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The Web Controlled Christmas Light Hoax
from the amusing... dept
A few weeks ago, when we had our story about Christmas lights causing problems with broadband connections, apparently Alek Komarnitsky stopped by here at Techdirt to tell everyone in the comments that he had set up his 17,000 Christmas lights so they could be turned on and off via the web. I had forgotten about this until earlier this morning when a friend instant messaged me to tell me he's become addicted to the site and had been turning the lights on and off regularly. Well, it turns out my friend was taken in by a practical joke. The lights were real but the web-cam and web-based control were a hoax that's now getting a bit of press attention. What's interesting, though, is that from the details it sounds like the hoax was more technically complicated than actually setting up a system to really do what he claimed it would do. Still, it's somewhat amazing that no one figured it out until now.
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Disaster Hoaxes
Do you think this guy is posing for the cameras? The girl doesn't look like a local. Maybe the girl is not even dead?
I wonder how many hoaxes and scams are happening in that part of the world as we speak? It is a poorer part of the world, after all, which means that people will stoop lower to make a buck.
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No Subject Given
Few things are more irritating than hoaxes such as this. I don't see anything clever, funny or even mildly interesting about betraying people's trust and fooling the public.
I've always had the same reaction to those old e-mail hoaxes that used to litter our inboxes. I never understood the motivation behind them. Spreading false information for the sake of simply spreading false information serves no one, and in fact can cause harm.
This Christmas lights guy didn't hurt anybody, unless you count wasting hours of others' time as harm. But his ploy certainly qualifies him as an ass of the lowest degree. (Not to mention ... a liar.) There's nothing amusing about making the world spin a little less efficiently.
What a jerk.
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Christmas lights hoax
He's been at this for three seasons now and still hasn't figured out how to actually program the lights to do what he said they did. Instead, he resorted to trickery and untruths. Not much of a programmer, if you ask me. His 15 minutes are up.
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Re: Christmas lights hoax
Interesting that he's been so caught up in all this that he hasn't seen fit to even acknowledge or mention the nearly 100,000 deaths from the Tsunami. I guess he lives in his own little ego-inflated bubble.
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Wasted time
Would any LESS time have been wasted if the lights
were actually controlled by a web page?
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