Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
businessinsider.deIf I want to know how a classic trick is done I'll look at the Wikipedia page. It often won't reveal the secret directly, but if you check the page history you'll find an edit war between magicians which exposes exactly how it works.
now this is interesting! what exactly is the rationale used by those who would prefer it remain secret? i assume it's for the preservation of their job or hobby, but i doubt that would fly on its own.
A culture of a magician never reveals his secrets.
With the secret unknown it's 'magic'. With the secret known it becomes just a simple trick.
These are essentially trade secrets -- like the recipe for KFC or Coca Cola. Except with the latter, there is plausible denial.
> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much the same way that TV shows and films are.
A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public.
Most of the described contents of the tracker are commercially released products. That's really not "stealing tricks" in any way.
> A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick".
Interestingly, this isn't quite true. People are trying to exert copyright over the specific motions under choreography protection.
I wonder how this would go down in a court of law, in that the specific motions they are claiming copyright on were /obfuscated/ or downright /concealed/ from view. I wonder if you can legally be considered to have copied something you have not seen..
I suppose what you'd end up copyrighting is the final effect, not how it's achieved. Which is, I guess, the point.
Without knowledge of the finer points of copyright law (IANAL), is this (the final effect) even copyrightable?
My understanding is that tricks aren't copywritable, but performances are. So magicians have sometimes successfully sued each-other over copying not just a trick but their delivery of said trick. That was the justification for the Penn and Teller lawsuit mentioned in the article
But I think the issue with the site discussed in the article is mainly just copyrighted material:, books, videos and the like.
Magic tricks can be patented.
https://www.google.com/patents/US6623366
And of course they can be trade secreted. Can they be copyrighted? That I dunno. A performance can be copyrighted. But the ideas? Probably not.
[conplete speculation, by me] They may be using the copyright of things they don't care about to shutdown the site to eliminate the things they do care about which they have no legal means to eliminate directly.
This hints at a more general problem: how does one gather a high-quality repository of knowledge on any given subject? How do you get enough stuff? How do you keep the noise down?
I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others. Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims. Even established techniques are hard to assess. Say you need to parse stuff. Will you go recursive descent? LALR? Earley? PEG? Might depend on what you want to parse, which environment you're working in, how much time you may invest… Or say you write a compiler. Will you use OCaml/F#/Haskell for the ease of handling recursive data structures? Or do you want C/C++ because of the speed, and you know tricks to avoid recursive data structures anyway?
One tempting solution is to start a secret society dedicated to hoard knowledge on the chosen subject. It would be hard to get in, but once there you'd only get quality stuff. (Or you might have gotten into a self-delusional sect…) The idea is, maybe if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, instead of merely buried under a mountain of noise, we would treat it with the respect it deserves.
For most of human history groups of people have operated to restrict the flow of knowledge for the benefit of the controlling group. Technological advancement has exploded since governments began to incentivize release of information through the concept of patents.
Some examples...
See "guilds" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild
See "companies" with "trade secrets".
See Vatican Library (no longer fully secret) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Library
See "classified information" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information
Had something like this debate with manager at last job. Came to a head in my annual review.
Manager: "As senior developer, you lack sufficient knowledge of our most important application."
Me: "Wait. I am the one who wrote most the documentation that is in our knowledge base for that application. I am the one who set up the knowledge base."
Manager: "That is not knowledge. Knowledge is what is in your head."
Me: blinks incredulously
I departed the company shortly after this exchange.
But I think you're right. It was certainly the manager's idea that if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, his position would be treated (and generally was, among his superiors) with the respect he felt it deserved. But I'd have to assert that this secret society dedicated to hoarding knowledge was a self-delusional sect.
That's generally been my experience.
That's so bizarre. Was he trying to create some kind of official narrative on paper that he had the knowledge and you didn't? Or was he trying to tell you to document less and hide information?
> Was he trying to create some kind of official narrative on paper that he had the knowledge and you didn't?
Yes, this. We had actually worked together amicably for several years, he as senior, I as mid-level. Then we both got bumped up. As part of my new responsibilities as senior, I tried to surface issues and confront them transparently. I was mindful not to point fingers or show anyone up but rather identify them as shortcomings in our practices or policies.
For cultural reasons, I think he felt threatened by this and assumed it was his responsibility to hide issues and save his own face. It fell apart pretty quickly. It sucked but I've used it as a career lesson.
Self-evidently it is possible to gather a high quality repository of knowledge; it's been done many times in history.
I suspect that the real solution is an absence of secrecy - indefinite hoarding of information is no help to anyone except those who want their egos stroked by the number of "things" they have, and knowledge that nobody can access is barely knowledge at all.
As far as noise goes, you can never hope to rub it out completely. There will always be transcription errors, deliberate mistruths and gaps - the most you can do is carefully curate the repository to make sure you catch and repair as much as possible.
Essentially, the closest thing we have is probably Wikipedia. I don't know if that's especially complimentary to us as a species.
This was already tried with Encyclopedia Britannica and it doesn't quite work.
The truth is, if you want high quality, more eyes the better. (And the article mentions that magical art was greatly improved by general accessibility of things on the Internet.)
