Fox News: Top Ten Internet Pranks
This April Fool's Day, as in past years, is a busy one on the Internet. FOXNews.com takes a look at some of the better pranks out there.
1. EbutUoy
The YouTube front page looks normal at first, but click on one of the featured videos and it'll turn your world upside down — literally. The next page you see will be completely upside down — the writing, the video, the links ... everything.
2. Conficker Strikes
The Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports various problems caused by the much-feared Conficker worm, set to detonate Wednesday. They include a full-scale DefCon 3 military alert after a nuclear-missile base in Alaska was suspected of being infected by the virus, ATMs in credit-crunch plagued Iceland suddenly spitting out cash and London's Big Ben frozen at one minute after midnight.
3. Wikifake-ia
Every item on the home page of the user-generated site Wikipedia is fake. The featured article is about the "Museum of Bad Art" in Boston. The headlines include such stories as NASA monitoring diamonds falling from the sky and the Irish prime minister streaking in public — both of which barely stretch real recent news events.
4. Facial Web Browsing
Norwegian alternative Web browser Opera, famous for introducing mouse gestures to control Web surfing, takes the notion one step further — with Face Gestures. It even provides an instructional video and detailed steps on how to set up the new feature.
5. Twitter News
London's Guardian newspaper announced on its Web site that after 188 years of printing in ink on paper, it would be switching exclusively to publishing on Twitter. Management notes that any story can be told in 140 characters. Sadly, it was tough to tell whether this was an April Fool's joke or an entrepreneurial idea that really could be the future of news.
6. Xbox's 'Alpine Legend'
Microsoft's gaming division announced a new music-based game for the Xbox 360 that lets players yodel their way through a mountainous village, record music in a log-cabin studio and compete in a live yodel off.
7. Fly Me to Mars, Book Me On the Moon
In a press release, Hotels.com announces its newest sale — the world's first rooms on the moon. The site warns that the room prices don't include travel. Want to take a side trip whie you're there? How about booking a flight to Mars for $99? Expedia is touting "no interplanetary booking fees," and huge savings on the regular Martian-trip price of $3,000,000,000,099.
8. Google Aprilfoolery
Google's traditional April 1 silliness isn't limited to YouTube. Its Chrome Web browser is now supposedly in 3-D, just like "Monsters vs. Aliens." But before you start surfing the Internet in an extra dimension, you'll need print out a special pair of downloadable glasses. If you're too busy to reply to every e-mail you receive, Gmail, which has some real features that sound fake, is here to help. It's introduced "Autopilot," a time-saving service that automatically crafts polite responses to incoming messages you'd rather not deal with. That's possible thanks to Google's new artificial intelligence, CADIE, a sophisticated algorithm that takes the shape of a big-eyed cartoon panda and has an affinity for rainbows, bunnies and unicorns.
9. Weighty iPods
Filling up that iPod with tons of music? Then you'd better start hitting the gym. According to newslite.tv, researchers have found that the more music that is loaded onto MP3 players, the heavier they are to carry.
10. Really High Cloud Computing
"Cloud" computing normally takes data and applications from your or your company's hard drives and offloads them to remote servers through the Internet. Amazon's taken that a step further with its Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE) project — massive data centers on solar-powered, laser-defended blimps that fly around the world, safe from hackers or government interference.
1. EbutUoy
The YouTube front page looks normal at first, but click on one of the featured videos and it'll turn your world upside down — literally. The next page you see will be completely upside down — the writing, the video, the links ... everything.
2. Conficker Strikes
The Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports various problems caused by the much-feared Conficker worm, set to detonate Wednesday. They include a full-scale DefCon 3 military alert after a nuclear-missile base in Alaska was suspected of being infected by the virus, ATMs in credit-crunch plagued Iceland suddenly spitting out cash and London's Big Ben frozen at one minute after midnight.
3. Wikifake-ia
Every item on the home page of the user-generated site Wikipedia is fake. The featured article is about the "Museum of Bad Art" in Boston. The headlines include such stories as NASA monitoring diamonds falling from the sky and the Irish prime minister streaking in public — both of which barely stretch real recent news events.
4. Facial Web Browsing
Norwegian alternative Web browser Opera, famous for introducing mouse gestures to control Web surfing, takes the notion one step further — with Face Gestures. It even provides an instructional video and detailed steps on how to set up the new feature.
5. Twitter News
London's Guardian newspaper announced on its Web site that after 188 years of printing in ink on paper, it would be switching exclusively to publishing on Twitter. Management notes that any story can be told in 140 characters. Sadly, it was tough to tell whether this was an April Fool's joke or an entrepreneurial idea that really could be the future of news.
6. Xbox's 'Alpine Legend'
Microsoft's gaming division announced a new music-based game for the Xbox 360 that lets players yodel their way through a mountainous village, record music in a log-cabin studio and compete in a live yodel off.
7. Fly Me to Mars, Book Me On the Moon
In a press release, Hotels.com announces its newest sale — the world's first rooms on the moon. The site warns that the room prices don't include travel. Want to take a side trip whie you're there? How about booking a flight to Mars for $99? Expedia is touting "no interplanetary booking fees," and huge savings on the regular Martian-trip price of $3,000,000,000,099.
8. Google Aprilfoolery
Google's traditional April 1 silliness isn't limited to YouTube. Its Chrome Web browser is now supposedly in 3-D, just like "Monsters vs. Aliens." But before you start surfing the Internet in an extra dimension, you'll need print out a special pair of downloadable glasses. If you're too busy to reply to every e-mail you receive, Gmail, which has some real features that sound fake, is here to help. It's introduced "Autopilot," a time-saving service that automatically crafts polite responses to incoming messages you'd rather not deal with. That's possible thanks to Google's new artificial intelligence, CADIE, a sophisticated algorithm that takes the shape of a big-eyed cartoon panda and has an affinity for rainbows, bunnies and unicorns.
9. Weighty iPods
Filling up that iPod with tons of music? Then you'd better start hitting the gym. According to newslite.tv, researchers have found that the more music that is loaded onto MP3 players, the heavier they are to carry.
10. Really High Cloud Computing
"Cloud" computing normally takes data and applications from your or your company's hard drives and offloads them to remote servers through the Internet. Amazon's taken that a step further with its Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE) project — massive data centers on solar-powered, laser-defended blimps that fly around the world, safe from hackers or government interference.
posted by Daily Observer at 4:06 PM
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