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Shutting down the Internet in Thursday’s Reddit Digest

Can hacktivist group Anonymous really shut down the Internet? And is it all just an elaborate April Fool's joke? 

 

Kevin Morris

Internet Culture

Posted on Mar 29, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 7:20 pm CDT

Want to read Reddit but don’t have the time? Our daily Reddit Digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the social news site—every morning.

  • Hacktivist group Anonymous apparently plans to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Wall Street by shutting down the entire Internet. The group claims this is a relatively simple task: They just need to cut off the Internet’s DNS root servers. Redditors are hardly shaking in their boots. “Even if they could knock out the servers, the cache in each intermediate DNS server would make so there is no disruption in service anyway,” AwesomeGarbageAccount writes. Others, meanwhile, think it’s an elaborate April Fools joke. (/r/YouShouldKnow)

  • r/bestof mods are considering an experiment: only allow submissions from non-default subreddits. Sounds like a terrible idea. Redditor soundslikeneon puts it best: “Some people (myself included) unsubscribe from every default subreddit, not because they are entirely garbage but because the signal-to-noise ratio just isn’t good enough for it to be worth the time.” The whole point of r/bestof is to highlight the diamonds in the Reddit rough. (/r/bestof)

  • I love this question: “What’s the difference between regular sleep and being passed out after drinking alcohol?” The answer, according to Pirateless, is that alcohol reduces the amount of R.E.M. sleep you receive. (/r/askscience)

  • Yesterday I wrote about a choose-your-own-adventure children’s book that a redditor was creating. Now a redditor has made a choose-your-own-adventure story out of Reddit comments. (/r/bestof)

  • r/TrueReddit rarely comes to consensus on anything. But at this thread, commenters are happy to agree on one thing: The Baby Boomer generation has screwed over America’s youth. (/r/TrueReddit)

  • “I got cancer and lost my balls, ask me about it,” redditor and unwilling eunuch j_croak writes. Bizarrely, he then returns to edit his popular AMA to query Reddit on his theories about a hidden puzzle in a Renaissance artist’s paintings. Weird. “I showed you my scrotum now help me tell people I found something awesome,” he writes. I guess that’s a pretty fair compromise. So far, one person has obliged. (/r/IAmA)

  • Here’s an amazing story: This guy traveled with his “broke, single mother” to 28 countries before he turned 16. “i never really realized that it was such a strange and amazing experience until this AMA i guess. it was just something i did,” he writes. (/r/IAmA)

Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments.

Image by Galileo55

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*First Published: Mar 29, 2012, 10:25 am CDT