[humorix] Beware Of Red Hat's April Fool's Day Joke

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Beware Of Red Hat's April Fool's Day Joke
April 1, 2000

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, NC -- We here at Humorix have been
hearing reports all day long about an April Fool's Day joke
embedded in Red Hat Linux 6.0 and above. The joke is a
program called "640K" that simulates the MS-DOS 6.66
command line.  The joke has fooled quite a large number of
people, causing some of them to do foolish things, like
fire up FDISK.

One member of our Vast Spy Network(tm) sent in a screenshot
showing the April Fool's Day joke in action during bootup:

===

Starting MS-DOS...
Now booting the MSDOS.SYS kernel...

Creating 640K RAM barrier...
Loading CD-ROM driver... ERROR: Competing operating system
   CD-ROM found in drive D:  Disabling CD-ROM interface...
Loading mouse driver... ERROR: Non-Mightgosoft mouse
   detected. System will not function properly!
Activating Visual Edlin and Visual Batchfile interfaces...

Welcome to Mightgosoft DOS 6.66!
 (C) Mightgosoft Corporation, 1983-2000.  All rights
     reserved. Violators of the Mightgosoft Closed Source
     License will be sold as slaves pursuant to UCITA
     clause 6-1C(a).

C:\>QUIT
Bad command or file name.  

C:\>EXIT
Error: user is an idiot.

C:\>HELP
Help files not found.  Please install Mightgosoft DOS 6.66 
Plus! Pack, available from your local Mightgosoft Outlet
store.

C:\>CD\LINUX
Error: user invoked name of competing operating system. 
Illegal operation performed.  User will be punished.

C:\>REBOOT
Warning: this operation is not necessary since MS-DOS is
not scheduled to crash for at least 15 more minutes.

Proceed anyways (Y/N)? Y

Access denied.  You have insufficient privileges to perform
this operation.  Please consult your MS-DOS Operating
Manual, page 2,412.

C:\>FDISK
Error: User attempting to modify MS-DOS installation. 
Illegal operation performed.  User will be punished.

C:\>SCREW YOU, BILL GATES!!!!!!!!!  [CTRL-ALT-DELETE]

===

>From what we can gather, the joke was slipped in by a bored
Red Hat employee.  However, some conspiracy nuts have
already speculated that a Microsoft mole could be
responsible.  

Users are certainly not happy about the joke.  "I thought
that my son had replaced my Linux partition with a DOS
partition! Not knowing any better, I fired up FDISK and
deleted what I thought was a newly created DOS partition. 
Of course, it was really Red Hat (or should I say, Black
Hat) masquerading as DOS.  Now I've lost my Linux install
and all of my hand crafted config files that took 3 years
to get perfected!"

Indeed, reports of people panicking and using FDISK have
been numerous.  We here at Humorix would like to issue this
public service announcement: Do not touch your FDISK
program if your machine appears to be running MS-DOS.  Stay
calm.  Adjust your system clock to April 2nd, and this
April Fool's Day madness will be over. Everything will be
alright. Do not do anything stupid!

We would ordinarily expect such a prank to generate a
firestorm of controversy and cause an angry mob to descend
on Red Hat's North Carolina offices.  However, that angry
mob is still in Holland, Michigan protesting Slashdot's
April Fool's Day joke, as previously reported.  

---

James S. Baughn
http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/

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