Who knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of checkboxes?
August 30, 2024 7:09 AM Subscribe
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes, a technical and emotional reflection on running the site and unexpected discoveries: "Teens wrote me a secret. I found them." Previously on MeFi and it's now "shutdown" and all the boxes are checked, but you can play locally only at the site. And earlier from the creator: Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks.
That is really cool.
I find hope in this story.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:33 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
I find hope in this story.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:33 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
I don't know much but I know that those discord teens are the best of the web.
posted by zenon at 7:41 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]
posted by zenon at 7:41 AM on August 30 [6 favorites]
If I were a genius teen, I would bot a million favorites on this post.
posted by Don Pepino at 7:59 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
posted by Don Pepino at 7:59 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
This story is wonderful for many reasons but this particularly resonated when talking about whether the botting was "good":
I am glad to hear there are similar opportunities today and people like Nolen who can build playgrounds for hackers and encourage them.
posted by Nelson at 8:01 AM on August 30 [9 favorites]
In highschool, I wrote a recursive mail rule that sent a friend of mine millions of messages as a joke. I (accidentally!) repeatedly crashed the school’s mail server. The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.A bunch of my tech friends were talking about this and shared experiences we had as young hackers doing something sort of naughty. And a friendly adult seeing us and instead of scolding us just redirected to something more productive, encouraged our curiosity and exploration. In my era that was the Unix lab in the early 90s. Lots of opportunities for mischief in a shared computer system but also a lot of possibilities for interesting and productive play.
I am glad to hear there are similar opportunities today and people like Nolen who can build playgrounds for hackers and encourage them.
posted by Nelson at 8:01 AM on August 30 [9 favorites]
This is insane and its great. I love that people still like to have fun and are finding ways to explore the wild even in a network world.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:26 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:26 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
I am glad to hear there are similar opportunities today and people like Nolen who can build playgrounds for hackers and encourage them.
One of my coworkers “hacked” his school computer lab. It was a bit of a pain in the ass to the school administrators, sure, but it was harmless.
But they went in such an opposite direction: they pressed charges. It was such a silly and wrong way to deal with a smart, bored high school kid just seeing what he could do on the network.
I, too, was very heartened by this reaction.
posted by teece303 at 9:01 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
One of my coworkers “hacked” his school computer lab. It was a bit of a pain in the ass to the school administrators, sure, but it was harmless.
But they went in such an opposite direction: they pressed charges. It was such a silly and wrong way to deal with a smart, bored high school kid just seeing what he could do on the network.
I, too, was very heartened by this reaction.
posted by teece303 at 9:01 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
It almost felt like that scene in Contact when they zoom out on the Message and see the big picture. And then it's a Windows 10 crash screen. Haven't laughed that hard in a long time. There's hope for today's youth...
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:10 AM on August 30
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:10 AM on August 30
Nolen's talk at XOXO went over this and I cannot overstate how delighted everyone was about it. It was the biggest rush of The Kids Are Going To Be Okay of the week. I've been watching the YouTube channel to post it here when released, but this is even better!
posted by foxtongue at 9:21 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
posted by foxtongue at 9:21 AM on August 30 [2 favorites]
Over on Hacker News Nolen wrote a comment so good I'm going to reproduce it here.
One of my favorite things about this is that it validated one of the core beliefs I have when making these things - that you need constraints for the small group of people that are jerks, but that for the most part those constraints are fodder for the largely-good and very creative folks that play around on the internet.posted by Nelson at 9:34 AM on August 30 [9 favorites]
Your loss, DSH. Also, entitled much?
posted by FallibleHuman at 10:19 AM on August 30
posted by FallibleHuman at 10:19 AM on August 30
The "Previously on MeFi" link gives you all the context you might want, if you don't recall the original post from a couple of months ago.
posted by jedicus at 10:23 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
posted by jedicus at 10:23 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
I thought the summary was great skynxnex. Thanks for sharing! I had already read the blog post a little earlier, but I'm glad you posted because I was interested in what other MeFites had to say about it.
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:25 AM on August 30
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 10:25 AM on August 30
The "previously" link was great, especially because the person who posted that original link was clearly someone of such evident taste and refinement. Though that original poster is probably jealous someone else found and posted this amazing and heartwarming follow-up. Thanks skynxnex, this honestly made my day!
posted by ordinary_magnet at 10:57 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
posted by ordinary_magnet at 10:57 AM on August 30 [1 favorite]
Wow, this is just marvelous and amazing.
I am truly in awe of the smarts and the humor of the botters.
I clicked over into the What's My Deal page and just love this:
posted by kristi at 11:04 AM on August 30
I am truly in awe of the smarts and the humor of the botters.
I clicked over into the What's My Deal page and just love this:
I like building games in surprising placesI loved reading this and I'm so glad to know about eieio. Thank you so much for posting this, skynxnex!
posted by kristi at 11:04 AM on August 30
Mod note: One comment deleted. Read a thread before commenting.
posted by loup (staff) at 11:16 AM on August 30
posted by loup (staff) at 11:16 AM on August 30
I love reading about how this sort of thing gets amiably messed with (this reminds me of what went on with reddit's Place), and I love the way they reveal something that makes me go "of course!" Of course a big pile of on-off switches can be used to represent basically any kind of message, why didn't I think of that?
posted by entity447b at 1:17 PM on August 30
posted by entity447b at 1:17 PM on August 30
✅
posted by HearHere at 6:35 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]
posted by HearHere at 6:35 PM on August 30 [1 favorite]
I just looked: One Checkbox (previously) is still online. It was a sort of joke remix of the million checkboxes and doesn't admit for the interesting large scale behavior. Last I looked a couple of months ago it was dominated by a bot or two that constantly toggled the checkbox. They're both gone now. It shows 3 watchers and just a few clicks in the last 10 minutes. So maybe everyone got bored poking it.
