Well hello people. Some of you may know what I mean by my title.. Then again most of you won't. So I'll start from the beginning.
Go back 2 posts from this one, and I talked about the Vlogbrothers. They're two brothers, John and Hank Green, who refrain from communicating through text-based media and make daily Vlogs to communicate. The stuff they talk about wil remind ppl of Kevjumba and co.
Anyways, about a few videos in since they started the project in 2007, John stumbled upon an arcade game in an airport called "Aerofighters". However the font made it look like it said "Nerdfighters". Vlogbrother fans all over the world took up this calling and started calling themselves Nerdfighters.
Here's John's definition of a Nerdfighter: " A Nerdfighter is just like any human, just that instead of being made out of tissue and blood and organs, a Nerdfighter is made up of 100% Awesome"
Yes. Call me a nerd. No, go as far as to call me a Nerdfighter :D I don't care.
Anyways, every year, the Vlogbrothers will put together the "YouTube Project 4 Awesome" in which Nerdfighters get together to make videos about their favourite charities and use similar thumbnails in their videos, and get them posted on the front page of YouTube. So for one day, instead of people going around looking at videos about... cleavage... for instance, they watch videos about charities, which are awesome.
This year however, there is a twist. DARPA, the experimental arm of the military, also the creators of the Internet (YAY INTERNET), has started a contest in which ten 8 ft diameter weather balloons are placed in 10 places all over the United States. These balloons are numbered and are guarded by DARPA officials so they will only stay in one place. Whoever who finds all 10 of these balloons and send in their coordinates to DARPA will win 40,000 Dollars. That $40,000. 40 freaking thousand freaking dollars. Freak.
Hank had the idea that we, as Nerdfighters, collaboratively organise search and confirm teams to try and look for these balloons. Considering that DARPA announced the project only 2 days before the competition, and we had little time to plan, we really outdid ourselves by developing strategies and plans to try and win 40 thousand dollars to give to the charity promoted in the best Project For Awesome 2009 Video.
However, we were against the best of the best. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) also assembled a team to try and find those balloons and according to their website, used "highly sophisticated computer algorithms" to try and sift through all the tips and information about the balloons. Because every team would try and throw others off the scent.
Yesterday at 11 p.m Malaysian time, in a hotel in Penang, with sucky wireless Internet connection, I managed to patch through to the Nerdfighters live chat website. Due to the fear that spies could come in to the chat, all of us were afraid of sharing info on the site and even the Vlogbrothers refused to tell us how many balloons we have found and where they were.
Feeling utterly useless all the way over here in Malaysia, an interesting message caught my eye : " Calling all in the U.S and abroad, if you can't search on ground and still wanna help, contact me ASAP". Intrigued, I contacted the person (who turned out to be a 20+ American girl) and had to prove that I was a legit Nerdfighter by answering a few questions that only real Nerdfighters knew the answers too. (Vain much?)
After being assured that I wasn't some random MIT spy, she sent me a link to this secure chat link on a website she runs. So on about 1 a.m MY time, we, along with about 10 others who wanna help but can't go searching on the ground, gathered in the chat room in some Harry Potter role-playing site. I felt like some covert agent lols.
Even though we weren't able to help by searching for he balloons, we managed to think up of ways to mess with the MIT team by using proxies and masking our I.P address and sending them fake leads to locations of balloons. But we still felt we were't doing enough.
And then CentiZen logged in. Centizen. He will forever be a legend to all of us who were there in that little chat room in the middle of nowhere (to speak figuratively).
Apparently Centizen was a Nerdfighter hacker and he managed to hack all the way through into the MIT balloon website servers. (According to him, it was pretty simple as the MIT guys made the website quickly and therefore didn't get to install much security measures.) Long story short, he managed to delete about a few hundred of their leads before they tracked him down and established contact with him. He sent us that chat log lols :
"192.168.*.* Says: Hello there :)
73.54.1.* Says: Stop this right now. If you don't stop we will go much harder on you
192.168.*.* Says: What, you mean like incorrectly patching an httpd server hole? Your supposed to use port 8080, not 8090.
192.168.*.* Says: And I thought you guys were supposed to be like the best or something
73.54.1.* HAS SIGNED OFF "
192.168.* was Centizen while 73.54.1.* were the MIT guys. We totally laughed our asses off wei.
And then it was 3 a.m I had to sleep , but not before we decided to create a Nerdfighters website group, but we didn't wanna really tell the world we hacked MIT just yet, so we called ourselves:
"Those who Witnessed the THING that HAPPENED on that DAY."
the subtext : You know who you are. We all saw the THING happen. On that DAY that it happened. And it was AWESOME.
And indeed it was.
Well many of you probably won't think it was awesome but I guess you just had to be there, or be a social-outcast like me. :D
Well ,I'm disappointed to say that despite all our efforts, we lost to MIT. They won the 40 thousand dollars because more ppl supported them as they promised whoever who helped got a share of the reward. While we were doing it for charity, they gave it out to people who only want profit.
Sometimes I lose faith in the human race.
However, Hank Green sent all of us an email, and in it, he said :
Of course, I had a short telephone conversation with one of the leaders of the MIT initiative and was gratified to hear that our misinformation campaign was a serious problem for them them throughout the day and greatly slowed their progress. So at least we dealt as good as we got.
I'd like to think that our little group, gathered there in that little chatbox in the middle of nowhere, wanting to help, managed to put up a great fight with those MIT jerks and kicked them right where in hurts, in the nuts. :D
So thats the story of my Nerdfight-mania. And I really DO hope that Nerdfighters all over the world don't take this defeat too badly. With luck, we'll get those MIT guys' asses next time.
PS: In case you guys were wondering, we came close, we had 9 out of 10 balloons when MIT sent in their submission and we found our tenth shortly after.
