High speed hoax: Taking advantage of a bug in CNN's "mail this story" mechanism, a guy created a hoax page looking like a CNN news story which claimed that Britney Spears had died in a car crash. (She's fine.) He seeded the story by giving it to just three people in a chat room -- and within 12 hours it had been downloaded 150,000 times. The Internet appears to permit extremely efficient distribution of disinformation.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Oct 10, 2001 - 26 comments

Well, it's official. Civilization has now come to an end; drowned in a sea of vapid mediocrity and fad. In five years, will anyone still give a damn about Brittney Spears?
posted by Steven Den Beste on Jan 3, 2001 - 21 comments

I'd still like someone to explain to me what a "Britney Spears" is. Is it synthetic? Created with Lightwave?
posted by Steven Den Beste on Aug 24, 2000 - 4 comments