A fake report on CNN's iReport site alleged that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been found dead.
(Credit: iReport, screengrab from Business Insider)Reports began to surface Sunday charging that AT&T had blocked broadband access to parts of the notorious (and powerful) Internet forum site 4chan, which the telecom company confirmed on Monday. Late in the evening, a fake story surfaced on CNN's iReport citizen journalism site alleging that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson had been "found dead in his multimillion dollar beachfront mansion" after a cocaine overdose.
Suffice it to say that the two events are likely connected. Access to 4chan has since been restored for AT&T broadband customers.
For those who stepped in late: 4chan is sort of like the Internet's equivalent of a league of pirates, den of thieves, or whatever other sort of anarchic analogy you prefer. Decentralized and relying on anonymity, the participants issue large-scale pranks both online and offline, from teaming up with video site eBaumsWorld to launch the "Porn Day" campaign on YouTube to spamming Twitter's trending topics.
The fake iReport disappeared from CNN quickly, perhaps because it read that Stephenson was found "delirious" when "a friend called 911 after a night of what he called, 'male dancers everywhere and the best blow west of the Mississippi.'"
Last October, iReport was the victim of a prank in which a more believable user-submitted story reported that Apple CEO Steve Jobs--who has a well-publicized history of health problems--had suffered a heart attack. It wasn't true, but it was online long enough that Apple's stock took a dip.
AT&T spokesman Michael Coe told CNET News in an e-mailed statement that a denial-of-service attack was what stemmed the temporary block of 4chan traffic and that it has since been restored. "Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org," Coe wrote. "To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic."
"Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question," the AT&T statement continued. "We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers."
This post was updated at 9:25 a.m. PT.
April Fools' Day has hit the Internet and, as usual, there's no shortage of fake news stories, gag product announcements, and corny jokes. Some are funny. Some are sort of lame attempts at being funny. Here are some of the ones we think are worth highlighting, and we'll be updating this throughout the day as we catch wind of more.
None of these links are Rickrolls. I promise. That is so 2008.
- A couple of blogs (including reputable tech stalwart Engadget) were legitimately punked by an early hoax: the "Hotelicopter," which claimed to be the world's first flying hotel--converted from an old Soviet military helicopter.
- Security blog TechJaws announced that Microsoft had finally acquired Yahoo. Um--yawn.
- One of the best April Fools' jokes this year comes from The Washington Post, with fake exploits of the much-hyped Conficker worm rolled up into what appeared at first to be a straight news story.
- Google, known for its April Fools pranks, pulled an odd one this year with the introduction of a fake artificial intelligence research project called CADIE. Naturally, CADIE is a disaster: the project determines that the best Web design resembles something out of 1997's backwaters. (There's also a mobile "Google Brain Search," a Gmail "autopilot," and a 3D version of its Chrome browser.)
- The Google-owned YouTube played its videos upside down.
- Broadband media blog VideoNuze announced that YouTube and Hulu had merged but were still searching for a new name.
- Amazon Web Services unveiled a new plan for cloud-computing systems hosted on blimps.
- Ice cream company Ben & Jerry's created a fake Web site, Cyclone Dairy, which claims to only sell milk coming from cloned cows. But in a press release, Ben & Jerry's explained that it does hope the prank will raise awareness of the ethical and health issues surrounding cloned livestock.
- Social news site Reddit rebranded itself as "Reddigg," aping the color scheme and layout of its rival Digg.
- The U.K. newspaper The Guardian announced that it was shutting down both its print edition and Web site, turning instead to a Twitter-only format. "Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters," the announcement read.
- Box.net, meanwhile, argued that 140 characters is too long and launched a gag product called Chirper, which promised to shorten tweets to 50 characters for easier consumption. It actually works, but, um, we doubt you want to use it.
- Image-editing company Aviary announced "Crane," the world's first "paper based image editor," which uses a physical "Pencil Tool."
- The makers of the Opera browser announced that they were introducing face-gesture browsing.
- Social-network app company SGN, which owns the cutesy virtual pet app FluffFriends, dressed up its cartoon animals to look like killer mobsters. They still don't look very scary.
- College search site Unigo added a fake college, Cornmouth University, to its directory. Company employees have been Twittering that they spent spring break there.
- An e-book company called Smashwords put out a fake press release announcing that the entire "Harry Potter" series had been self-published on its service by author J.K. Rowling. Self-aggrandizement, anyone?
- Ladies! TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is hunting for a wife and has enlisted a matchmaker! "I understand I don't have much to work with here," she wrote on TechCrunch. "A sedentary 39 year old single man who made questionable career choices and now blogs for a living just doesn't look good on paper...As far as I can tell his diet consists almost entirely of burritos from Chipotle."
- Wikipedia's annual homepage makeover again tweaked its "In the News" and "Did you know..." section to put a fake spin on otherwise real stories. "HBO television network broadcast midgets racing for prizes in a chili bowl" is technically true, but it was actually midget-class race cars in an event known as the Chili Bowl.
(Credit:
Wikipedia)
- Microsoft created a fake trailer for a Guitar Hero-like Xbox 360 game called "Alpine Legend."
- A Digg employee created a fake Web development framework called "PHP on Rails" or "Phails," a pun on Ruby on Rails and PHP. In fact, it's a jab at the terrible marketing banter that's so prevalent in the developer world.
- The people behind the "Shorty Awards" ceremony earlier this year created a spoof page for "Twitter Pro" accounts and enlisted some friends to add "Pro" watermarks on their user pictures.
- Some guy created FreakingHugeURL.com for people who consider themselves too cool for URL shortening services like TinyURL and Bit.ly.
- And in what could turn out to be the biggest joke of all, that Conficker worm has turned out to have more bark than bite so far.
Gmail's "autopilot" filters
(Credit: Google)
Box.net's faux Twitter-stye service randomly cuts out parts of your words.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Opera's "facial gestures"
(Credit: Opera)
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