2958: Hatchery
| Hatchery |
 Title text: Anadromous fish are more vulnerable in rivers, since the lack of salt means you can quickly crack passwords using rainbow trout tables. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a BOT EXECUTING REMOTE COD - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks. |
The joke in this comic is that if you remove the "e" from "code", you get "remote cod execution". This refers to killing ("executing") codfish remotely, using an exploit in a network application that allows you to view the hatchery.
The title text contains a pun on rainbow tables, referring to rainbow trout, one type of which (steelhead) is anadromous (migrating up rivers to spawn -- salmon are another well known example). These are used when trying to crack hashed passwords; it's simply a file with many possible passwords and their corresponding hash values. To prevent this, most modern password systems use "salt", an extra random string that has been appended to the password before hashing, so the same password will have many different hashes, and it becomes infeasible to store all of them in a file. An additional pun is that rivers contain fresh water, so there's no salt (the chemical/food additive kind) and the fish are more vulnerable to having their passwords cracked.
There is an additional pun on the phrase "shooting fish in a barrel", which could be taken figuratively to mean that the task is a "piece of cake", or that he is literally shooting fish. Black Hat, in addition to being a black hat hacker, might also be playing Call of Duty (CoD) and performing an execution in this shooter game.
Transcript
- [Black Hat is sitting at a computer desk, with Cueball behind him.]
- Black Hat: Shooting fish in a barrel.
- Computer: Blam!
- A new fish hatchery exploit allows remote cod execution.
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Aren't hatcheries usually about breeding fish, not farming them?RadiantRainwing (talk) 23:26, 12 July 2024 (UTC)
- Well farming sheep often involves the lambing process (though you can just buy in fresh surplus tups every year, from wherever happens to suit your price/quality thresholds, if that's your thing), so "farming" is a wide application in terms of animal husbandry (as well as agriculture, though perhaps in some arboriculture/horticulture/viniculture situations you needn't do the initial seeding, and just buy in the juvenile plants).
- Open-water "Fish-farms" may be more likely to get their fry/big-enough-to-keep-netted-youngsters from an 'on-shore' breeding facility that may be a separate supplier, but I'd probably accept the description of the breeding facility (in 'barrels', quite possibly) as 'farming', even if it's not a full-lifetime aquaponics setup, just had mysteriously internet-accessible firearms trained upon the various tanks of growing fish. 172.70.163.120 10:42, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
- Comic does not say "farm" anywhere? PRR (talk) 20:53, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
- Although it's missing a trick by not doing so — would have given the opportunity for a further fish farm/server farm pun.172.69.195.63 08:28, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
Reading it, I first thought it was about Call of Duty, an fps game series. Its usual abbreviation is COD, but this might be coincidence.Intara (talk) 01:44, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
- As funny as that is, it is almost certainly coincidence. An incredible, hilarious one to be sure, but still most likely a coincidence.OmniDoom (talk) 06:50, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
- I actually think the 'CoD' connection might be something. A hatchery is (amongst other things) where fish spawn. Someone sitting at a computer remotely executing cod as they spawn definitely feels like it might be some kind of 'spawn camping' joke. Also he mentions shooting and there's a 'blam' sound effect. Both of which I don't think fit that well with the pure cod/code pun, but make more sense if it's partially a reference to killing helpless players in an FPS as they first spawn. It feels intentional to me, but also very awkward, so I suspect I'm missing something. 172.69.43.226 12:40, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
- I recall a "remote controlled gun" from elsewhere in the xkcd canon. Can't immedaitely find it (was it somewhere in a What-If/off the usual numbered comics?) but eveything in this ones scenario screams at "actual gun (in a fish-farm) being controlled via a monitor". I'll have to use a bit better Google-Fu and discover which precise prior art I'm actually thinking of, out of the nearly (or slightly over, depending upon what I include) 3000 possibilities.
- And I rather think that if this was a pun (even partially a pun) on Call Of Duty, there'd be a few more actually direct references to this than merely "something you do on a computer". 172.70.90.144 17:00, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
- I just want to observe that despite Randall's convention for using all-caps in his comics, in the above-referenced CoD 792 comic, he does stylize that specific abbreviation with a lower-case "o". He doesn't do that here. L-Space Traveler (talk) 17:58, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
I wonder if this is also inspired by the fish doorbell set up so that users watching a webcam of a river lock can see when a fish is waiting and press a button to open the lock so the fish can continue swimming upstream to spawn. The title "hatchery" doesn't quite match but doesn't seem that far off. --Zeborah
- I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but I'm glad you put the reference here - I've never heard of it before, and it's awesome! L-Space Traveler (talk) 17:58, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
Is the fish shell daemon-spawn? Asking for a friend. 172.69.65.189 19:16, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
- That depends. Is init considered a daemon? 172.71.30.101 13:12, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
