About the Museum of Hoaxes
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about whatever dubious-sounding claims come across our path on a day-by-day basis. In our archives we have hundreds of articles about the most fascinating and notorious deceptions throughout history, from the middle ages to the present.
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Tale of a Clueless Hacker
A story is going around about a clueless hacker who gets mad with a chat-room moderator and tries to take revenge. He asks the moderator what his IP address is. The moderator tells him it's 127.0.0.1. The hacker apparently doesn't realize this number is geek-speak for home. It's the IP address of whatever computer you're currently using. Try to connect to it and you'll simply connect to your own computer. So the hacker plugs 127.0.0.1 into his hack-tool and then begins to gloat as he sees the hard-drive of the computer he's connected to disappear. He doesn't realize that he's erasing his own computer:"I can see your E: drive disappearing, he gloated, "D: is down 45 percent!" he cried, before disappearing into the ether."
Hard to say if the story is true or not. The original version of it is in German. Slashdot has a lot of discussion about it.