IT Security Mag Tricked Into Publishing Hilarious Nonsense

[KoudelkaMorgan]

Very seldom do I refer to an article as being delicious, but this one here is mighty delectable. It has more than satisfied my RDA of fail with none of the side effects of pitying our species that Youtube fail reels trigger.

The fact that they published this piece, ASCII wang and all...wow.

I can only hope that others are inspired to produce similar periodical pranking pandemonium.

Cry havoc, and let slip the trolls of war!

 

[camazotz]

And people think magazines are dying because of the internet....hah! Great stuff.

 

[Loethlin]

Oh yeah...heh, I remember that episode. Good stuff. And not only that, they went with the reverse-gamer trope. Rather than the person who has the highest scores on "all the MMOs" be a fat defenseless male nerd, it was a hot chick. Oh ho ho, how edgy and non-stereotypical they are.

They're getting better lately. They made an arrow in the knee "joke" that one time. That's nice, right..?
No, no it's not, they still suck in that respect. Pity, because I actually enjoy watching NCIS.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Well, they really borked up here. I mean, anyone who has a decent knowledge of computers should have been able to tell that was just plain nonsense from 5 minutes with the thing. I doubt they will ever be respected by anyone as a legit, professional magazine after this. I know I won't. XD

Or videogames, for that matter. The PDP 11 was a successor to the PDP 1, a minicomputer [footnote]heck, just knowing it's a minicomputer should be enough to know the article was bullshit -- that's a class of computing that has been effectively obsolete for decades[/footnote] otherwise known as the system on which the first videogame (Spacewar[footnote]It was the first videogame that anyone knew about, anyway, and it's what planted the seeds for the industry. Saying that oscilloscope tennis game was the first videogame is like saying those acid filled clay jars they found in Alexandria were the first chemical batteries. They may have technically been that, but it's not exactly an unbroken line[/footnote]) was made. The first model in the PDP 11 line came out in 1975, and the last one came out in 1990. Not exactly modern hardware.

That said, this was hilarious. You got to love it when something like this happens.

 

[dtgenshiken7]

This is just... amazing. It's a good thing I never pay for these magazines or I'd be up in arms over it.

 

[dancinginfernal]

Well you see what they needed to do was create a GUI Interface in Visual Basic and get to tracking IP addresses. Or at least that's what worked for the people on NCIS.

Pretty sure that's CSI.

 

[Gilhelmi]

I can't believe the actors didn't refuse to do it. Even my slightly technophobic Grandma saw that and asked how that was supposed to work.

Wasn't NCIS also responsible for having a character who had the highest score in, and I quote, "All the MMORPGs"?

Oh yeah...heh, I remember that episode. Good stuff. And not only that, they went with the reverse-gamer trope. Rather than the person who has the highest scores on "all the MMOs" be a fat defenseless male nerd, it was a hot chick. Oh ho ho, how edgy and non-stereotypical they are.

Though I still don't think that's as bad as when in CSI, they tracked a person's IP address in an MMO by making chase in-game. For some reason, in order to track their IP, they had to physically chase his character through the world. Like, chase his character with another character. WAT?

Wait, What? How would that work? No, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Owww, my mind was blown by the stupidity of CSI.

 

[Xanthious]

Well you see what they needed to do was create a GUI Interface in Visual Basic and get to tracking IP addresses. Or at least that's what worked for the people on NCIS.

Pretty sure that's CSI.

Yeah it is. I get them confused oftentimes.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Well you see what they needed to do was create a GUI Interface in Visual Basic and get to tracking IP addresses. Or at least that's what worked for the people on NCIS.

Pretty sure that's CSI.

Yeah it is. I get them confused oftentimes.

I get all those police procedural shows confused. They're all equally poorly written, they all have similar names and premises, and the kicker, they all use the same style of cinematography with the same color palette. They're depressingly dark, but not in the plot line; it's the actual lighting that's too dim.

Case in point, I saw part of an episode today what I think was Law and Order (the schedule on the website is wrong and I don't have access to the TV in the livingroom with the set top box at the moment to make sure of which show it was), and the plot was about a game programmer who had hidden clues to a murder in a videogame he worked on. I lost it when one of the detectives explained to the one who was playing the game that whoever programmed the level they were looking at may have left his name in it somewhere as an easter egg, had to explain what an easter egg was, and before he finished his explanation, the guy playing the game found it. "It" being a crack in a wall in the level that when walked up to opened up into a space with the programmers name in giant floating text.

What's even worse, most of the "clues" were in animations for characters in the game -- apparently in their world certain programmers (who apparently do all the work -- there are no animators in this world) can be told apart from other programmers by the signature moves the characters they programmed do, like doing a backflip and shooting three times, or stabbing a specific number of times and places with a knife. I can't imagine anyone watching it for anything but comedy value.

Anyway, the point of my digression here, aside from telling a funny story about a terrible genre of shows, is that I'm pretty sure everything in the genre has done a "videogames are linked to the killer" plot, many of them more than once. I think they're called "police procedurals" less because they're about the procedures involved in police work, and more because they're shows about police whose scripts are procedurally generated on a computer somewhere.

 

[AlwaysPractical]

Still my favourite part of the article: "Without a doubt, our heuristic turns the trainable archetypes sledgehammer into a scalpel."

Did nobody even skimread this?

 

[lacktheknack]

Still my favourite part of the article: "Without a doubt, our heuristic turns the trainable archetypes sledgehammer into a scalpel."

Did nobody even skimread this?

I'm pretty sure they saw "scalpel" and thought "Clearly, the author is a doctor, and likely has 'Dr.' in front of his name, so he knows what he's talking about".

 

[ThunderCavalier]

So... would this count as an absolute fail... or a hilarious one?

 

[Strazdas]

This is absolutely fantastic.

 

[EtherealBeaver]

Absolutely fantastic.

I love how it's also the very first thing in the magazine. Pride of house page one.

Even though we believe most readers of Hacking9 shall be
familiar with classic Nmap use as a port scanner, using Nmap as a weaponized tool for remote backdooring is essentially
not public.

Ok, the thing is called "DICKS" and it operates by "remote backdooring". Is this whole article an allegory for anal sex? Because that's beyond awesome.

It is. If you read closer, they even detail how ejaculation works - in "computer sciency terms".
I would find the quote but honestly Im still laughing so hard I start crying every time I think of the article. My wife even came in worried that something was wrong with all the noise I was making.