Why didn't the encyclopedia work (for its time)? Before the Internet it was the best, most information dense, source available. Not perfect, but better than any available alternatives.
Heck, _during_ the age of the internet it's the best, most information dense source available, far outclassing Wikipedia on the most used topics.
Curious about an example of this. As someone who spends many hours reading Wikipedia, the time and effort put into very niche subjects seems fantastic. I haven't opened a physical encyclopedia in probably 10 years.
Britannica is online; you don't need to open a book. Go search it now.
Just trying now, it's slow, doesn't take me to the page by name ('Iraq' was my search), and was still trying to load from adservers as I type this. Slow to load, poorer layout that is harder to read (but not terrible), and split across multiple pages requiring another slow load. The 'demographics' section that I was looking for is needlessly split across pages. The page chugs as I scroll it up and down to read the one paragraph on-screen at any time (on a laptop with a decent CPU).
Is the information better? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know enough about the country to say. But it's a chore to read. Last updated in June 2013, so that's three-and-a-bit years without updates in a rapidly-changing part of the world.
My mother sold World Book encyclopedias when I was a kid, and we had a set. I grew up reading those cover-to-cover. There's something beautiful about having info at your fingertips that can be consumed at the speed of reading. Paper encyclopedias have it, and wikipedia has it, but online Britannica does not. Well, not from my excursion there just now.
FWIW, I use Britannica regularly and don't recall ever seeing those problems. The information is clearly better, IME; there's nothing like being able to access instant expert knowledge on almost any topic. The main drawback is that the coverage is, of course, much narrower; no pokemon characters.
Crowd-sourcing can be a great tool, but not for high-integrity information. IMHO: As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda, I've come to think that overlooking Wikipedia's accuracy problems was a forerunner to this situation. I'm sure much of Wikipedia's information is good; I just don't know which is correct and which is complete nonsense.
I dunno, I'm not seeing it. I've just done another search, this time on 'resistor'. The Britannica article is a paragraph, whereas the Wikipedia one goes into a lot of depth on styles, history, etc. Notably, neither article has a diagram referring to the colour bars...
I get a similar differential with 'orchestra', where the wikipedia article goes into much more depth, not just about composition, but also about things like selection criteria. 'Grasses' gets the same kind of results as 'resistors' - one paragraph in EB, lengthy page on WP. At this point, I ran out of free views :)
(I was purposefully avoiding subjective topics like biographies, as no matter what is written in a biography, you can always find something to complain about.)
If it works for you, keep using it, I guess. But I found it slow, poorly laid-out, with fewer pictorial examples, and at least for the selections above, the inferior source.
> As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda
The public has always done this. Yellow journalism has been there since the start, and propaganda goes back at least as far as Ancient Egyptian steles (damn, should have looked that one up). The only thing that's new (IMO) is the 24-hour news cycle, which has given everyone 'scandal fatigue'. When scandals are coming at you thick and strong, you just can't care about them anymore.
Rarely has Britannica been criticized for having articles that are too short. Certainly we can find plenty of 'stubs' in Wikipedia and plenty of long articles in Britannica.
Is more better? Is more mediocre information better than less? How do you know what you're reading is true?
>> As the public now widely accepts lies and propaganda
> The public has always done this.
It's always been true to a degree, just like there is always crime, but sometimes it's much worse than others. Right now there is plenty of evidence that the situation is bad.
These aren't exactly big secrets. Anyone can get copies of The Linking Ring, the magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and see ads for many of the tricks that require special props. (There used to be a competing publication, the "Magic-Gram", but it may be defunct.)
Realistically, if there's a video of a trick, you can usually figure it out. If there are multiple videos from different angles, it's easier. For that matter, there are explanatory videos for most of the big tricks on YouTube now.
I once saw a professional magician having a miserable time performing on the stage on the Santa Cruz beach. He was doing a levitation, and in brilliant sunlight it was embarrassingly obvious how it worked.
There are many videos of hans moretti's cardboard box trick, but I still have no clue how it's done...
Who's up for starting a comp sci secret society? We'll share the best ways to split a cake. The optimal algorithms on how many kittens to have to improve moods, and, best stats how to not forget important anniversaries while trying to boot up a Vulkan pipeline.
:)
Let’s call it… Dark Science
http://dresdencodak.com/2016/05/23/dark-science-64-turncoat/
The open source secret society
Perhaps we could name it: F Society
I have been interested in magic for a long time, and have subscriptions or accounts at most major magic retailers in the world. I am not the best at performing magic tricks (mainly because I don't have that story telling personality that is needed to execute most tricks), but I love learning them and practicing them in my spare time.
No need to go to the dark net though - 99% of magic tricks are now readily exposed on Youtube public channels, and I am not just talking about the original instructions videos being leaked on there. A myriad of kids stand ready to either perform tricks so badly that they give away the techniques, or else outright show how things are done.
Still though, it is like seeing how a commercial airliner is flown. Watching hundreds of hours of video footage is no substitute for formal training and real like practice.
Also, one of the biggest draws of magic to me is hearing of the origins of most tricks, and researching guys who came up with these things over a hundred years ago.
Any if this on the darknet?
Sounds like the music industry.