How a Group of Teenagers Pranked 'One Million Checkboxes' (kottke.org) 20
After game developer Nolen Royalty launched his short-lived viral site "One Million Checkboxes" in June. (Any visitor could check or uncheck a box in the grid — which would change how it displayed for every other visitor to the site, in near real-time.) "Within days there were half a million people on the site," he says in a new video, "and people checked over 650 million boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online."
But he also explains how what happened next was even more amazing: He'd stored the state of his one million checkboxes in a million-bit database — 125 kilobytes — and got a surprise after rewriting the backend in Go. Looking at the raw bytes (converted into their value in the 256-character ASCII table)... they spelled out a URL.
Had someone hacked into his database? No, the answer was even stranger. Somebody was writing me a message in binary."
"Someone was sitting there, checking and unchecking boxes to form numbers that formed letters that spelled out this URL. And they were probably doing this with a bot, to make sure those boxes remained checked and unchecked in exactly the way that they wanted them to." The URL led to a Discord channel, where he found himself talking to the orchestrators of the elaborate prank. And it was then that they asked him: "Have you seen your checkboxes as a 1,000 x 1,000 image yet?" It turns out they'd also input two alternate versions of the same message — one in base64, and one drawn out as a fully-functional QR code. (And some drawings....)
"The Discord was full of very sharp teens, and they were writing this message in secret — with tens of thousands of people on the web site — to gather other very sharp teens. And it totally worked. There were 15 people when I joined, over 60 people in the Discord by the time that i left.
"I tried to make it hard for them to draw, but... no problem. They found a way. And they started drawing some very cool things. They put a Windows blue-screen-of-death on the site. They put sexy Jake Gyllenhaal gifs on the site. At the end I removed all my rate limits for an hour as a treat, and they did a real-time [animated] Rickroll across the entire site."
The video ends with the webmaster explaining why he thought their project was so cool. "As I kid, I spent a lot of time doing dum stuff on the computer, and I didn't get into too much trouble when I, for example, repeatedly crashed my high school mail server. There is no way that I would be doing what I do now without the encouragement of people back then. So providing a playground like this, getting to see what they were doing, provide some encouragement and say, 'Hey this is amazing' — was so special for me.
"The people in that Discord are so extraordinarily talented, so creative, so cool, I cannot wait to see what they go on to make."
Link via Kottke.org
But he also explains how what happened next was even more amazing: He'd stored the state of his one million checkboxes in a million-bit database — 125 kilobytes — and got a surprise after rewriting the backend in Go. Looking at the raw bytes (converted into their value in the 256-character ASCII table)... they spelled out a URL.
Had someone hacked into his database? No, the answer was even stranger. Somebody was writing me a message in binary."
"Someone was sitting there, checking and unchecking boxes to form numbers that formed letters that spelled out this URL. And they were probably doing this with a bot, to make sure those boxes remained checked and unchecked in exactly the way that they wanted them to." The URL led to a Discord channel, where he found himself talking to the orchestrators of the elaborate prank. And it was then that they asked him: "Have you seen your checkboxes as a 1,000 x 1,000 image yet?" It turns out they'd also input two alternate versions of the same message — one in base64, and one drawn out as a fully-functional QR code. (And some drawings....)
"The Discord was full of very sharp teens, and they were writing this message in secret — with tens of thousands of people on the web site — to gather other very sharp teens. And it totally worked. There were 15 people when I joined, over 60 people in the Discord by the time that i left.
"I tried to make it hard for them to draw, but... no problem. They found a way. And they started drawing some very cool things. They put a Windows blue-screen-of-death on the site. They put sexy Jake Gyllenhaal gifs on the site. At the end I removed all my rate limits for an hour as a treat, and they did a real-time [animated] Rickroll across the entire site."
The video ends with the webmaster explaining why he thought their project was so cool. "As I kid, I spent a lot of time doing dum stuff on the computer, and I didn't get into too much trouble when I, for example, repeatedly crashed my high school mail server. There is no way that I would be doing what I do now without the encouragement of people back then. So providing a playground like this, getting to see what they were doing, provide some encouragement and say, 'Hey this is amazing' — was so special for me.
"The people in that Discord are so extraordinarily talented, so creative, so cool, I cannot wait to see what they go on to make."
Link via Kottke.org
This (Score:5, Interesting)
Is cool. Glad to see teens still finding and heading on challenges that, while to the average person seems like wasting idle time, is helping develop skills and thinking that they can use to benefit the world once they get out as adults. This is what we seriously need to encourage. Not a no-child-gets-ahead policy, but when we find these gems, enough projects should be available to help guide and satiate their curiosity, rather than force suppression of intellegence, or to have them steer into destructive outlets which negatively affect more than just those immediately around them.
Thank you webmaster, at least you didn't freak out like my school did when I found a way to cause all the Apple computers to auto-eject everyone's floppy with a network-run AppleScript command due to lack or priviledge systems (MacOS Classic, AppleTalk/LocalTalk networks in the 90's)
I am sure I am more than responsible for crashing the entire Windows 9x network when I was a dumb kid and found the internal messaging system for network prompts and set up a repeating scripts (looped) which wreaked havoc. Not sure if they figured out it was me...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes I hope these children can graduate from learning to operate the world's biggest Lite-Brite, to minor vandalism! Truly brings a tear to the eye.
Re:This (Score:5, Funny)
Not sure if they figured out it was me...
They did. And that's why you are sentenced to this site for the rest of your life.
I don't understand (Score:2)
What keeps "any visitor to the site" from either accidentally or malliciously "walking over" someone else's bitmap pix or QR code?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently they had a 'bot checking it and rewriting as needed.
Re: (Score:1)
The URL probably would have been mangled often, but a QR code could have quite a few people randomly flip some parts and not mess up the validity, especially with a bot repairing it pretty often. Same for images if each bit is a small enough pixel in an image.
Really cool the site owner was so open to people playing like this.
making the internet cool again (Score:2)
Great stuff!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
sure. ever since "hacking" came to include "using a script to otherwise operate the site as intended," everything has been hacking...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Where can I get a copy of their script? (Score:2)
HOWTO BE ELITE HAXX0R
https://stackoverflow.com/ques... [stackoverflow.com]
https://linuxize.com/post/curl... [linuxize.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
They didn't so much prank the Million Boxes web service as they hacked it - in the original, non-pejorative sense of the word./p>
The original sense of the word is...not that.
Re: (Score:2)
So was the site actually "viral"? (Score:3)
Or was this just a handful of people hacking it and making it seem viral to the site owner? Sounds like the latter...
Wayback Machine? (Score:2)
Did you just send me back to the Hot Grits Slashdot or did I miscount my gummies?
relevant sigblock (Score:2)
Uplifting. Best story of the year. (Score:1)
Simple abstraction, pattern and automation (Score:2)
Clever teaches what a million algorithms would never convey through direct mathematical sophistication.
The IQ bump that checkboxes left in self confidence will last those hackers a lifetime, made a dent in humanity and taught that 'cool' is always found outside the box(checkbox). Technology underestimates simple analogs.
APL did the same abstraction over mathematics in a symbolic metaphor. Simple, atomic, single functions combined into powerful expressions. Checkboxes allowed even more accessible function-sp