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Newsweek Easter Egg Reports Zombie Invasion
danielkennedy74 writes "Newsweek.com becomes the latest in a long list of sites that will reveal an Easter egg if you enter the Konami code correctly (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, enter). This is a cheat code that appeared in many of Konami's video games, starting around 1986 — my favorite places to use it were Contra and Life Force, 30 lives FTW. The Easter egg was probably included by a developer unbeknownst to the Newsweek powers that be. It's reminiscent of an incident that happened at ESPN last year, involving unicorns."
After all, it isn't like their subscriber list is expanding a lot lately.
Wait, maybe this is part of a business strategy to appeal to the burgeoning zombie market!
Let me tell you how this happened.
Newspapers and magazines are not development oriented. Here's what I face, and I suspect you will find similar stories at every newspaper and some magazines.
Understaffed - I am the sole developer supporting a dozen sites written in four different languages. (I do have 3 graphic designers who know html, but couldn't even tell you what source control is)
Project duration - Any project that takes more than a week is considered a blasphemy. You're expected to work on a "news cycle" schedule. If you can't roll it out quickly or chunk into into tiny pieces, you probably aren't going to do it.
Project thrashing - Its not uncommon to work on a project for two or three days, get pulled off of it in favor of another project, and then get pulled off of that for yet another project. You can guess at the trail of unfinished projects that die from being ignored due to the whims of an editor or publisher.
Hostile IT departments - setup around servicing journalists, IT departments are extremely hostile towards development needs. I'm not allowed to install browsers or virtual machines for testing, not allowed to have a development server, source control is a security risk, I don't have local admin on my desktop,
and I need to summon an IT guy every time I need to test a deployment package. This leads to a lot of development on production systems because you literally have no other choice. Yes, this has been run up to executive level management.
Not caring - No one really cares what you do until it breaks or until it wins them a press award.
Not understanding - Graphic designers are frequently given root access to linux boxes and superuser access to sql server. They believe anyone can write a windows service, manage a database, or write quality html. This includes graphic designers because "They can do it for print, how is the web different"
No resources - In conjunction with not caring and not having money, you aren't given resources. I use gimp for image manipulation, purchased my own copies of Visual Studio and Zend, and have the bare minimum to do my job.
External politics - Being owned by a larger corporate entity, we often fall victim to running foul of sweetheart deals at the corporate level and random kingdom building. We're not even allowed to submit a proper sitemap to Google, the roll out version has been broken for three years, so I rolled our own which works wonderfully, but it was shutdown because it was "out of step with the larger company-wide sitemap rollout scheduled for Q3 2012."
So, you've got this great combination of no resources, business-wide apathy, developing on production, no communication, politics, and no QA/testing process...it really is as simple as uploading the script. Chances are no one would care that it was there, and I promise you that no one one notice until a reader discovered it and it hit the internet at large.
If you're wondering why I stay, I work with some very good people and I don't ever work overtime. Its pretty decent for anyone that can put up with the nonsense.
The story is ostensibly about Newsweek.com putting an Easter egg on their website. Then why is there no link to said website in the fine summary?
I used to hate kdawson only for his idiotic political posts during the final days of the Bush administration. Now I hate him for posting godawful story after godawful story. Leave this one to samzenpus to put on Idle, it at least belongs there.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
After trying the code on numerous random sites and getting nothing but failure I decided to let Fox.com be my last stop. I wasn't expecting anything with the string of failures on a slew of other high profile websites.
After entering the code the text and articles immediately changed. No longer was there a right wing conservative pro-republican bias on any article. It was all neutral tone reading with viewpoints from all sides. In fact, nearly article was damn neared educational and it left me yearning for more. There was even a detailed plan plus Fox coupled subsidiaries for containing and resolving the issues with the BP oil spill.
Unfortunately, the somewhat magical result with seemingly endless positives also had a nefarious side. I could no longer access any porn site. In fact, my friends who could no longer find reach their favorite "photography" web sites.
I immediately made a quick call to the news room and eventually reached their noc. Once they understood the nature of the problem they quickly reverted the code push and set fire to the primary data center.
In the end we agreed it was just too great a sacrifice.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Hey, I wrote that! Cool!
The code works on iPhones/iPads too with gestures, but it doesn't seem they implemented it on iphone.newsweek.com. Or perhaps they disabled that - they seem to have disabled it on their main as well.