(In theory you could send a message with the one checkbox over time, toggling a pattern. But unlikely anyone but the server admin would notice.)
posted by Nelson at 7:40 AM on August 31
(In theory you could send a message with the one checkbox over time, toggling a pattern. But unlikely anyone but the server admin would notice.)
posted by Nelson at 7:40 AM on August 31
Delightful. I love the idea of someone building a thing and then other people doing amusing and (for the most part, it sounds like) upbeat things with it that the creator did not imagine in the slightest.
posted by rmd1023 at 8:00 AM on August 31
posted by rmd1023 at 8:00 AM on August 31
English major here: can someone please explain to me what this is and why people are so delighted with it? I saw it on formerTwitter and clicked through to the site but I continue to be absolutely mystified. You check boxes? Why? What for? I've read the comments on both the Twitter post and here and I'm even more confused. Help?
posted by jokeefe at 4:42 PM on August 31
posted by jokeefe at 4:42 PM on August 31
On second thought, I withdraw my plea. I've read the linked article and understood about 5% of it. It's too far down the tech alley for me, and I have kittens to play with (not a metaphor--they are about 4 months old and they are very busy).
posted by jokeefe at 4:50 PM on August 31
posted by jokeefe at 4:50 PM on August 31
Fellow English major here, though one who also stumbled into work at a compiler company for a dozen years.
The delightful story is in the first link. However, it is probably only delightful if you understand a little bit about computers encode information for storage and for transport. Everyone knows that computers turn information (text, pictures, music, databases, everything!) into numbers and eventually into ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros get zapped along the internet where they turn into things like web pages and, well, check boxes.
So this person made a web page which consisted of nothing but a million check boxes that people could toggle on and off. He didn't put them in a grid. He put them all in a line, counting on the fact that browsers would take the line and wrap it around so that it fit whatever the width of the window was. He did this to try to make it hard for computer sophisticates (e.g. teenage nerds) to draw dick pics and write dump graffiti.
But now remember, while the check boxes showed up on users screens as check boxes, they were stored on his server as ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros were then built up into letters using a venerable encoding (ascii) and also arranged in another encoding called base64-encoded2. I don't know the details of that, except that I believe it's a very basic way to arrange blocks of data for storage and moving around.
Well, one day he happened to glance at the raw information in his database, and he was shocked. This was a database that just contained a millions bits. (A bit is a one or a zero). Zero meant the check box was unchecked. One meant the check box was checked. Somehow some group of people had reverse-engineered everything he'd done, and then figured out how to coordinate with each other to put messages into the raw bits. And from there, they coordinated to draw pictures, create animations, and all sorts of things that the creator had assumed was impossible.
I believe they were young. They hung out on discord, and over time more and more people got word of it and contributed.
So, there's the shorter version. I'm sure I made many mistakes in the details but hopefully I caught the gist sufficiently. As someone who once wrote some bit into memory on a PDP-8 mini computer in the 1980s and was delighted to see the letter "A" appear on a fuzzy green monitor, it brought back all sorts of feelings of fun. There really are bits at the bottom of it, and it's still possible to do things with them.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:03 PM on August 31
The delightful story is in the first link. However, it is probably only delightful if you understand a little bit about computers encode information for storage and for transport. Everyone knows that computers turn information (text, pictures, music, databases, everything!) into numbers and eventually into ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros get zapped along the internet where they turn into things like web pages and, well, check boxes.
So this person made a web page which consisted of nothing but a million check boxes that people could toggle on and off. He didn't put them in a grid. He put them all in a line, counting on the fact that browsers would take the line and wrap it around so that it fit whatever the width of the window was. He did this to try to make it hard for computer sophisticates (e.g. teenage nerds) to draw dick pics and write dump graffiti.
But now remember, while the check boxes showed up on users screens as check boxes, they were stored on his server as ones and zeros. Those ones and zeros were then built up into letters using a venerable encoding (ascii) and also arranged in another encoding called base64-encoded2. I don't know the details of that, except that I believe it's a very basic way to arrange blocks of data for storage and moving around.
Well, one day he happened to glance at the raw information in his database, and he was shocked. This was a database that just contained a millions bits. (A bit is a one or a zero). Zero meant the check box was unchecked. One meant the check box was checked. Somehow some group of people had reverse-engineered everything he'd done, and then figured out how to coordinate with each other to put messages into the raw bits. And from there, they coordinated to draw pictures, create animations, and all sorts of things that the creator had assumed was impossible.
I believe they were young. They hung out on discord, and over time more and more people got word of it and contributed.
So, there's the shorter version. I'm sure I made many mistakes in the details but hopefully I caught the gist sufficiently. As someone who once wrote some bit into memory on a PDP-8 mini computer in the 1980s and was delighted to see the letter "A" appear on a fuzzy green monitor, it brought back all sorts of feelings of fun. There really are bits at the bottom of it, and it's still possible to do things with them.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 5:03 PM on August 31
*gasp* KITTENS! HELLO KITTENS!
Basically, a small horde of smart folks (including lots of teenagers) got together and started treating the giant wall of checkboxes as pixels to make art, like sometimes happens with skyscraper windows (like this pic of Boston's Prudential Tower with "GO SOX" on it). But, like, way WAY bigger.
posted by rmd1023 at 5:04 PM on August 31
Basically, a small horde of smart folks (including lots of teenagers) got together and started treating the giant wall of checkboxes as pixels to make art, like sometimes happens with skyscraper windows (like this pic of Boston's Prudential Tower with "GO SOX" on it). But, like, way WAY bigger.
posted by rmd1023 at 5:04 PM on August 31
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