Top 100 Hoaxes of All Time

Kaz Riprock writes "Did you know that Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell? Or that Spaghetti grows on trees?? Here is a pretty interesting website that compiles 100 of the best hoaxes perpetrated through the ages."

Comments

Obviously.....

[sogoodsofarsowhat]

/. should be at the top of this list :)

Re:Obviously.....

[Politburo]

No.. these are meant to be good hoaxes.

The biggest Hoax of them all!

[Ishkibble]

Micro$oft OS's are secure!

Re:The biggest Hoax of them all!

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Micro$oft OS's are secure!"

Linux, the Gamer's Choice!

Re:The biggest Hoax of them all!

[unicron]

You couldn't hack a properly configured windows box if someone put a gun to your head.

Oh, and installing redhat from a bootable cd and typing ls and startx all day does NOT make you a linux user.

Re:The biggest Hoax of them all!

[houseofmore]

"You couldn't hack a properly configured windows box if someone put a gun to your head."

Anyone would have to have a gun to their head to 'claim a properly configured windows box'.

"Oh, and installing redhat from a bootable cd and typing ls and startx all day does NOT make you a linux user."

Installing windows XP from a bootable cd and typing <CTRL><ALT><DEL> does make you a pretty typical moron.

Re:The biggest Hoax of them all!

[lpontiac]

You couldn't hack a properly configured windows box if someone put a gun to your head

But if Halle Berry was blowing me at the time I think I'd stand a chance.

Re:The biggest Hoax of them all!

[houseofmore]

Is it on?

Morons!

[NetMasta10bt]

#17: The Left-Handed Whopper
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."

Re:Morons!

[unicron]

Bah, amateurs.

In college pulled one that people still talk about. Me, mostly.

A friend of mine had taken a real liking to online trading through Datek. I had the great idea to spoof their security division's email address and send him one accusing him of insider trading. Guess he didn't pick up on the fact that most emails of this type wouldn't contain the sentence "stick around there so we can arrest you when we get there."

He comes rushing into my dorm room(at a REALLY, REALLY bad time, mind you) screaming up and down about FED's and insider trading and this and that. My girlfriend and I can barely contain ourselves and luckily he took off again to call his father before we lost it. I go downstairs, and a mutual friend that was in on it tells me I've gotta tell him the truth, because he just called his father. Turns out his father is some fat cat attorney back in Cali. I come clean, he takes a swing at me, it was all in good fun. To this day I still say to him "remember that time I made you think you were going to spend the rest of your life in prison?"..good times.

Re:Morons!

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."

Reminds me of the Kodak 'Weekender' Camera. People kept calling up asking if it was okay to use during the week. (note: That's not an April Fool's hoax.)

Re:Morons!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats similar to a prank that was done on a friend of mine.

He has just got a "demo" copy of windows XP and had just connected to the net. His boss then sent him an email from "legal@microsoft.com" with the subject "Illegal copy of XP detected". Gave him a heart attack of course, but once he realised it was fake he replied to the email. It wasn't until just after he clicked the send button that he realised he hadn't changed the reply to address and he had just sent that email to MS.

Re:Morons!

[Tablizer]

The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich.

Shoot, I would charge them 30 cents extra, give them a regular whopper, and pocket the 30. I am for "taxing" the really stupid. Hell, palm readers do it all the time.

It's about time

[seinman]

Finally, an April Fool's Day post that isn't annoying as hell!

One of the biggest hoaxes that site missed:

[Tofino]

One of the biggest hoaxes that site missed:

"News for nerds. Stuff that matters."

Re:One of the biggest hoaxes that site missed:

[neurostar]

One of the biggest hoaxes that site missed:

"News for nerds. Stuff that matters."

Well part of it's a hoax, part of it isn't. Here's the breakdown:

News for nerds. - Definitly not a hoax.
Stuff that matters. - HOAX! HOAX! HOAX!

neurostar

well...

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

at least it wasn't:

1) Slashdot posts story regarding IPv4 evil bit.
2) Slashdot posts story regarding IPv4 evil bit.
3) Slashdot posts story regarding IPv4 evil bit. ...
etc

The BEST in my book

[MasterSLATE]

The best prank I'd say was the broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Even though it was unintentional, the widespread hysteria it made was just amazing.

Re:The BEST in my book

[fucksl4shd0t]

That's exactly the one I was looking for. I thought it should be #1, How could you beat the War of the Worlds?

Dudley, Bob, and Debra on the KLBJ morning show spent like 3 hours one morning talking about how Metallica got struck by lightning and they were all dead. Guys I worked with were calling their girlfriends and crying on the phone at them. It was funnier than shit. :)

OTOH...

[ParnBR]

Why do all comments in April Fools' Day must be annoying as hell?

Notice what's NOT there?

[wdr1]

Notice that NOWHERE in the list is Slashdot's April 1st editions?

Take the hint guys. Please.

-Bill

Personal favorite

[OsCarJ]

My personal favorite has to be #6: Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers. I remember seeing that story in Discover and being completely amazed. It had me going for quite a while until I did some checking and found out that the scientist's last name was latin for fool. Since her first name was April I then figured out it was a joke.

Apparently naked mole rats are a big favorite for April Fools pranks. They show up again later on in this list.

April Fool's

[Bueller_007]

This is the top 100 April Fool's hoaxes of all time, not the top 100 hoaxes of all time.

Huge difference.

Hoax and Myth

[fm6]

In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.

