The Social

(Credit: Topherchris.com)

Some nasty pranksters, likely associated with Web forum 4Chan, have hacked into Apple gossip mainstay MacRumors' live-blog coverage of Tuesday's Macworld keynote. Hosted on a separate domain, MacRumorsLive.com, the site was plagued by offensive messages about Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health and general inanity (i.e. "SEX ME") before finally succumbing to "technical difficulties."

It remains uncertain whether the pranksters actually brought down the site, or whether MacRumors voluntarily took it down to keep things under control.

It's pretty clear, however, that this was the work of 4Chan, which has gained both respect and notoriety (depending on who you ask) over the past year for its persistent protests against the controversial Scientology sect in the form of an offshoot group called "Anonymous."

Over on 4Chan's labyrinthine forums, a couple of threads (warning: contains explicit language) hint at members' collusion to take down MacRumors Live, and the hacked live blog was peppered with declarations of "4CHAN FTW" (that's "for the win," for those who stepped in late).

This year's Macworld Expo has gained particular attention because Apple has announced that it's the last in which it will have a presence. Additionally, iconic CEO Steve Jobs bowed out of the keynote presentation. took his place.

The 4Chan skulduggery appears to have first been noticed by Twitter users and independent blogs like Topherchris.com, which took the screenshot above.

One Twitter user pointed to rumors on social-news site Digg that 4Chan members had been circulating MacRumors passwords on Monday night.

It's a silly prank, yes. But it could have a big impact on MacRumors: this is likely the site's biggest day of the year, and the event could have an impact on both ad revenues and server costs.

UPDATE: It's not totally clear who's actually responsible for this attack. We've been getting a handful of e-mails indicating that it may have been a non-4chan group called Myg0t that was using the 4chan forums to organize, and another e-mail claimed credit on behalf of another forum community, Ebaumsworld. Indeed, screenshots show that one of the hacker messages read, "We are from Ebaumsworld. We are hackers on steroids."

Honestly? The world may never know.

This post was updated at 2:13 p.m. PT.

The biggest hit on YouTube this week might not even be a video.

A couple of radio DJs from Montreal--Marc-Antoine Audette and Sebastien Trudel, who are known as the "Masked Avengers"--managed to get in a phone call to U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, claiming to be French president Nicolas Sarkozy. They then posted an audio clip of the five-minute stunt to video hub YouTube--and according to just about every major news outlet, this appears to be legitimate.

Does anything scandalous get said? Not really. Palin sticks to her usual talking points, but doesn't seem to pick up on the fact that "Sarkozy" comes across as quite the buffoon, even when he implies that a recent adult film depicting a Palin lookalike was a "documentary" and when he says (in French) that he would love to go hunting for baby seals with her.

The "Masked Avengers" have pranked heads of state before, including Sarkozy himself. But given all the fever about Tuesday's hotly contested election, in which Palin may or may not be elected as the country's first female vice president, this could be their biggest contribution to the history books of hilarious and head-slapping media hoaxes.

It'd be in good company: it comes almost exactly 70 years to the day after the legitimately freaky War of the Worlds radio stunt.

(Credit: Wikipedia)

Wikipedia might not take too kindly to pranks any other day of the year, but the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia sure had some fun with April Fools' Day.

The site revamped its "On This Day" section with events that actually did happen on April 1, but with the wording cleverly tweaked to make them sound ridiculous. "(In 1969) The British-born model Hawker Siddeley Harrier was introduced at a Royal Air Force event, becoming the only one in the 1960s to successfully perform on a short runway," Wikipedia's front page read. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier is actually an airplane, not a vintage Derek Zoolander.

Another one: in 1970, "the first of over 670,000 gremlins was released into North America." That is, of course, referring to the AMC Gremlin, a subcompact car.

(Credit: Wikipedia)

Wikipedia also April Fool-ified its featured article of the day, the biography of "Ima Hogg." Typically, a few paragraphs of the featured article are displayed on the front page. "Raised in government housing, young Ima frolicked among a backyard menagerie of raccoons, possums, and a bear," the fanciful Wikipedia front page read. "Her father, 'Big Jim' Hogg, in an onslaught against fun itself, booby-trapped the banisters she loved to slide down, shut down her money-making schemes, and forced her to pry chewing gum from furniture. He was later thrown from his seat on a moving train and perished; the Hogg clan then struck black gold on land Big Jim had forbidden them from selling."

