This is a follow on from this event a little while back: ‘Reckless’: Man pretending to be injured on motorway overbridge arrested.
Back in April, I spent some time looking into a fledgling charity called the Suicide Reduction Trust (SRT). It had caught my eye after a reader tip-off about a TradeMe listing they believed might be a scam. The listing advertised a raffle with the prize too good to be true: a free house. And not just any house, a $2m Auckland mansion, along with cash for furniture and a brand new Tesla to boot. The raffle was advertised as raising funds for the SRT, which had launched shortly before the win-a-house promotion. While TradeMe pulled the listing, telling The Bulletin that it went against its rules, the raffle was legitimate, as Stuff’s Tony Wall reported at the time. But who was behind it and why?
A couple of weeks ago, an email arrived in The Spinoff inboxes with a provocative and, to be frank, shocking subject line: “Auckland lawyer hangs himself on Auckland motorway overpass.” It was from Jaques, criticising the media for failing to cover his new charity. The body of the email clarified this was simply an attention-grabbing stunt. “I’m going to do you a favour and give you the newsworthy clickbait you so badly desire and this morning I’m going to hang myself from an Auckland motorway overpass and you’ll have the story you really want,” he wrote. A few hours later, reports started to emerge of a man dangling from an overbridge, attached to a harness, causing delays to shocked rush hour commuters after two lanes were closed by emergency service. Newshub reported that Jaques was throwing leaflets at the speeding traffic below. He was later charged in relation to offensive behaviour and endangering transport.
Jaques acknowledged it could have “a profound impact on the Trust’s reputation and way of operating” and said “he may have in fact caused more harm than good”.
Funny! How did you annoy someone enough that they put an unflattering photo of you online?
I’ve had my fair share of websites in the past. More along the lines of Geocities or Myspace, but I’ve done vanilla HTML/PHP/MySQL stuff, also decades ago. At a time when marquees were the peak of style. Once people wanted websites to look good I bowed out and stuck to hosting instances of sites that other people made.
That would have been funny but they weren’t annoyed with me, it was part of one of those things where people put up a bunch of photos of people attending an event and caption them with their names. I just thought I looked super creepy, and not what you want to be the top result.
Omg php, I never got into that but php bb sites were all the rage. I used to make websites in Dreamweaver. Back when you needed a whole adobe suite to make one website because people wanted animated buttons and flash ha ha. It’s so different now we have CMSes.
Oh I never had the adobe suite, my websites were terrible haha.
I definitely did my time on some php bb sites. Php was all the rage, Facebook was written in PHP (and maybe still is? They developed some way of precompiling it for speed and gave it a new name).
Hmm, apparently it still is. Called Hack. There’s a list of programming languages for popular sites here. Still a fair bit of PHP hanging around. Even more surprising, Yahoo is still high on the list!
I actually got a part time job as a webmaster when I was a student. On my first day in the job I realised the site consisted of over 1,000 pages sitting right there in the top level directory with no folder structure and no cms, all just manual links.😁😥😫
That’s an interesting list! Yahoo!
Kbin/Mbin is written in php! Kbin itself seems to have fallen by the wayside though.
Haha wow, 1000 pages with no structure 😆
Haha yeah Yahoo. I think more technical people often forget that others move at a slower pace. I had this discussion at work recently, no I don’t believe the average person has a TOTP Authenticator app on their phone. Yes probably everyone in our project does, maybe everyone on Lemmy does. But I’d put money on less that half the population (even of just those with smart phones) having one. And it may well be 1/4 or less.
Me reading this comment: “well I don’t have a TOTP authenticator … (googles it) … oops yes I do”.
Yeah you’re right, it’s easy to forget the general slowness out there.
Php’s defenders say it’s way different to how it used to be and has evolved though, aparently people who call it out of date are wrong. I don’t code, so I don’t know if that’s true!
Haha I was going to say 2fa but it’s pretty common these days to have SMS or email based 2FA (I’d argue it isn’t a second factor of the something you know, something you have, something you are factors - SMS is insecure and email is something you know (email password) which is the same kind of factor as the password you’re using to log in to whatever other account).
Microsoft and Google also both have apps that you can confirm logins with, which is closer to a second factor but many people will have this 2FA without realising it. Hence why I specifically mentioned TOTP authentication.
I am confident PHP is different now! I think it was version 3 or 4 when I was using it, they are up to 8 now (plus all the minor releases in the middle). As well as frameworks like Laravel that either didn’t exist or I didn’t know about at the time I was playing in that space.
But also I think people like what they know. You probably won’t convince people familiar with alternative backends that PHP is better, because whether the way PHP does it is good or not, the thing we like best is what’s familiar to us.
Pretty sure I first got a TOTP thing forced on me by an organization I was contracting for. It was kind of funny because it meant I could access their stuff for years afterwards.
People definitely like what they know. I’m trying to learn chess lately and have to fight myself to learn new ways of doing things.
My favourite was that I enabled TOTP for Facebook, but for years they would also SMS a code as well. So the benefits of TOTP over SMS were eliminated. I don’t think they do that anymore, but I don’t log in to Facebook very much so maybe they do.
Chess is an interesting game for so many reasons. There’s a story told as a sign of the power of AI (and perhaps a warning), where for years Stockfish was this chess engine that could beat all others (by this time, maybe 2010?, humans had no hope). Then one day Google (technically a company Google bought) came out with this neural network AI AlphaZero that was beating Stockfish within a few hours of training, despite never being told anything about chess. It was simply given time to play games against itself until it worked out how to win.
My understanding is that Stockfish later adopted a neural net and is once again the best, but it is a pretty impressive story.
Chess is also interesting because it may never be considered a solved game. They are more moves possible than there are atoms in the observable universe, and it’s not even close.