[humorix] Vast Spy Network Captured... While Spying On Itself!

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

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Warning:  humorous content ahead.
To prevent overdosage for the sensitive readers, please
take your discussions to humorix-l@nl.linux.org...
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Vast Spy Network Captured... While Spying On Itself!
Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, bero@redhat.de
July 24, 2001

Just minutes before the last Crashback article was posted, 
the following message was received by the mail servers at
the top-secret Vast Spy Network(tm) Outpost Number 137.

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Subject: An internal matter...

It is our sad duty to inform you that "Slashdorix: Fake
news for nerds, stuff that would matter if it were true" --
the result of an earlier acquisition of Humorix by Slashdot
-- is no more.

The site has been renamed to Slashdot, and the motto has
been changed back to Slashdot's old one. However, the
content hasn't changed. It's a weird story: Slashdorix was
getting so many comments on badly researched fake news
items ("Hey, this story is actually genuine!") that they
outnumbered the "This isn't true" posts on Slashdot.  By
comparing the stats closely, we figured that Slashdorix
actually produced more genuine stories than Slashdot, even
though we never intended to.

The big problem with creating proper fake news stories is
that they need to be believable.  If we ran a story on
Linux going closed source, or even George W. Bush
pronouncing a foreign name correctly, everyone would
immediately recognize it as fake news, and it wouldn't be
much fun.

In providing believable fake news, we often beat the
official announcement only by a couple of hours. You
wouldn't believe how much trouble Noah Morals had getting
rid of the NSA's lawyers when we reported that George Dubya
Bush proposed mandatory one-time SUV purchases for all
wealthy citizens as part of his scheme to boost oil usage
(and tax income)  at the cost of the environment. 
Naturally, this "fake" story was published just two hours
before Bush was getting ready to hold a press conference to
announce the exact same thing.  

(The reason why the official announcement never got out is
closely related to this case, contact our legal department
for the details.)

Granted, when Microsoft announced its plans to require
monthly fees for their software just two days after our
story on it, there were a couple of minor differences (the
fees are supposed to be somewhat lower than the user's soul
and sold to the devil in human shape, also known as Steve
Ballmer), and they didn't arrest all open source
programmers because Microsoft bought the government, but
arrested an open source programmer because Adobe bought the
government -- but that's just the "Angry father grills his
kids! We interviewed the steaks." type of journalism
commonly found in mainstream press. We couldn't uphold the
claim that any of our items actually represented fake news.

Noah Morals disgustedly left Humorix headquarters after
facing the 497th lawsuit for false advertising in a month
(filed mostly by Microsoft and the government to make us
stop pre-announcing their plans), and with no other
lawyer-fodder, we couldn't keep it up.

Noah, are you reading this? You can safely come back now.
But please pay attention to that odd black car still
patrolling the headquarters.

This communication is over.

---

The staff at Outpost 137 became quite upset when a similar
message was published before the story "researched" by VSN
#137 could possibly have passed the 319 anonymizers
designed to conceal the outpost's location.

A quick investigation revealed that this couldn't be a
coincidence -- nobody could have known our fake news was
not actually fake news, unless... Yes, the Vast Spy
Network(tm) actually spied us out.

Noah Morals, by his contract with the headquarters the one
and only representative for all legal matters, immediately
filed a lawsuit against the Vast Spy Network(tm), and is
currently busy preparing the defense. He was not available
for any official comments, but people in the cubicles next
to him reported he's ectatic about it.  "I'm going to
appear in a big espionage case! And since I'm representing
both sides, I'm going to win!!! Yes! I'm going to win the
first case in my life!"


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