Cyber-Knowledge.net Computer related blog

66,000 Bloggers Are Retarded

Around five days ago a satirical writer wrote an entry on his website saying the Zune's DRM and wifi was hacked. Anyone with any sense of humor could clearly see the post was a complete joke. From their writing they claim the RIAA is going to take legal action. Now normally two major legal players wouldn't try and take each other on, hours after hearing unconfirmed rumors.

"Microsoft is very concerned about the possible security breach and the RIAA is threatening to sue Microsoft over the faulty DRM standard."

The second clue for this being a totally unreliable source is their domain name, "unconfirmedsources.com". I fail to see how anyone would consider that a reputable source. And lastly, the site blatantly says the writing was satire, and fake.

"Unconfirmed Sources political satire and news story parodies as represented above are written as satire or parody. They are, of course, fictitious."

And yet, with those three obvious signs pointing towards this article being a complete fake, there are 66,000 results on Google for the query "Swedish Teen Hacks Microsoft Zune". Even well known sites such as hackinthebox.org with a page rank of 7 picked up on this fake news. Social book marking sites such as Digg had a field day with this with over 1500 Diggs. Granted, that's user generated content, but it took around 38 comments before someone figured it out.

How could so many people have fallen for such a blatant lie? Do bloggers even read from the sites they post about, or anxiously write down the story?

According to a poll I took early this year, 17% (755 people) of Diggers will Digg the story based on the title, even before reading. Another 7% (297 people) Digg it to bookmark it for later. This might be the cause for the rampant inaccuracies in stories. Whatever the reason, it's pretty sad 66,000 people were fooled into believing such a blatant lie.