One Million Checkboxes was a little web experiment by Nolen Royalty that blew up over the summer. It got a lot of press for something kind of silly and pointless. It felt like the internet of the early ’00s. It also just won a Tiny Award, which, again, is a pretty big deal among a small group of internet enthusiasts. The pitch is simple, and it’s right there in the title. No point, just a toy that a bunch of strangers are tinkering with at the same time as you.

But there’s an awesome B-plot here:

On his website, Nolen writes (and talks) about finding some suspicious elements that led him to believe he’d been hacked:

I panicked. There were URLs in my database! There were URLs pointing to catgirls.win in my database!! Something was very very wrong.

I assumed I’d been hacked. I poured over my logs, looking for evidence of an intrusion. I read and re-read my code, searching for how somebody could be stuffing strings into a database that should have just contained 0s and 1s.

I couldn’t find anything. My access logs looked fine. My (very simple) code was ok. My heart rate increased. My girlfriend patiently waited for me to join her for dinner. And then – wait.

Wait!

I saw it.

You have to read this, it’s beautiful.

Or watch the video, if you’re allergic to text:

This is the most 2002 thing I’ve seen in a long time. An army of nerds doing fun, wholesome graffiti for no good reason. Just brilliant. And he hits on one thing that I think is critical:

In highschool, I wrote a recursive mail rule that sent a friend of mine millions of messages as a joke. I (accidentally!) repeatedly crashed the school’s mail server

The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.

Same! In high school me and a couple friends figured out a way to get into the teachers’ intranet (but chickened out before actually doing it). In first year university I showed my classmates how to FTP into the computers in the lab using Internet Explorer. Me and a pal ran a pretty large centralized music server in the residence. That spirit of testing and pushing boundaries is what got me where I am today.

Anyway. This is great. And the story behind it makes the award so much richer. You can see on his twitter feed that he’s as awed by the nerds as he is by the award. Just excellent stuff.

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