Coupon Code
by Jeff
Image text: This also guarantees he won't be one of the ones to get a bobcat.
This comic is pretty straightforward. And here I thought that those coupon code fields were only machine-read.
The image text is a reference to xkcd comic 325 in which Black Hat ships someone from eBay a bobcat instead of the item they ordered.
Wikileaks
by Jeff
Image text: STUDENTS ARE CALLING PRESIDENT JOHNSON EN MASSE TO PROTEST THE BOMBING AND IT'S JAMMED THE WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD. COULD THEY COLLAPSE OUR CRITICAL PHONE SYSTEMS? HAS THE FIRST TELEPHONE WAR BEGUN? STAY TUNED FOR MORE ON THIS DANGEROUS NEW TECHNOLOGY.
First and foremost, the image text appears to be a news wire from during the Vietnam War when Lyndon Johnson was President. The students were calling to protest the War in what xkcd implicates as the first DDOS attack. A DDOS attack is a distributed denial of service attack in which the attackers force too much traffic from many different points to take down a web server, or in the case of the image text a phone network.
The comic is a reference to the group Anonymous, who over the past week or so has been using DDOS attacks to take down servers for companies that aided the governments of the world take down Wikileaks and its CEO Julian Assange. Amazon, Paypal and Mastercard were all targets of Anonymous. Anonymous is a group that was formed out of the forum 4chan.org. (I'm not linking there, find it at your own risk).
The joke in the comic is that Anonymous supports Wikileaks and their ability to make confidential and top secret information public until their own names, phone numbers and addresses are made public.
Weather Radar
by Jeff
Image text: Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!
This one is pretty self explanatory. However, I think that the weather sites rig the "future" button to make the weather seem more scary to ensure repeat visitors.
Additionally, the problem outlined in this comic is only a problem for people who like thunderstorms.
Business Idea
by Jeff
Image text: We didn't believe you at first, but we asked like three people who were at that party. They not only corroborated your story, but even said you totally mentioned wanting to start a company someday. Sorry! If this isn't enough money, let us know.
This one is pretty straight-forward and don't you wish that this was actually true!?
The image text is the letter that is included with the $20 million in the Fed Ex delivery.
Constructive
by Jeff
Image text: And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.
In this comic, Cueball is considering his new invention for keeping spammers off an online community. All sites now use CAPTCHA which is used to tell humans from bots or spammers. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. CAPTCHAs are usually image files that have a word on them that humans can easily read (or sometimes not so easily) and computers are unable to.
Cueball's idea is another form of a Turing test that forces all potential commenters to get their comment flagged as constructive or non-constructive. This allows other users to decide what should be allowed on the site. The desired side effect is that all users, spammers, bots or humans all contribute constructive comments.
So, thanks to all of our commenters here at explainxkcd.com. You guys, girls, spammers and bots are all awesome. Just in case you didn't realize, we are not geniuses. Thanks for helping us see our way through the quagmire that is xkcd comics ever Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. Our powers combined we can figure out these comics, or summon Captain Planet, one of the two.
Thanks!
Online Communities 2
by Jeff
This is an update of the original online communities xkcd comic/poster/famous thing. Click on the image to make it huge.
Since I'm very late on this, let's open this up to the comments. Commenters - explain as much of the map as you want. Also, what do you think of the map? Let's hear it.
Swimsuit Issue
by Jeff
Image text: Parents: talk to your kids about popup blockers. Also, at some point, sex. But crucial fundamentals first!
This one is pretty self-explanatory, but always practice safe browsing!
Infrastructures
by Jeff
Image text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.
This comic is a satire of the recent concerns regarding the ever popular social network Facebook and what Facebook is doing with the information, pictures and videos everyone shares with Facebook.
This comic is saying that some bearded (possible professor) has been concerned about proprietary software and has been (since 2003 or earlier) advocating for open source software.
Obviously saving your documents in a file type that only one software can open is different than giving all your information to a closed source for profit company, but they are similar. Both are proprietary shells held by a single for profit entity.
In the image text, CC licensed means Creative Commons license is a license from a non-profit organization that allows people to share their work. Diaspora is the new NYU student-created "privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network".
Campfire
by Jeff
Image text: 100 years later, this story remains terrifying--not because it's the local network block, but because the killer is still on IPv4.
This is a take on the classic scary story "The killer was inside the house" or "The call is coming from inside the house". If their IP address is 192.168.xxx.xxx that means they are on your local network since that is the default IP addresses given out by DHCP on a home local network.
The image text references the change over from IPv4 which is IP addresses 192.168.xxx.xxx to IPv6 which look like this: 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf
Trade Expert
by Jeff
Image text: I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.
This programmer sneaks on to the news show to tell the newscaster the different between backslash and forward slash. In a web address it is forward slash (or just simply "slash"). In a Windows folder structure, backslash is used.
A good way to tell the difference is the top of the slash. If the top is forward of the bottom, it is a forward slash. If the top is backwards from the bottom, it is a backwards slash.
Easy right?
In the image text, URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier.