September 27, 2001 – 12:00 am
Phil Agre collected hundreds of URLs related to the WTC/Pentagon attacks. All the URLs are now archived in one place.
More like this: censorship, charity, conservatives, cryptography, disasters, economics, environment, health, history, hoaxes, politics, privacy, progressives, pundits, religion, sources, statistics, the-americas, transportation, us-government, web-logs
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Posted under culture, media, writing
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“Keith S. of Teaneck, NJ ignored this letter. He was eaten by Wombats. Mary L. of Oregon, WI forwarded this letter to ten friends and won the Powerball jackpot, but was assaulted by her angry, former friends who fed her to rabid stoats in Stevens Point.”
CSICOP, those joyful debunkers of hokum, run a site full [...]
February 6, 2001 – 12:00 am
First Monday has a report on the effectiveness of recruiting over the Internet by hate groups. The good news is that most hate groups don’t appear to be targeting children. The bad news is the groups are seeding search engines with pointers to misinformation, and creating legitimate-looking sites that libel Black leaders such as MLK, [...]
Advogato yanks everyone’s chain with an April Fools hoax about an infringement lawsuit filed against them by Slashdot’s parent Andover.net. This one had people going because as in all April Fools gags, it played off the shared concern that greed may kill open source projects.
March 18, 2000 – 12:00 am
“Rent” the musical has a huge following of fans. It’s a rock’n’roll version of “La Boheme” with HIV instead of ‘consumption.’ The desire by some fans to identify with the characters in the show, some of whom are dying, lead one to construct a lie where she has a fatal disease. She leverages it to [...]
November 29, 1999 – 12:00 am
[ via Nettime-l ] Updated In the classical (MIT) sense of a hack, some person or persons intercepted copies of one of Seattle’s newspapers and wrapped the front page with a false front with stories such as: “Monsanto patents food chain.” Bird On a Wire has a scan of the cover.
October 12, 1999 – 12:00 am
A group of researchers have put the final kibbosh on the alleged Torah codes. The so-called codes are sensitive to initial conditions. For example, the debunkers were able to locate within another text, War and Peace, the names of important rabbis using accepted spellings that differed from those in the list the original claimants were [...]
September 27, 1999 – 12:00 am
From the Slashdot coverage of the Jesux Hoax comes this tale of what happens when you wear a BSD t-shirt–with its cute little demon–in the Bible Belt.
September 27, 1999 – 12:00 am
You’ve heard the story: engineers testing an airliner’s windows wonder why the chickens shot to simulate bird impacts keep breaking the windows. Chickens are used for this purpose, but the business about not thawing them was probably an engineers’ in-joke transformed into an urban legend.
August 31, 1999 – 12:00 am
[ via Silent-Tristero ] How chain letters mutate.
“Subtle methods that increase replication include: (1) the use of ambiguity, for example on whether simply passing on the letter will avert bad luck, (2) text transferred from foreign letters, that may cause an ethnic minority to identify the letter as its own, and (3) testimonials that exploit [...]
Now the W3C is doing April Fools’ pranks.
“This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited, provided the following instructions are followed. On a blank sheet of paper, write ‘I want to set an Internet Standard.’ along with your [...]
More like this: hoaxes
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Posted under Uncategorized
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Bare Bones Software provides some entertaining 4/1 psudoscientific babble:
“We determined that the dye used to give lime iMacs their distinctive tint also had the effect of blocking ultraviolet radiation and low-energy gamma rays — just like running a green magic marker around the edge of your CDs. The remaining ionizing radiation that made it into [...]
March 31, 1999 – 12:00 am
I rarely have sympathy for big, faceless companies, but you have to feel sorry for Proctor and Gamble. First the Amway crowd circulates rumors that P&G are Satanic. Then someone claimed a cleaning product contains Agent Orange. Now there’s a rumor circulating that claims their new fabric deodorizer kills pets. Fortunately, that’s what Urban Legend [...]
More like this: health, hoaxes
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Posted under Uncategorized
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February 4, 1999 – 12:00 am
Don’t make fun of Candians.
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More like this: comics, hoaxes
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Posted under Uncategorized
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December 20, 1998 – 12:00 am
If the Legend of the Rocket Car survives, my great-grandchildren will probably end up talking about a guy from Lunartown who nailed an anti-matter pod onto an old Apollo moon-rover and flew into the side of Tycho Crater.
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