CRASH PICTURE A HOAX - It'S OFFICIAL!!!
Mike
The widely debated crash photo which depicts Diana dying in the merc. is
a hoax. The follwoing is taken from a Reuter's press release:
Friday September 19 12:09 PM EDT
Faked Diana photo just latest Internet hoax
By Tom Heneghan
PARIS (Reuter) - Dying princesses, embattled presidents, famous writers
or nameless computer newbies -- nobody is too
high or too low to be beyond the reach of the Internet's many hoaxers.
A faked picture on the world-wide computer network claiming to show
Princess Diana lying bloody and motionless in her
fatal Paris car wreck made it this week onto Italian television and the
front page of the daily France-Soir.
French police quickly saw the rescue crew's jackets were not the right
color and an emergency telephone number on a rescue
van was the British one.
Other hoaxes, though, have been floating around the anarchic net for
years, just waiting for the latest wave of new Internet
surfers to fall for their baseless claims.
Companies have been the target of false information and new users have
been terrified by warnings of fake viruses ready to
infect their home computers or tricked by pyramid schemes.
"With the explosive growth of the Internet and its popularity, more and
more new users are getting online and becoming
targets for pranksters," California computer expert Charles Hynes says
on his homepage tracking latest hoaxes.
"There is no technical solution to this problem. Even when users become
experienced enough to be able to tell a silly
message when they see one, anyone can get suckered sometimes."
Both President Clinton and former British Prime Minister John Major have
been the targets of X-rated hoaxes.
A site named "www.whitehouse.com" -- instead of his official
"www.whitehouse.gov" page -- shows Clinton embracing a
scantily-clad Hillary against a backdrop of sexy dancers. The site,
which is full of racy pictures, claims: "This site is a
heckuva lot more fun than the real White House."
An official Conservative Party message last year was doctored to show a
purported collection of Major's favorite pictures --
porno shots -- and have him admit to presiding over "the greatest
betrayal of our homeland since God knows when."
Last summer, the Net was buzzing with talk about advice the U.S.
novelist Kurt Vonnegut was supposed to have given to
graduates at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT).
"Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1997: wear sunscreen," read the
hoax Vonnegut said was so good it fooled his wife.
The speech, widely reprinted in discussion groups, was a Chicago
newspaper column with no link to MIT or Vonnegut.
One European foreign ministry had to pull the plug on its own website
after hackers broke into it and replaced the minister's
official speeches with gibberish.
In July, a Swedish Internet marketing agency put out a fake report that
Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot had arrived in the
Scandinavian country seeking political asylum.
Hackers succeeded in altering the homepage of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) last year to rename the U.S.
intelligence service the "Central Stupidity Agency."
Fraudulent messages harming a company or offering "get-rich-quick"
schemes have also mushroomed on the Net.
In one such case, the U.S. pharmaceutical company Quigley Corp. said an
anonymous Internet posting had wrongly reported
one of its senior executives had resigned.
Britain's Securities and Investments Board (SIB) last month issued -- on
its own web page -- warnings against "copycat sites"
with false information and bogus investment schemes.
"The global nature of the Internet makes it easy, cheap and very
tempting for cyber-cheats to try to exploit potential investors
with offers that seem too good to be true," SIB chief executive Andrew
Winckler said in the warnings.
Less offensive pranks have been so common on the Internet that there are
several sites listing them and advising how to check
whether an unsolicited message is only virtual reality.
One widespread prank, called "Good Times," warns against an e-mail virus
that supposedly can scan a user's hard disk for
credit card numbers and computer log-in passwords. Another hoax claims
the U.S. government wanted to impose a "modem
tax."
Reuters/Wired
Andrew/
> The widely debated crash photo which depicts Diana dying in the merc. is
> a hoax. The follwoing is taken from a Reuter's press release:
Yes Mike it's OFFICIAL now. It's even been said on the TV
that it's a fake. Therefore it MUST BE TRUE!!!!!
duh.
Andrew/
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