menudo

Except XKCD wasn't.

The XKCD comic strip makes for a useful and shallow zinger, amid casual banter, but the real world actually faces two or three new layers of complexity, which actually reassert the problem it attempts to dispose of.

1. The global reach of networked telecommunications permits a small quantity of sociopathic murderers to operate from beyond jurisdictions that can reach them, and also assists in destroying evidence of their interference.

2. Computational power enables force multiplication, such that even just one sociopathic murderer could exploit software flaws across millions of vehicles, simultaneously.

3. Some software exploits will work against self driving cars, which could never work against an ordinary person, and of course, vice versa, but not so much via remote control at a distance, when people are the operators, while we still lack electronic interfaces to our central nervous system.

tl;dr - During (on the eve of) the decline of The Soviet Union, a trustworthy news magazine program on state-sponsored television, hosts a performance artist for a segment of his choosing, in which he spouts absurdities and nonsense. During the segment, the performance artist deadpans details of Lenin consuming psychedelic mushrooms in quantities which ultimately transform Lenin (somehow). Everybody laughs.

Not exactly a hoax, but more a wink and a nod at the bastardization of the media apparatus of a totalitarian state that is soon to be replaced, and thus no longer requires donning the pomp and circumstance of official government communications.

Is it me, or are there 3:42 (three minutes, forty two seconds) of silence at the start of the video?