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The Hoax Museum Blog
Examining dubious claims and mischief of all kinds.
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Google has announced a new email service called Gmail, that will give each user one gigabyte of free storage. Strangely, the press release is dated April 1, leading many to speculate that it's an April Fool's Day joke. Maybe it is, but if so it would seem a very odd one. Usually April Fool's Day jokes involve a certain minimum level of wit, and you should feel foolish for believing them once you find out they're a joke. But if someone were to tell me that Gmail is a joke, I wouldn't feel foolish. I'd just feel like Google had lied. There is some goofy language in the press release, but otherwise it just doesn't seem over-the-top enough to be a joke. But time will tell.
There have been tales going around recently of iPod owners being targeted by muggers who then demand their iPods. For instance, there's this recent story of an iPod mugging in the British West Midlands, as well as a story from a month ago. Apparently it's the white color of the headphones that are making the owners prominent targets. About which an Apple representative reportedly said, "There are guys who�d rather be robbed than change the colour of the headphones." Now Engadget is casting some doubt on these stories. According to their source, the iPod muggings are a hoax.
I just heard about this early April Fool's Day fumble on the part of the BBC. As the Times of London reports: "Declan Curry, the intrepid television hack, broke the embargo on a fascinating British Waterways study that revealed that ducks living on canals weigh, on average, about a pound more than those living on rivers. The slow-moving canal water, so the story went, provides less opportunity for the ducks to swim and as a result they piled on the pounds. Mr Curry and the BBC should have taken note of the embargo date. April 1. The name of the academic quoted, Olaf Priol, is an anagram of April Fool." Unfortunately I can't find a link for this.
Are you guilty about living a life of comfort while others around the world suffer? Do you want to 'feel their pain'? Now you can, thanks to the WiFi-SM. This is a wireless device that "automatically detects the information from approximately 4,500 news sources worldwide updated continuously and analyses them looking for specific keywords such as death, kill, murder, torture, rape, war, virus etc.. Each time the text of the news contains one of these keywords, your WiFi-SM device is activated through the Wi-Fi network and provides you with an electric impulse. This impulse is calibrated so that you can feel a certain amount of pain, but is completely safe." (via Gizmodo)
If it weren't for the inconvenient fact that no one has a clue who I am, I'd almost feel famous, because I was interviewed not only by Wired, but also by the Christian Science Monitor, for this article. My mother always says that she could have had a son who was a doctor or a lawyer, but instead she gets a son who's a hoax expert. Well, it may not pay much, but at least I get interviewed a lot once a year, every April 1st.
Wired published an article about net hoaxes today, for which I was interviewed. The increased traffic it brought promptly melted down my web host's servers, which has been causing quite a headache for me. But regardless, it's nice to get the visitors. Perhaps a few of them were even able to view some of the site's content.
Once thought to be a fake Vermeer, this painting of a young woman sitting before a keyboard has now been officially reclassified as a real Vermeer. It's going up for sale (the first time a Vermeer has been sold since 1921), so if you've got a couple of million lying around, feel free to make a bid.
According to the Wall Street Journal a strange prank is becoming a real problem for restaurants throughout America. A phone prankster calls up a restaurant, pretending to a police officer, and asks the manager of the restaurant to strip search the store's employees. The reason given is usually that the police are searching for stolen money or drugs. And time after time the store managers comply with the request. I've seen cases of this prank reported in the news before, and I assumed they were unrelated to each other. But police suspect that all the cases might be the work of one guy, operating out of North Florida. Tom Briggs, of the National Food Service Security Council, notes that "Whoever this caller is must be a hell of a good con man... You'd think nobody would fall for this." Numerous restaurant chains have fallen victim to the prank, including Burger King, Wendy's, and Applebee's.