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Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chatthisamericanlife.org
478 points•simonpure•2 days ago•255 comments•
#traffic#secret#kids#spotify#group#turned#low#npr

255 comments

xnx2 days ago
The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)

Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.

flyinghamster2 days ago
It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.

Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.

bahmboo2 days ago
Wow, what a find! Thanks for posting this. It's funny that dial tones bring back the memories!

Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.

hypersoar2 days ago
What the OpenAI agents did is basically how my class in middle school improvised a chat room. We renamed files in a chosen directory. It made me think that some of the reporting about the technical ingenuity shown in that incident was a bit overblown, at least on that point. I mean, we were able to figure it out as normal 12-year-olds.
ghostpepper2 days ago
Any time someone shows me something an agent did, the first question I ask is whether there's plausibly something comparable already in its training data.
tantalor2 days ago
> I'll once again cut myself open to prove I'm not a computer

Becoming increasingly relevant every day now.

pjmlp2 days ago
Might not be enough among replicants.
nadermx2 days ago
The onion is the prophet we needed but never knew we had.
neilellis2 days ago
The Onion isn't satire it's just a dystopian Cassandara.
kingkongjaffa2 days ago
TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)
xd19362 days ago
Came here to post this. Deer me later!
jonty2 days ago
Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.

One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.

I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.

Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.

montagg2 days ago
Life/teenagers find a way.
charlieyu12 days ago
I have seen something like this before but it was mostly spammers/scammers. Don’t think they were kids at all.
jonty2 days ago
These were definitely schoolkids - I translated some of the posts and the majority were gossiping about boys.
gumby2 days ago
French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!

The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!

Lammy2 days ago
See also: similar mid-20th-century Bell System phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beep_line
nyargh2 days ago
Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.

I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc

Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!

barnas22 days ago
> I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc

This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.

SAI_Peregrinus2 days ago
> you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away

Only applies if you regret posting it later. If it's something you want to find later, it will inevitably have bit-rotted and not been archived.

autoexec2 days ago
> Only applies if you regret posting it later

Not really. For example, something you posted on social media can easily get you turned down for a job you wanted. You'll never be told that your post is what caused you to lose the job, so you'll never "regret" having posted it, but your life was still negatively impacted by what you overshared. It doesn't even have to still be found online to have an impact on your life. It could be something scrapped once a long time ago by a data broker who used that data to flag your file in some way. Your info can still come up when people request targets matching whatever you were flagged for, even when the original content is no longer online. Even when the internet forgets, data brokers don't.

xer0x2 days ago
This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.
Lerc2 days ago
My father blocked things from me, not internet based obviously because they weren't available. But things like fixing the heater so it wouldn't be set higher than what he considered reasonable.

I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.

Aeolun2 days ago
I try not to restrict things so that I can walk into the room at any time and not have them hide shit. Then the few times I do see something I don’t like and ask him not to look at it there’s plenty of other stuff to watch so it doesn’t really cost him anything to humor me.

I’m young enough that I remember my parents thinking games were going to make my eyes go bad, and old enough to remember my younger siblings being absolutely addicted to youtube. Everyone turned out fine.

I’m convinced knowing what they watch is far more important than making sure they don’t watch it.

bityard2 days ago
> everything you put out on the internet never goes away

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.

I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.

bilegeek2 days ago
I'll do my duty and provide some links as a fellow spelunker (apologies if you've already seen some of these):

http://textfiles.com/directory.html (https://archive.org/details/textfiles-dot-com-2011 or use rsync for a local copy), plus he made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary with the full interviews available (https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289)

https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...

https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/msgs/

https://mirrors.archeobits.com/bbs/archives.thebbs.org/ (https://archive.org/details/bbsarchives_2017 for a local copy)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955294

https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine

https://defacto2.net/bbs

https://web.archive.org/web/20241210143429/http://sysopshub....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBD-U-9PIg

jasonfarnon2 days ago
What surprised me is BBS's aren't really the Internet, right? Everything is just stored one one guy's (often a kid's) computer at a time when hdd space was expensive and we were constantly swapping out floppies etc, who could expect it to last long? For some reason in the Internet era I didn't think it would often still come down to "it's just stored on one guy's computer". Likewise I've been surprised how much film/TV/radio from when I was a kid no longer exists.
walthamstow2 days ago
I regularly mourn the photos of my early teens that were on MySpace and no longer exist anywhere
dylan6042 days ago
Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.
empath752 days ago
I worked at AOL in the early 2000s and let me assure you, a lot of it did go away. I tried to rescue the club caribe code and it got erased with the last mainframes before i could. They had a lot of stuff backed up on tape but it was in dire shape and most of it get deleted in a datacenter migration.
Aeolun2 days ago
I think I just start with this talk early, but it’s amazing how kids are willing to assume the best of intentions. “But why? Why would they do that?”, “Because suckering 7 year olds makes them money.”, “But why? That’s mean!”
17186274401 day ago
This just means, they are well raised.
cyanf2 days ago
On the topic of bypassing school restrictions.

Every day, for his last 2 years of high school my sibling remoted into the KasmVNC server he has at home.

This was during a time when sysadmins were keen against any new circumventions. New methods usually gets blocked within the week. To keep it hidden, he had it behind a <something_academic_sounding>.org domain.

What did he do with absolute freedom? Mostly browse HN and Twitter.

If anyone at Kasm happens upon this, thanks for improving lives :)

phantom7842 days ago
I did this in high school. I hosted an SSH server at home on port 443 so it'd get through the school's filtering, then tunneled in and connected with VNC.

Only time I got yelled at was when the teacher saw the SSH window open and yelled at me for being in the command line. So I changed the colors to black text on a white background and they never said anything again.

djmips2 days ago
terminal were the OG dark mode. Nice hack to get around that!
theturtletalks2 days ago
I used to put Ubuntu on a flash drive and boot the computer to that. Not sure if it helped bypass website restrictions.
empath752 days ago
When i was around 13 the local news did a story about a school system BBS, and I happened to have a pen in hand when it flashed the number on the screen briefly, and it turned out to be a dedicated line for teachers. The thing is teachers never actually used it and there was a very active community of kids that dialed in on their own number. They were on a time limit though and I eventually shared the teacher line with a lot of them so we could chat 24-7. It was one of the few multiline BBS’s at the time so it ended up being kind of an HQ for people trading pirated software and stuff after the number spread around. I don’t think school staff ever looked at it.

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