The Beverly Hillbillies-esque teaser is fake, but clicking on the "article of the day" link does go to the Wikipedia article for the real Ima Hogg, who managed to get past her embarrassing name to become a prominent Houston-based philanthropist and patron of the arts in the first half of the 20th century.

Whoever wrote the fake Ima Hogg bio might want to think about pursuing a career in screenwriting. It sounds more amusing than any of the movies I've seen recently...

'Custom Time' in action. Darn, I wish I'd had this when I forgot to ask my boss for some days off.

(Credit: Google)

Happy April Fools' Day!

As expected, Google's Gmail rolled out a fake "custom time" feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again. The new feature "utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality," Google wrote.

"I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the 'first' to respond to a co-worker's 'first-come, first-serve' email," a fake testimonial on the Custom Time site read. "Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I'm denying it."

April Fools' Day is something that the Gmail folks take very seriously--the product's real beta launch was, in fact, on April 1, 2004.

What, where's Bono and Project Red?

But the April Fools' Day shenanigans at Mountain View went well beyond Gmail. Google's home page provided a link to "Virgle," a faux collaboration on an "open-source" Mars expedition between the prank-friendly dot-com and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. "Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B," the site explained. "So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars."

The information about "Project Virgle" was accompanied by an application for interested "pioneers" and a video starring Page and Brin in which they look like they're having a lot of trouble keeping straight faces.

Other Google divisions joined in the April Fool's Day fun, too. The links to featured videos on YouTube's home page all directed to the music video for Rick Astley's 1987 pop song "Never Gonna Give You Up," which became a geek-culture phenomenon over the past year as the "Rickrolling" prank.

Google Calendar, meanwhile, offered users a "Free Wake Up Kit" to help users get out of bed in the morning.

"The 'wake up' notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used," the fake announcement from Google read. "The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters."

An 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button on Google Calendar schedules random dates.

(Credit: Google)

Google Calendar also added one of Google's famous "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons to its scheduling tool, creating random events on calendars that inevitably involved dates with celebrities. (Except I didn't really feel lucky. I was only offered "dates" with Tom Cruise, George W. Bush, and South Park's Eric Cartman. None of them are really my type.)

Last year, Google had to deal with "no, it's not a joke" rhetoric when a live snake escaped in the company's New York office on April Fools' Day and representatives had to ensure both employees and the press that there were no hijinks in place.

This post was updated at 9:19 AM PT on Thursday to reflect the correction issued by the New York Times.

Wow, we all fell for this one.

An NBC affiliate in Spokane, Wash., reported Tuesday that one of the Web's most popular viral videos of late was a fabrication, in a prank that fooled the national news media and plenty of YouTube loyalists.

The video, called "College Basketball Game Gets Rick Roll'd," purports to show a timeout in a women's basketball game between Eastern Washington University and Montana State University interrupted by a performance of the '80s pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley. The 1987 tune has become the subject of an online phenomenon called "rickrolling," in which a Web user is tricked into clicking on the link to the song's music video. Real-life rickrolling--randomly playing the song as a means of surprise or disruption--has turned into a popular offshoot among pranksters.

The basketball game video is hilarious. But it's not real.

The New York Times ran a story about the video earlier this week, and creator Pawl Fisher seemed to indicate to Times reporter Evelyn Nussenbaum that the video was authentic. But he backpedaled after the NBC affiliate KHQ-TV contacted a number of people affiliated with the university who seemed to indicate that no such prank had gone on, and it seems like his claims of authenticity to the Times were really just another layer of pranking.

Here's what appears to have happened: A guy dressed up as Rick Astley, identified by the Times as Davin Perry, really did run around the EWU basketball arena, lip-syncing to the song. But the bizarre interlude did not actually disrupt a timeout in a game, according to EWU representatives quoted in the KHQ-TV story. Video of people dancing to the music, as well as game footage, came from several other EWU games. Learning the truth was, to say the least, an epic disappointment.

