How a Group of Teenagers Pranked 'One Million Checkboxes'

After game developer Nolen Royalty launched his short-lived viral site 'One Million Checkboxes' in June. (Any visitor could check or uncheck a box in the grid — which would change how it displayed for every other visitor to the site, in near real-time.) 'Within days there were half a million people on the site,' he says in a new video, 'and people checked over 650 million boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online.'

But he also explains how what happened next was even more amazing:

He'd stored the state of his one million checkboxes in a million-bit database — 125 kilobytes — and got a surprise after rewriting the backend in Go. Looking at the raw bytes (converted into their value in the 256-character ASCII table)... they spelled out a URL.

Had someone hacked into his database? No, the answer was even stranger. Somebody was writing me a message in binary.'

'Someone was sitting there, checking and unchecking boxes to form numbers that formed letters that spelled out this URL. And they were probably doing this with a bot, to make sure those boxes remained checked and unchecked in exactly the way that they wanted them to.' The URL led to a Discord channel, where he found himself talking to the orchestrators of the elaborate prank. And it was then that they asked him: 'Have you seen your checkboxes as a 1,000 x 1,000 image yet?' It turns out they'd also input two alternate versions of the same message — one in base64, and one drawn out as a fully-functional QR code. (And some drawings....)

'The Discord was full of very sharp teens, and they were writing this message in secret — with tens of thousands of people on the web site — to gather other very sharp teens. And it totally worked. There were 15 people when I joined, over 60 people in the Discord by the time that i left.
'I tried to make it hard for them to draw, but... no problem. They found a way. And they started drawing some very cool things. They put a Windows blue-screen-of-death on the site. They put sexy Jake Gyllenhaal gifs on the site. At the end I removed all my rate limits for an hour as a treat, and they did a real-time [animated] Rickroll across the entire site.'

The video ends with the webmaster explaining why he thought their project was so cool. 'As I kid, I spent a lot of time doing dum stuff on the computer, and I didn't get into too much trouble when I, for example, repeatedly crashed my high school mail server. There is no way that I would be doing what I do now without the encouragement of people back then. So providing a playground like this, getting to see what they were doing, provide some encouragement and say, 'Hey this is amazing' — was so special for me.

'The people in that Discord are so extraordinarily talented, so creative, so cool, I cannot wait to see what they go on to make.'

Link via Kottke.org

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