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."

Just wait

That's all I can say right now ... just wait.

Don't worry!

Don't worry! Chris -- and his family and friends -- are being investigated by homeland security as you read this. :-(

Re:Don't worry!

Perhaps because they ought to be focused on investigating people that they actually have EVIDENCE, INTELLIGENCE or PROBABLE CAUSE that a crime MAY be committed?

Mysterious person spams codes all over the net. Codes could mean anything. Would the DHS take the risk of these codes being communication between hostile agents and possibly ending up with another PR desaster of "why didn't you see that major terrorist attack coming?"? Especially since the DHS seems to have a budget surplus they must get rid of*?

*=Beaurocratic rules say that if you don't use your entire budget, your budget gets cut. Therefore everyone wastes all left overs before the budget times out. Yes I know that's stupid and inefficient but noone bothers to fix it.

just wait...

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.

Re:just wait...

"If you blog with MySpace, you blog with Osama!"

"This just in, Hamas has threatened to open up a new MartyrSpace website to help lonely terrorists get laid and launch eye-shredding suicide webdesign attacks on Israel. The Israeli Defence Minister is reported as saying, 'The goggles... they do nothing!'"

Re:Troll response

Goodbye mod points...

This point is missed in the modern tech savvy libertarian geek. They want a system that benefits their immediate greed, their future and everyone else be damned. I really can't think of any other reason than greed that anyone would support such an untenable and intangible ideal.

Civilization is doomed to be imperfect, and unfair. Social security tries to evens this out a bit. I have a feeling that most people who are against it have never been down and out, or poor, or rendered incapable of work. I have a feeling that they really don't care that 90% of America is two paychecks away from the streets, meaning if they loose their job for two measly weeks their in a world of hurt and debt, of no fault of their own. Sure they could have invested, but this precludes the idea that they had excess capital to begin with. Its hard to invest money when your living paycheck to paycheck, and fighting off the debt of raising a family or paying off a mortgage on a wage that is grossly inadequate for any standard of living.

Adventures in capitalism is only for the rich. And a hugely vast majority of us aren't wealthy by any means, of no fault of our own. Not all of Americans have good paying tech jobs, but it seems that some people can't escape from their own position to see how other people live, and are far too egotistical to see that helping others is our responsibility, especially since we have the means to do so.

This is going to get modded to oblivion, isn't it? The anti-slashbot POV.

And why should we believe him?

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.

Re:And why should we believe him?

If he lived in the UK we'd have already accidentily shot him.

You americans have such slack security.

what the hell?

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?

Re:what the hell?

Where did the summary get the name Chris from?

It is a mystery, but the answer will be revealed on July 3rd. Keep watching the website slashdot.org.

That's when the dupe will be posted ;-)

-a.d-

Re:what the hell?

Probably from this:

http://www.vitalsecurity.org/uploaded_images/hck edeon3-789284.gif

Re:Heh heh

This was right up there with watching grass grow ... [watching-grass-grow.com]

Why is this surprising?

who wanted to see how people would react to an absence of information, and he was disappointed that people expected the worst

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.

Absence of information? Hardly.

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.

Re:Why is this surprising?

In the absence of valid information during a decision making process it would be foolish not to assume the worst.

No -- it would be foolish to rule out the worst. Assuming the worst is just paranoid. It's the kind of thinking that would have triggered WWIII if it had dominated.

Re:Why is this surprising?

No -- it would be foolish to rule out the worst. Assuming the worst is just paranoid. It's the kind of thinking that would have triggered WWIII if it had dominated.

Imagine, if we'd adopted that attitude, a proud country like the US could be running gulags and turning functioning (if repressive) nations into dangerous, extremist enemies.

Whew! Dodged that bullet!

Re:Worst? What do you mean by that?

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.

Mysterious Website Or Prank?

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...

Re: Mysterious Website Or Prank?

I did one better than you and had managed to have never even heard of it until today.

Re: Mysterious Website Or Prank?

Same here. If people were so concerned over this, why is this the first we've heard of it on Slashdot? I would have loved the chance to mock them earlier about it.

Or maybe if people considered this a real threat, it would have been in a newspaper, or perhaps on the evening news on TV.

Fear

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.

People find this compelling ...

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 :)

Re:People find this compelling ...

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

...and I suspect Lost won't have a particularly satisfying conclusion either... :)

No subject

This comment is another social experiment to see how people react to a lack of information.

disappointed people took it the wrong way?

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

in shocking news

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.

eon ate my children

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.

Assume the worst?

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...

Another F*ing Hoax

Just another Internet hoax. Surprised that there are no references to it on Snopes. Don't know about you, but I am sooo tired of attempts to make me part of yet someone else's social experiments. If you want my participation in your project, pay me for it!

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.

Re:Another F*ing Hoax

If you want my participation in your project, pay me for it!

How much are you getting paid to participate in this project?

This is important...

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?

Plenty of people have done similar things

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.

Psychological Experiment Site

Here is a site which tests your subconsciousness with regard to hypnotics!

http://r33b.net/ [r33b.net]

All Glory to the Hypnotoad!

July 1 is Canada Day!

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!

Keep watching...

Keep watching this number: 58

When it reaches 0, you're in for a big surprise. Just keep watching....

Wikipedia and the CIA probably never visited.

"All of this, along with some apparent recorded visits by US military and intelligence computers."

I can't believe how many people took that and ran with it imagining some grand conspiracy that was never there. Eon8 had a live feed of HTTP referers [wikipedia.org], so some one probably thought it'd be a great joke to spoof a visit from the CIA and the Pentagon which isn't hard at all considering there's even Firefox extensions [mozilla.org] that can do it for you.

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) [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_fo r_deletion/Eon8 [wikipedia.org]

Re:Lost of Innocence

Im going to completely ignore the typical grammar nazi posts I could throw in...

We havent been innocent for a very long time. The Veitnam war was probrably the end of it, and even before that fear played a hell of a big role in our lives ( you know... the whole Cold War thing ). The only thing that has changed since post World War 2 innocence is a greater lack of conformity, the fear mongering was always there.

Movies are a classic example, horror movies and thrillers specifically. The themes change from generation to generation, but there was always an underlying current. Godzilla representing the fallout of the nucleur era, countless war movies following vietnam, slasher flicks of the 70s and 80s teaching us our normal fellow man may infact be a psychotic killer. But here is an example much closer to home for me( at my age ). Did you every go trick or treating? Was *the fear* ever put into you that you had to inspect all of your candy, because psychos were putting razorblades and poison in them? Ever hear of a single case of that actually happenning? I mean... an actual case of someone you know? No, it was simply media generated hype.

Yeah, there are sickos in the world, always have been. Thing is, in our 24/7 media coverage generation we get overloaded with stories of pure evil. I have to imagine an immegrant from a war oppressed region of Africa has to look at America's modern day fears and laugh. When our biggest fears are whatever media/goverment generated terror scheme which never actually seem to happen. After that, our fears seem to revolve around meaningless shit like Grand Theft Auto and its murder simulations. To someone who came from a soceity where death was a daily occurance, our fears much seem pretty damned trivial.

Notice though, the government isnt doing much to curb those fears? Thats simple, a scared population is an easy to control population. Something the current regime seems to have learned exceedingly well.

Re:Threats

And I can see how you must be such a huge coward, that you would be well served by never leaving your home again. People who live in fear of anything and everything are not healthy.

Excuse me while I hide from: Terrorists, SARS, the bird flu, west nile virus, mad cows disease, video game violence corrupting the youth, school shootings, anthrax, and gays some how destroying traditional marriage. Oh yeah, and now anonymous website postings that may or may not be threats.