It is a hoax, Wired reported Thursday -- an article that looks like a story on Wired.com and that claims Apple CEO Steve Jobs has had a heart attack.
"A widely-circulated URL which points to an image that purports to be a wired.com story about Steve Jobs health is a hack job," Wired.com said. "We won't provide the URL here but the Twitterverse quickly surmised that the item was not correct." It appears to have first been reported by Mashable.
Someone created a legitimate-looking Web page using Wired's public upload image viewer, which generates a page containing an image under a Wired logo banner, Wired.com said. The hole has been patched, the news site added.
While characteristics of the fake post--such as the Wired logo, byline, and accompanying related stories list--make it look legitimate, the post is plagued with misspellings and grammatical problems.
Rumors about Job's health have been a big deal for the last 12 months, including a fake news item in October about Jobs purportedly having a heart attack. That allegation was reported on CNN's iReport citizen journalism site and led to a drop in the price of Apple stock.
Jobs, who had surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, announced this month that he will take a medical leave of absence to treat a hormone imbalance.
Mashable got a screen shot of the fake Wired.com page with the Steve Jobs hoax report.
(Credit: Mashable)
Wired is being sued for posting a video on how to get Mac OS X on an MSI Wind, shown here.
(Credit: CNET)Update at 11:30 a.m.: It seems that Chen did not understand exactly what happened regarding his article. Updates throughout.
Wired has confirmed that Apple contacted the publisher about a blog post with step-by-step instructions on how to get Mac OS X running on a non-Apple Netbook and decided to remove the offending video.
Earlier in the day, Brian Chen, who writes for Wired's Gadget Lab blog, posted a message to Twitter spotted by Gizmodo saying "just found out Apple is suing Wired for my video tutorial on hacking Netbooks to run Mac OS X."
It turns out, however, that Apple merely contacted the Conde Nast division regarding the post in question, and after reviewing the post, Wired decided to remove the video from its site, a company representative confirmed. Chen updated his Twitter feed to that effect shortly after we contacted Wired.
The video no longer appears on Wired's site. The original article with step-by-step instructions on how to circumvent Apple's restrictions on where Mac OS X can be installed is still up as of this moment, and Wired is currently reviewing it but plans to leave it up for now, the representative said.
Apple has appeared to gently tolerate the "Hackintosh" community that sprung up after the company decided to adopt Intel's x86 processors for the Mac, so long as the project didn't advance much beyond science fair mode. But it has shown a clear interest in protecting its licensing agreements for Mac OS X this year, through its legal battle against Psystar, a clone maker selling generic desktop PCs with Mac OS X preinstalled.
In its article, Wired admitted that the practice is illegal, requiring the installation of hacked software, linking to well-known torrent site The Pirate Bay to provide a source for the software. It also offered the following disclaimer: "Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple's End User License Agreement for Mac OS X. Please ensure you own a copy of Mac OS X Leopard, if you wish to follow the procedure."
An Apple representative declined to comment on the situation. Evan Hansen, editor-in-chief of Wired.com, did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.
Updated 12:25pm - Our friends at ZDNet were able to get a hold of Hansen, who had the following to say. "We made a determination that the video...we're more comfortable taking down the video." Hansen also told ZDNet that Wired tries "to default to the most conservative position we can in terms of removing content ... but we don't want to pull content (needlessly)."
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