Stupidity

Stupidity

by Mike Masnick




Fake Al-Qaida Messages Cause Real Heartaches

from the people-will-do-anything dept

LittleW0lf writes "Wired News has an article about a series of fake usenet postings supposidly from Al-Qaida instructing their minnions on the next series of attacks to be performed. They looked like they were sent from a programmer in England who is responsible for deleting thousands of SPAM messages on usenet, and according to the article, the motivations for using his name to push out these was for revenge for his anti-SPAM activities. How anyone would believe these were real is beyond me, but according to the article, the fake postings did cause quite a stir. After all, if Al-Qaida is going to put out messages, they aren't going to be public about their activities, especially when law enforcement is listening. I suspect with the current public mania about "terrorists", this isn't going to be the last time we see an article about this."

1 Comments | Leave a Comment..

 
 

Reader Comments

(Flattened / Threaded)

    Dec 6th, 2002 @ 7:35am
  • hehehe...

    by dorpus

    Reminds me of the time back in 1994 when I posted a fake news article about "Hydrogen beer invented in Japan", and it made it to the New York Times, Boston Globe, and beer trade journals.

    I also posted a fake news article about Japan testing a nuclear bomb in the South Pacific, and Greenpeace took it seriously. AP contacted me and told me to stop, so I did.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now.
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML
Save me a cookie
  • Plain Text: A CRLF will be replaced by break <br> tag, all other allowable HTML is intact
  • HTML: No formatting of any kind is done without explicitly being written in
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <p> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>
Close
Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now.
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Plain Text HTML Save me a cookie

Search Techdirt
And now, a word from our Sponsors..



Subscribe to Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Techdirt's Daily Email Newsletter

Related Stories
Close
E-mail It