The Times issued a correction to its story on Thursday: "The stunt, which involves a person lip-synching the 1980s hit song 'Never Gonna Give You Up' while dressed as the British singer Rick Astley, was performed before the start of four separate basketball games, and the pranksters distilled the performances into a YouTube video," the explanation read. "The March 8 game, between Eastern Washington and Montana State, was not interrupted by a performance."

On the bright side, the media attention was likely what triggered Astley, now 42, to break the silence about his revived popularity and give the Los Angeles Times an interview.

Surprisingly, the video's popularity was not accompanied by the usual level of scrutiny and skepticism that many "too good to be true" YouTube clips are subject to. Perhaps it's a sign of how online video is no longer an unfamiliar new medium that inherently draws suspicion.

Or maybe it was just a giant Rickroll.

Two decades ago this week--on March 12, 1988--the corny pop song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

What does this have to do with the Internet? Oh, just about everything.

For those of you who actually have lives and don't pay attention to the latest iteration of goofy Internet phenomena (think "all your base are belong to us," "the Internet is a series of tubes," or lolcats), Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the Web equivalent of the old, "Is your refrigerator running?" prank call.

The gag known as "Rickrolling" consists of sending someone a link that purports to be something good, only to have it direct that person to the cheesy video for the '80s pop song.

If it sounds pointless and stupid, that's because it is. The practice is believed to have started in the 4chan (warning: content may not be safe for work) online forums, the same den of virtual infamy that allegedly brought forth lolcats as well as a good portion of the anti-Scientology hacker activity that went on earlier this year.

On Wednesday, avid members of the Digg community celebrated the song's 20th anniversary of hitting the top spot on Billboard with an extensive comment thread of the song's cringeworthy lyrics.

But there are far simpler ways to celebrate. Just go ahead and trick someone into watching that video. Everyone's pumped about the presence of the Speed Racer and Incredible Hulk trailers on the Web--use that to your advantage!

It goes without saying that in addition to a stellar reputation for academic innovation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is renowned for its geeky pranks. The best-known of these was perhaps the time when students decorated the campus' Great Dome to look like Star Wars robot R2D2 in celebration of the legendary film series' first prequel in 1999.

But Star Wars prequels are so last decade. These days, it's all about the much-hyped Xbox 360 title Halo 3. And why prank your own campus when you can pull a fast one on those snotty Crimsons next door?

Consequently, MIT pranksters headed over to the neighboring campus of Harvard University and decorated Harvard Yard's legendary statue of founder John Harvard to look like a Spartan warrior. Enough said.

Click here to see the end result.

A caption in the MIT student newspaper, The Tech, explained the full prank: "The back of the helmet, which is worn by the protagonist of the game, Master Chief, was labeled with 'Master Chief in Training.' The statue was decorated with an assault rifle (bullet count of 2E), as well as a Beaver emblem on the right shoulder." (In case you didn't know, MIT's mascot is the beaver.)

Oh, Boston. What do they put in your water, anyway?

He wants to beat you to a bloody pulp.

(Credit: NBC)

This post has been corrected to provide the correct URL for Red Line Films.

If you thought Kid Nation was pushing the envelope, wait till you hear about this one. Production company Redline Films has just announced that you can now audition for its latest creative masterpiece, Office Fight. It's exactly what you think it is: it'll take co-workers who don't like each other and make them go face-to-face in a boxing ring.

Do you find this as supremely awesome as I do? Of course! To make it even awesomer, getting involved with Office Fight is easy and you can totally be part of it too! Just e-mail Redline, tell them who you want to pummel and why ("Jason smells like rotten cheese," or "Sean totally meant to let his pet python loose in my cube," or the serious stuff, like "Andrew cheated me out of a promotion and then ran off with my wife"), and if you have a valid claim, you're in like Flint.

The production company will then come to your office to shoot some spicy B-roll of how much you and what's-his-name hate each other, and then they'll train you for two weeks. Then you fight. If there's enough space in your office, they'll set it up right there, but otherwise, they'll hold the event in a local gym. The judges, fittingly, will be your other co-workers, and you'll have to wager bets in which the currency is pure unadulterated shame. ("If you lose, you have to wear a chicken suit to the office for the next week.")

Declan, you're on.

(Via Thrillist)