (which was merged with the AI Lab to form CSAIL a few years ago, and thus no longer formally exists).
For some reason, I expected him to be really thin, and wearing a black hat.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
how odd we don't see the two tags together more often
Actually, there's a reason behind the playpen balls (not pens). It's a reference to the strip.
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
The grape fruit juice and the raptors come from a blog entry about a letter he received.
Pfft, everyone velociraptors fear nothing besides traffic cones.
and the velociraptors http://xkcd.com/c87.html
The playpen balls were a reference to one of xkcd's more popular comics, Grownups. The message on the playpen balls was a reference to some of xkcd's comics "My hobby...".
In fact, most etymologies of the modern usage of the term hack go back to this use in the 1960s at MIT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(technology)
They chose velociraptors for a reason.
What was the name of that Internet "law" (more like an observation) that once you reach a point far enough to the political right, your viewpoint becomes indistinguishable from satire?
I assume you posted this in honour of the late Jerry Falwell.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Not if you realize how hard is it to write "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" on thousands of playground balls and them load them into chutes in the ceiling!
You must be attending Clarkson!
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The term 'hack' has long been applied to various pranks on the MIT campus. Please read this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_hack
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
Well, to be perfectly precise, that's all a real hacker is. But those who released the key were crackers. Not to be confused with the fucking hilarious racial epithet.
For those who may have missed the Velociraptor joke, another one here, and one more for good measure.
I love xkcd!
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
I might consider hiding hundreds of labelled playpen balls in the ceiling and dropping them on the lecture a clever use of engineering and ingenuity. It's not everyday that happens...
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
The greatest mistake anyone can make, is underestimating one's enemy.
The RIAA is not stupid. They, of anybody, have money to burn on purchased expertise. They already understand that bits are inherently copyable. And they've been told many times that crypto will always fail in finite time when Eve is given the ciphertext, the plaintext, and the key.
What DRM is, is their attempt to tilt the economics of copying in their favor. In the same way that we are attempting to tilt the economics of spam in our favor. In both cases, the root problem (copying or spam) is intractable... but it can be satisfactorily tamed by a change in the economics.
By raising the cost (i.e. the hassle, the legil peril, the hardware requirements, the software expertise, etc.) of copying, and of receiving copies, above the price of retail media, they'll solve the problem enough.
Yes, you've told us a thousand times that the problem cannot be conclusively solved, but everyone already knows that. They aren't seriously trying to do that. They're just trying to tame it, and they're succeeding. You are blind to this because you've underestimated them. You hang out here on slashdot talking about how stupid they are, but meanwhile BluRay is taking over the world, and most of your and my friends have closed down their bittorrent servers in fear.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Extremisim in any form is pretty tough to distinguish from satire. For instance, it's hard to tell if the thousands of the inane "OMG Linux+OOo+Beryl rocks M$ is the sux0r!" posts here are satire or not. I hope at least some of them are.
Playpen balls are an xkcd in-joke.
http://xkcd.com/c150.html
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
You mean like Aram from Men in Hats? Man, I miss that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Also, if you don't already know, being afraid of and protecting yourself from velociraptor attacks and playpen balls as sexual innuendo are a common meme at xkcd and on its forum. Simple things like releasing playpen balls and stalking Randall Munroe with velociraptors seem to be the perfect hack considering the general spirit of the comic. In the end, the sophistication doesn't matter if it completely misses the joke and just doesn't feel right for the occasion. There's a right time and place to show off your tech skills, but this one just wasn't.
:/- spoon(_).
LSC..
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Having only recently been introduced to xkcd (and having read the entirety of the strip in one sitting) I have to say this entire thing is quite amusing. The balls, the raptors... obviously the folks who pulled this have read and understood the strip.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. Geek humour at it's finest (and sometimes most touching)
Hey Rob, where's my 20 questions with the xkcd author???
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
The comics have the Title attribute defined. For example http://xkcd.com/c253.html. I read them all and noticed this a week later and then had to go back and read them all again.
I love xkcd.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Firefox doesn't show the whole titles (i.e. hovertext) without the Long Titles extension. Get it. Enjoy it. :D
Don't miss the alt text.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
What was the name of that Internet "law" (more like an observation) that once you reach a point far enough to the political right, your viewpoint becomes indistinguishable from satire?
i believe you're refering to Poe's law:
"Without the use of a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to make a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
So, like 27 people link to the playpen balls comic, but no one mentions that someone actually baked him a cake shaped like the internet - a deliciously(!) multi-layered reference to XKCD?
sic transit gloria mundi