top | item 1169969

Jon Stewart: ChatRoulette

171 points| initself | 16 years ago |thedailyshow.com | reply

65 comments

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[+] Locke1689|16 years ago|reply
"ChatRoulette is like regular roulette, but five of the chambers are filled with cock."

Strangely profound statement. As always, he does a magnificent job of making the mainstream media look like morons.

[+] dotBen|16 years ago|reply
Not wanting to be a pedant, but I think the exact quote is "ChatRoulette is like Russian roulette, but five of the chambers are filled with cock."

Regular roulette doesn't involve a gun and chambers... unless you run up gambling debts to shady people, I guess.

[+] jimbokun|16 years ago|reply
I think you should give a little bit of credit to a representative sample of the mainstream media for playing along.
[+] nazgulnarsil|16 years ago|reply
"we're slipping guys. we're bleeding viewers. people just don't care about the news anymore. we need something that grabs people. steve, who's our main demographic these days?"

"uh...well according to nielsen it looks like...scared old people."

"I have an idea."

[+] icco|16 years ago|reply
What amazes me about this short is not that they satirically covered the news, but the amount of clips and actual people they were able to put together to make the segment really work.
[+] dimarco|16 years ago|reply
Jon & the Daily Show crew have a satirical way of covering certain topics without actually covering them, which I appreciate.

It's the same reason that most of my news comes from the Daily Show and news.bbc.co.uk

[+] handelaar|16 years ago|reply
Friends don't send friends links to geo-locked video clips.
[+] ugh|16 years ago|reply
Geo-locked? That’s strange. Where? I can watch here in Germany. Despite having to endure ads which are in no way relevant for me.

I thought only Hulu was geo-locked. People might simply not know that something is geo-locked if it’s only unavailable in a few places. The sites (regrettably) don’t come with a warning.

[+] nollidge|16 years ago|reply
It's by-definition kind of hard to know when something is geo-locked if you can see it just fine.
[+] fbu|16 years ago|reply
Available in Belgium. Where are you ?
[+] GrandMasterBirt|16 years ago|reply
Unless its to tell their friends "lol ur f0x0red"!

Nah, ok lets get a thread going on proxy mechanisms to help handelaar open up this website.

[+] naqeeb|16 years ago|reply
Sadly, you think the Mainstream Media would realize that viewers are not as afraid of the internets as they were back in the 90s. There is a reason why more people watch the Daily Show for their news these days.

On a side note, I would have loved a cameo appearance from Chris Hansen and the To Catch A Predator crew.

[+] harshpotatoes|16 years ago|reply
I was waiting for Chris to pop out.

"Sit down. Have a seat, Jon. So what are you doing here?"

[+] borga|16 years ago|reply
It's Jon. Sorry.
[+] simplegeek|16 years ago|reply
I'm not sure why you're sorry? Yes, I'm not American so may be there is something that I don't know? Just plain curious ;)
[+] morphir|16 years ago|reply
Linus Torvalds called the bsd-people for a bunch 'masturbating monkeys' and the digg-crowd for a bunch of 'wanking walruses'. I wonder if there was a more appropriate term for chatroulettes users..

But lets be honest guys - we all thought "err.. why did I not think of that".

[+] cookiecaper|16 years ago|reply
I don't know wtf is wrong with these newspeople. Not that many people know about ChatRoulette -- for instance, no one in my family knows about it, and with all the time I spend online on sites like this, I've only heard it mentioned a few times.

But when you get on TV to "warn parents" about this "frightening new trend" of seeing penises, you tell a lot of "normal" people about it and only make things worse.

The mainstream media is desperate to look like they know what's happening with kids and the internet, but they really just constantly misreport and their own reporting skews numbers. See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter.

[+] dpcan|16 years ago|reply
How does getting more "normal" people on ChatRoulette make it worse?

This is just what it needs.

[+] dotBen|16 years ago|reply
um, are you aware that Daily Show is satire and not really 'newspeople'. Just saying.

"See also the ridiculous obsession with Twitter."

<sigh>

[+] MrHyde|16 years ago|reply
The mainstream media does not understand the internet? Incomprehensible!
[+] groaner|16 years ago|reply
On the contrary, I think they understand exactly what this site is about and are happy to demonize it, possibly to the extent that they can get the powers that be to introduce restrictions on online video so that we can all go back to getting our spoon-fed media.
[+] swombat|16 years ago|reply
So how can I watch this in the UK?
[+] buro9|16 years ago|reply
Rent the cheapest linode possible out in New Jersey and then set up a proxy to effectively tunnel the traffic.
[+] petercooper|16 years ago|reply

  ssh -D 8080 -C -N your-non-UK-based-ssh-server-name
Then use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS proxy from a spare Web browser (Firefox is particularly easy for this).

Or get a cheap VPN account. Lots of providers. I pay $5 a month for this (mostly because my ISP frequently blocks access to Google). Hit connect, watch video, hit disconnect.. bob's your uncle, etc.

[+] srogers|16 years ago|reply
Probably the same way I watch Guardian football highlights.
[+] Dbug|16 years ago|reply
The show is also on the well known torrent sites
[+] freshfunk|16 years ago|reply
ROFL love his joke on how it's russian roulette with 5
[+] abstractbill|16 years ago|reply
Interesting, looks like whatever you typed after the "5" tickled a HN bug - there's an unclosed <i> tag that causes the reply link on your comment to be rendered in italics.
[+] sutro|16 years ago|reply
You're not allowed to submit links like this to HN, because HN is too serious and important for humor. Cue the censorious "we're becoming just like reddit" comments...
[+] sutro|16 years ago|reply
Thanks folks, I'm trying to get to 0, -4 at a time. I'm here all week.