Owner of Japanese "Diggbot" supposedly arrested

Gentlemen, commence processing this in your WTF file.

According to this video, the owner of a robot arm programmed to Digg 3,000 stories every two days has been arrested in Nagasaki, Japan. If we're to believe the monotone, robotically-speaking narrator, the arm could supposedly reload the Digg website every five minutes and would even shut down the system if a mobile number was called three times.

My first inclination was just to type "FAKE" followed by "DUH" with a typographical trail of H's extending far into the Internet's horizon. I mean, why would anyone program a mechanical robot to do the same job that pure software could accomplish far more easily? What possible crime could Nagasaki police have charged the owner with? Why hasn't anyone in gadget blogging ever heard of the lofty institution "Techno News?" Why is their announcer filming out of his mom's sewing room? And aren't there already robotic, indiscriminate flesh constructions that do the same thing as this so-called Diggbot? In the industry, we call them "Digg Zombies." Their exploitation is how we get our quarterly bonuses. They work for free. We hug them so much.

Self-evidently a scam, then. But a lot of people are buying this one. People who know Japan. Pink Tentacle seems to have bought it, and my beautiful, utterly charming ex-colleague Lisa Katayama also seems to think it is legit. Both of these guys are experts in the study of Japanese weirdness, and neither of their posts contains a trace of irony or bemusement. They're convinced.

So what do you think, besides an initial ejaculatory "lolwut?" Fake? Real? Let me answer for you: of course it's fake. It even says "For Entertainment Only" at the end! The real story here is that Japan has become so marvelously surreal that even people who study its culture for a living can't tell fever dream from reality anymore. And really, who can blame them?

[#1 posted by Rob Beschizza , July 3, 2008 9:46 AM]

We should make it so that when you float the mouse over the Digg button in this post, the pointer becomes a robot hand

[#2 posted by chesh , July 3, 2008 10:05 AM]

I dugg this with my robot arm.

[#3 posted by mdixon , July 3, 2008 10:17 AM]

Very fake, but very funny. It kind of reminds me of the Infinite Solutions videos.

[#4 posted by Anonymous , July 3, 2008 10:32 AM]

i am so out of it I read it as "a robot arm programmed to DIG 3,000 stories every two days," as in, into the ground. It took a while to understand the next paragraph

[#5 posted by raybot , July 3, 2008 12:40 PM]

its so fake. also, people who "study" japanese culture are funny to me. they get paid to do that... ive been doing it my whole life. anyway

GET OF TF2 TONIGHT!!!

[#6 posted by nexisnet , July 4, 2008 9:34 AM]

Aside from the fact that the video is obviously a joke, the robot arm in the video is an OWI 007 Robotic Arm Trainer with other bits hot-glued on.

The arm is a great toy, but it is open-loop controlled with no position feedback (i.e. you press a switch and a joint bends, but there is no "return to home position" type control). It doesn't look like any feedback sensors were hacked onto it, and while the video suggests the arm is doing some sort of visual servoing with feedback from the camera, that one camera wouldn't give you depth perception. During the key-strike motions, the camera isn't even pointed at the keys anyway.

So yeah, totally fake. It looks like someone took apart a printer and a web-cam, hot-glued the various bits to a toy robot arm, and is controlling it manually from off screen. Hilarious! And the fact that so many people are buying it just makes it funnier!

[#7 posted by Anonymous , July 7, 2008 2:44 PM]

Even if it IS fake, strange things like that do happen. I used to have a WoW guildmate who made a pvp bot so he could farm honor without going afk. It consisted of a desk fan, a dowel rod and a plastic spoon..