One of the greatest things Omegle enabled is this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzHV9QD0Is (Harry Mack freestyling for random Omegle matches, it was a series of 90+ episodes and brought me and others so much joy during COVID)
Frank Tedesco, pianist / musician meets people on Omegle, takes song requests and plays them - and for ones he doesn't know, he listens once on his phone then plays them by ear.
Marcus Veltri, piano, https://www.youtube.com/@MarcusVeltri
Rob Landis, violin, https://www.youtube.com/@RobLandes
Billy Wilkins, guitar and vocals, https://www.youtube.com/@BillyWilkins
The Doo, guitar and piana and otamatone, https://www.youtube.com/@TheDooo
Both Frank Tedesco and Marcus Veltri frequently did joint Omegle videos with Rob Landis. Tedesco and Veltri also have some joint videos. I seem to also recall some Wilkins, Landis, and Tedesco collaborations.
edit: i'm not exactly musically inclined. When i was in college the joke was Guitar Center had painted a line around the building in the parking lot and i was not allowed to cross it.
Imagine they'll hop to a different platform.
1. He starts out by asking if he can show them a magic trick. They say yes or nod yes. He then exits stage right. He then returns either through the back door or some the side stage left. Where he enters from is too far away from where he left for him to have walked or even ran there in the time between entrance and exit.
The part up to where he exists stage left could be pre-recorded. His wording and gestures change slightly with different people but he could have several different pre-recorded segments for this.
As Teller once observed:
> Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect
Penn has said something similar:
> The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth
It could then switch to live for his return, where he then actually converses with them to prove that he's live.
2. If he encounters someone whose responses to the pre-recorded segment don't fit in, he skips them. Remember, we don't see how many people he had to try this with to get enough good ones for a video, and recall Teller's quote from above.
The one he's done that has me baffled is the one where he does this:
1. He asks them what city they live in.
2. He then tells them he used to live in that city and gives the address of where he lived. It is their address or an address of a close neighbor.
He also does this except instead of asking the city he tells them he has a talent for guessing people's names, and then tells them their name.
I can see in general how to do these, by using fake disconnects. He uses fake disconnects in one of his most common routines where he asks someone if he can show them a magic trick, starts a "pick a card" type routine, and then disconnects just has he's revealing their card. Then later when the person is connected to someone else either that someone else says "is this your card?" and holds up the correct card or he walks into that someone else's room and shows the card.
The key here is that he doesn't really disconnect. He just shows the disconnect screen, and then switches to feeding them video of the other person. They think that they have connected to someone new on Omegle but it is him the whole time.
With fake disconnects he could have his subjects in the "tell them their name" bit first talk to an accomplice who gets their name, fake disconnect and fake connect with him, and then he can do his name guess.
That should be fairly easy because people often exchange names on Omegle. But full addresses? I'd hope that would be rare, rare enough that even a Penn/Teller level of time would not be enough to get many people.
Someone who has worked incredibly hard at their craft in a very public manner.
The positive vibe he brings makes the internet a little bit better on every encounter.
I almost shed a tear when H.Mack got the opportunity to perform in front of his idols, Ice Cube, who said he was one of the best freestyle rappers he's seen, and had followed his career closely for years. A magical moment :-)
With so many big names using it, and it is so popular.
Why was it a financial drain? Why can't it keep going?
Surely if was making enough money. .
It's more like losing access to a bar that allowed random people to meet in private rooms, and didn't check they weren't giving access to minors, and didn't check inside the private rooms to prevent sexual abuse.
You’ve made a poor analogy, though, since obviously it’s very trivial for a bar to validate age at the door. If such a thing were easy for Omegle to do, I’m sure they would.
This bar also had special partitions in each room that were practically indestructible, allowing sound and light through but protecting from physical harm.
[EDIT: I don't mean to imply that the check is easy! The reality of Omegle's difficulties is understood. I'm just riffing on the metaphor]
Unfortunately, that requires a return to the days when most people's primary computing device was capable of acting as a web server, and computer literacy implied empowerment: that might be tricky, but if we work hard enough I'm sure we can get there.
Even knowing their age at all is giving up some privacy.
If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to data brokers and exploited at large a scale
It's usually obvious if you can have a short conversation with the person in question. Throughout my childhood escapades, I'm certain that most, if not all, the responsible adults I interacted with knew pretty much exactly how old I was. (I'd managed to navigate a legal loophole that, I believe, still exists in GDPR today, so they weren't required to kick me off – but while I was treated as an equal, I wasn't treated the same way I'm treated now.)
> If it can be done at small scale, it will get sold to data brokers and exploited at large a scale
That's quite illegal, and quite easy to detect (just give slightly different data to everyone and see what leaks). Most people don't commit crimes: individuals just don't have the kinds of incentive to buy and sell people's personal data that organisations like Facebook, Taboola and Oracle have. (And what would they get for betraying these people's trust? $30? Sure… I'd totally go for that.)
A library is in public view.
Omegle was in private, away from public view.
No one needs to keep anyone off Omegle now, it is gone.
And yet heinous acts of abuse/violence/etc have occurred in both.
By your logic, we should pave all the parks and burn down the libraries.