Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery

rollingstone.com

23 points·BogdanCalin··4 comments

Hi, sorry if what I'm saying here is obvious and well-known; I'm coming to the whole Cicada thing late.

When the article listed the names of cities, one jumped out at me: Fayetteville, Arkansas. I used to live in Fayetteville, and it's tiny and insignificant -- totally out of place in a list with cities like Seoul.

But surprisingly, weev lived briefly in Fayetteville. So I search for weev and cicada, and find that he wrote an essay in 2013 called "The Tiger and the Cicada".

Sounds like a modern-day Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, for you Pratchett fans out there.

If there was a serious super-secret illuminati secret ubermensch braintrust, I expect they'd have fundamentally better ways of attracting members, ones that don't get confused with marketing ARGs, hoaxes, or not-as-serious groups.

However, if they only wanted free labor from people who are easily motivated by puzzles and affirmation... people with no no easily-traceable relationship... people they can casually cut-loose when convenient... Hmmm.

I don't feel like reading yet another cicada article that in the end has no new information. Is there anything new in this article that wasn't in the last 1/2 dozen cicada articles?

I thought it was worth reading, initially I had my doubts about the veracity of the claims by the person being interviewed, I imagine some of this is as much the writers fault as anything else.

Toward the end it provided some insights that I had not previously read anything about (e.g. broods), but maybe I haven't paid enough attention to the other cicada articles.

It seemed counterintuitive to me that in the interest of free information he hid the piece of software they worked on on the "darknet"... Surely given he has come out publically the sane thing to do would be to make it easily available and open source.

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