I'm reminded of that persistent myth about drains and the Coriolis Force. I'm told that in equatorial contries, tourists can find entrepreneurs who will "demonstrate" the precise location of the equator with a tub that drains clockwise in one location, and counterclockwise a few feet away. If you ask one of these guys about another entrepreneur that lives a few miles north or south that has the same demo, he'll gravely inform you that the other guy is a fraud!

It can be pretty hard to tell the liar from the true believer!

As long as RFC 3514 isn't on the list...

[Znonymous Coward]

I'll RTFA.

Colour TV

[hpa]

Back in the 60's a Swedish TV show host, Lennart Hyland, managed to convince some huge portion of the Swedish people to drape a nylon sock over their black-and-white TV in an effort to test a new technique to transmit colour TV without requiring new receivers.

This particular April Fools joke is still talked about...

Some hoaxes based on reality

[Thatmushroom]

#8: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.

Funny, but came very close to happening. In fact, in my great state of Indiana, the House actually passed legislation to set pi equal to 3 by a vote of 67-0. Fortunately, it was shot down in the Senate.

Re:Some hoaxes based on reality

[superyooser]

he he
The hoaxers fell for an urban legend. The Bible doesn't say that pi is 3.0.

PI in the Bible

"The Bible says pi = 3."

Does the Bible say pi equals 3.0?

Does the Bible Give a Wrong Value for Pi?

I see four major issues in the relevant Scripture:

1. We don't know the exact length of a cubit.
2. We aren't sure of the complete geometry of what was being measured.
3. The Scripture is giving measurements of real-world objects, not presenting a mathematical theorem. If the numbers seem wrong to us, we're not understanding what was being measured.
4. We don't know what kind of rounding, if any, was being used.

Slashdot IPO

[JWSmythe]

That was a joke? Cmdr Taco! Give me back my money!!! :)

Dihydrogen Monoxide

[shane_rimmer]

Where was Dihydrogen Monoxide?

MIT Hacks

[i22y]

While not directly related to April Fool's Day, one cannot forget MIT Hacks. Some of the best pranks I've seen in awhile.

Notable is the Campus cop car on the Great Dome...though they're all great.

Re:MIT Hacks

[tbmaddux]

... except that Caltech beat MIT soundly in the top 10 college pranks listing with the #1 slot going to the Rose Bowl hoax and #3 going to the McDonald's contest brute force attack. MIT showed only at #10 with Bonsai Kitten.

Re:Copied directly from the article...

[localghost]

So register, post each of the 100 individually, get each modded to 5, and instantly you have +500 karma! Then sell the account on ebay. Then submit a story about it to slashdot. Then submit the story half a dozen more times.

Orson Wells

[jimson]

I'm really surprised to not find Orson Well's War of the Worlds in the top 20 anyways. That has to be one of the best hoaxes ever! War of the Worlds

Re:Orson Wells

[Chris Mattern]

Can one classify the "War of the Worlds" broadcast as a hoax? Welles did not in fact mean to fool anybody; it was supposed to be just a radio play.

Chris Mattern

War of the worlds?

[Brigadier]

Though not intentional but shouldn't the 'war of the worlds' radio broad cast by orson wells be listed ?

What about the 100 best trolls?

[grumpygrodyguy]

Slightly off-topic, but interesting none-the-less. Would some industrious young slashdotter mind compiling a "Top 100 slashdot trolls of all time" list for the bemusement of the common reader?

It's highly likely that such a list would be modded into oblivion, so perhaps your could link the list in your sig? Title it something conspicuous like "The top 100 slashdot trolls of all time".

Would someone please do this? Is the troll community still alive and well on SD? In the 3 years I've been reading SD, I've seen some gems. Make this list, and let everyone share in your trolling glory! Make a new account, and link the top 100 trolls of all time to it. Pretty please, with sugar on top.

Re:What about the 100 best trolls?

[Skiboo]

There was a slashdot user named Trollback, who's journal may interest you.

It was an automated system, that would rate various troll posts on certain criteria, including number of replies and moderations, to give an overall score. Unfortunately, it seems to have been discontinued.

Oblig. Soviet Russia Post

[coldwd]

IN SOVIET RUSSIA...the internet hoaxes YOU!

Hoax #16: Kremvax

In 1984, back in the Stone Age of the internet, a message was distributed to the members of Usenet (the online messaging community that was one of the first forms the internet took) announcing that the Soviet Union was joining Usenet. This was quite a shock to many, since most assumed that cold war security concerns would have prevented such a link-up. The message purported to come from Konstantin Chernenko (from the address chernenko@kremvax.UUCP) who explained that the Soviet Union wanted to join the network in order to "have a means of having an open discussion forum with the American and European people." The message created a flood of responses. Two weeks later its true author, a European man named Piet Beertema, revealed that it was a hoax. This is believed to be the first hoax on the internet. Six years later, when Moscow really did link up to the internet, it adopted the domain name 'kremvax' in honor of the hoax.

bah. you're the Amateur

[geekoid]

I pulled a similiar joke, but my friend is still sitting in prison. I can't wait for his release so I can see the look on his face when I come clean..
aahhh, good times.

William Horace de Vere Cole

[The Ape With No Name]

We are all pikers in his wake. The Abyssinian gag. The Dreadnought Hoax. The Venice Horse Mystery. And, possibly, The Piltdown Man.

My life's goal is to write a book about WHdVC. I know. I'm a loser.