Mysterious Website Actually Social Experiment 349
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just wait (Score:3, Funny)
Wait for what? I'm confused now
Re:Just wait (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Just wait (Score:2, Funny)
In order to maximize your waiting experience, I suggest any of the following options:
Re:Just wait (Score:3, Funny)
He wanted to play some games on his spankin' new Windows Vista system, but Duke Nukem Forever hadn't shipped yet.
Re:why did this make the front page? (Score:2)
The ones submitting it to digg weren't paying them?
the ones in charge of submissions got busted for helping their friends more then actually letting people submit story's?
Don't worry! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't worry! (Score:3, Insightful)
knowing how people react to something which could be perceived as a threat is something the government (rightfully) would like to know.
Re:Don't worry! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Don't worry! (Score:2)
I always feel so conflicted when ACs make good posts. Such a waste.
-stormin
just wait... (Score:5, Funny)
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... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:just wait... (Score:5, Funny)
"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:just wait... (Score:2)
Which might make them reconsider their brilliant master plan of killing themselves to take some innocent bystanders with them.
Re:just wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, this became a large thread. Maybe I should consider a career as a political agitator ?-)
Not at all. The point of my sig is to express my opinion about welfare system and the prevailing Slashdot attitude of it being somehow bad.
No, it forces you to protect my unlucky ass. The point of social security is not feeding those too lazy to feed
Troll response (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Troll response (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Troll response (Score:3, Insightful)
Get over yourself. There's a strong libertarian streak, but there's also plenty of "america sucks, capitalism is evil" types running around.
Two points.
1. My original point was simply this: I don't think you have a right to force someone else to invest in a safety net. Period. I'm well aware that a social security net would benefit both, but if you notice the sig I was replying to stated something to the effect of "if you don't want
Re:Troll response (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't we have that at one time? Social security is a relatively new invention as are medicare, medicaid, etc. Apparently minimal govt thing wasn't working so well and private enterprise wasn't providing enough so we invented social security.
We don't like in a vacuum you know. There is a rich history of mankind without social benefits. Not only that but today, right now, there ar
Re:Troll response (Score:3, Interesting)
THe old trick where someone makes a statement (X) and I reply with "Not X" and then get hit with "what, you don't believe Y? you must be retared"!!
You're a clever one alright.
You said that conglomerists, monopolists, etc. controlled the market. I said they did not. Now you are claiming that they bias investment risk in their favor. That's the sme thing to you is it? "Contol" and "bias risk"? And I'm naive?
Stop whining about the little people trying to get back some control of the
Re:Troll response (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it was a time called the Great Depression. The name should indicate it was an emergency, and Social Security was an emergency soluion. Where's the emergency now?
Why don't we look to see if people are better off in those countries then they are in the US or other countries which provide even more social benefits.
Because it makes far more sense to look at how American privat
Re:Troll response (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's not my argument. There's a difference between gov't programs and re-distributing wealh. Gov't programs are like nat'l defense and publich libraries. Social security is about taking money from some people and giving it to others. The useful value of money, from a societal standpoint, is that it encourages people to be productive, etc. This erodes the utility of money to society at large. The incentiv
Re:You're pretty funny (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I'm serious. Is Bill Gates a fat cat? Warren Buffet? Steve Jobs? How about my grandfather. He owned his own business and it was worh over a million. Now my uncle owns it, and it's probably 2 or 3 times as valuable. Are they fat cats? What about my boss? He and his two buddies started a company that now makes revenues of about 1.5 milli
Re:Troll response (Score:3, Insightful)
Why did the great depression occur if private enterprise was so great? Maybe the great depression occured BECAUSE there was a weak govt and private enterpise ruled the day. Every think of that?
"Other nations have other cultures, other infrastructure, other politics, and other economies. So whatdo you think we could really learn from such a co
Re:Troll response (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, what would be my prior statement? This is my first comment in this thread.
What do you mean doesn't work? If the majority of recepients didn't like it they would not fight so hard for it and they would fight to change it. Maybe in your world recepients of social security don't interact with society and are not happy with SS but in my world that's just not true.
Oh, they're happy alright. They just shouldn't be. In my
Re:just wait... (Score:2)
Couple this with the fact that I'm reasonably confident Europe's economy will continue to gradually decelerate under the growing burder of it's older, entitled population (coupled with ever decreasing child-bearing rates) - and I'm doubly happy to be where I am. In a few decades Europe is likely to either be in a semi-permenant recession, in social upheavel as young immigrant populations refuse
And why should we believe him? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
You americans have such slack security.
Re:And why should we believe him? (Score:2)
what the hell? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where did the summary get the name Chris from?
Re:what the hell? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
Probably from this:
http://www.vitalsecurity.org/uploaded_images/hck edeon3-789284.gif
Re:what the hell? (Score:2)
Why is this surprising? (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Absence of information? Hardly. (Score:3, Informative)
Deployment? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why must you assume the worst? Sounds to me like bad marketing hype. Did you think Ginger (the Segway) was a new thermonuclear weapon? This guy could have been pushing a PC game or a new type of potato chip.
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whew! Dodged that bullet!
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:2)
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:2)
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:2)
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:2)
Re:Worst? What do you mean by that? (Score:2)
So we are going to go about our daily lives and assume just because we don't have enough information about a web site that we are all going to die horrible ebola related deaths while a nuclear fire rains down on us while nano-bots turn us to grey goo?
