April 1st Re-revisited

Really a footnote to a footnote…

One day I’ll do some serious writing about the more subtle implications of the April Fool tradition, but not today. 2010 saw a pretty good crop of April 1st hoaxes, though nothing that really threatened the BBC’s pre-eminence in the field, with its spaghetti tree harvest and flying penguin hoaxes. Still, Google had a good day, announcing that it was changing its name to Topeka, and apologizing for a vowel outage in Gmail. The Register also managed some good shots: I particularly liked the announcement that Google was planning to digitize everyone in the world. Sophos announced that they’d discovered that writing romantic fiction mitigates data leakage, while F-Secure revealed their new Rickroll Protector software. Allan Dyer published an article on how not to protect your passwords that was worthy of “I’m Sorry, I haven’t a Clue” (the BBC’s long-running radio panel-game), and Neil Rubenking “revealed” that the antivirus companies really do write all the malware and that the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization was rewriting its Principles document as a result.

All of which gave me the opportunity to indulge in a little belated and barbed fakery of my own at http://www.eset.com/blog/2010/04/02/april-1st-your-questions-answered. (Which you’ll have to visit if you want the links I didn’t include above and don’t want to wind your way through acres of search engine suggestions.) And some more serious thinking on the myth of the AV industry writing the viruses at the AMTSO blog here.

Next, back to the real hoax business.

David Harley FBCS CITP CISSP
Mac Virus
Small Blue-Green World
AVIEN Chief Operations Officer
ESET Research Fellow & Director of Malware Intelligence

Also blogging at:
http://www.eset.com/blog
http://www.macvirus.com/
http://avien.net/blog/
http://smallbluegreenblog.wordpress.com/
http://blogs.securiteam.com
http://blog.isc2.org/
http://dharley.wordpress.com