Its like not getting a call from your wife/girlfriend when you expected one and then assuming she was kidnapped, raped, murdered and thrown into a d
Re:Worst? What do you mean by that? (Score:2)
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.
Example: Boy who
Re:Worst? What do you mean by that? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:2)
Mysterious Website Or Prank? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Mysterious Website Or Prank? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Mysterious Website Or Prank? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe if people considered this a real threat, it would have been in a newspaper, or perhaps on the evening news on TV.
or references to (Score:2)
Re: Mysterious Website Or Prank? (Score:2)
Subtle Promotion Methods... (Score:2, Informative)
This sort of experiment was probably done slightly better by the xbox team with ilovebees.com just prior to the Halo 2 release.
Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fear (Score:2)
Actually, one anthropologist pointed out at one time (can't remember the link), people who died in combat during the pre-1700 eras were more likley to have more children than people who were came back from battle. They thought it might be something to the lines th
Re:Fear (Score:2)
Really? It may be wise to allow for the worst, but assuming it is just paranoid if you have no particular reason to do so.
As the saying goes, we should not fear what we do not understand, we should fear because we do not understand.
Re:Fear (Score:2)
Imagine the awful power of the suicide knife. Or the suicide rock. Or the suicide stick.
Terrorism didn't EXIST in a mearningful way until the 20th century, so what's your point?
-stormin
People find this compelling ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ... (Score:5, Funny)
...and I suspect Lost won't have a particularly satisfying conclusion either... :)
No subject (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No subject (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No subject (Score:3, Funny)
The results? People just make stuff up to fill in the gaps.
Re:No subject (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No subject (Score:2)
Damn, we need to crack that message before this timer runs out! >>> 5:32 <<<
Re:No subject (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, yeah, sure... you're just part of it aren't you?? AREN'T YOU??? Tell us! Tell us what you KNOW!!! Or we'll KILL YOU!!!!
thistextforthelamenessfilter
disappointed people took it the wrong way? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:disappointed people took it the wrong way? (Score:2)
Re:disappointed people took it the wrong way? (Score:2)
-stormin
WRONG TERM (Score:3, Interesting)
Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely, on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that value to account for other elements of the circumstance. Usually once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that value.
This article
Public countdown? (Score:2)
in shocking news (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:in shocking news (Score:2)
Who need credentials? The guy wanted to make a point and it turned out people just overhyped something that could have just been a live action game going on.
Seriously, he wasn't granted government or college grants to pull this off.
Heck anyone could have did it. I think he was trying
Re:in shocking news (Score:2)
If this *sociological* experiment had been carried out by qualified sociologists
Dissapointed (Score:2, Funny)
eon ate my children (Score:3, Funny)
Assume the worst? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Assume the worst? (Score:3)
Er, all sorts of people. Even web developers [microsoft.com] and software engineers [sun.com].
It's just a word meaning "put something in place and get it ready".
Well yes, it might have implied the worst, but people were still pretty damn stupid to believe it's for real. I'm pretty sure the next person to nuke the world isn't going to put a nice Flash countdown up on the web.
I did find the website hor
Re:Assume the worst? (Score:3, Informative)
* Deployment
* Launch Date
* Work the front lines (help-desk)
* Upper eschelons (the suits)
* Strategic Planning
* Go up in smoke
* Application crash
* Callatoral damage (software A that affects software B)
* Debri (garbage collection not working right)
* Fallout (when bleep happens and the blame game starts)
* (more to come....)
Select-All on Home Page (Score:2)
Also, at the bottom of the page (visible) is this:
IP: 70.17.160.238 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
That's not my IP number and I'm not using Windows, I'm using a Mac. Got the Firefox part right, though.
This _IS_ mysterious... excessively so.
--Richard
Re:Select-All on Home Page (Score:2)
Have no fear, thats just the information from whoever cached the site to a mirror. Its not the actual site itself. And I assume that string at the bottom was just part of the "code".
Another F*ing Hoax (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
Re:Another F*ing Hoax (Score:4, Funny)
How much are you getting paid to participate in this project?
Terrorism? My ass... (Score:2)
Over here in Europe the do this stuff all the time, but on T minus zero they don't launch a terrorist attack, but a product. And the shady people behind it are not Osamas, but marketing.
Looks like the goverments have finally won in making people believe in all this terrorist hysteria, just to roll out more laws to give the folks in power even more power.
This is important... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Plenty of people have done similar things (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Something funny (Score:2)
Psychological Experiment Site (Score:3, Funny)
http://r33b.net/ [r33b.net]
All Glory to the Hypnotoad!
July 1 is Canada Day! (Score:5, Funny)
Keep watching... (Score:5, Funny)
When it reaches 0, you're in for a big surprise. Just keep watching....
Wikipedia and the CIA probably never visited. (Score:3, Interesting)
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] o r_deletion/Eon8 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_f
Re:Heh heh (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Heh heh (Score:2, Informative)
this is the first of heard of this foolishness
Re:Lost of Innocence (Score:3, Interesting)
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 f
Re:Lost of Innocence (Score:2)
Re:Lost of Innocence (Score:2)
If you open with that line you should spell check your comment.
Re:Lost of Innocence (Score:2)
Although, in my defence, my errors were mostly spelling, not grammar.
Re:Threats (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Chris... (Score:2)