Hacker Arrested For Defacing His Own Website

Fake News written by James Baughn on July 27, 2001

It's a great time to be a Microsoft employee. With all of the outrage surrounding the Dmitry Sklyarov case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation & Privacy Violations has quickly replaced Microsoft as the number one enemy of the geek community.

And how! Earlier today, Mr. Eric Nolluck was arrested for violating the DMCA when he "defaced" his own website as a form of protest against the DMCA.

According to charges filed by the FBI&PV, at 11:45 AM on July 27, 2001, Nolluck purposely defaced the front page of his website ("Eric's House Of Pr0n") by posting a page that featured a photograph of Dmitry and the slogans "Free Dmitry!" and "Serr Qzvgel!"

[Editor's Note: We would provide a mirror of the defaced page, but doing so might violate federal law because we would be making a copy of the hacker's intellectual property.]

Within 30 minutes, a SWAT team from the FBI&PV raided Nolluck's apartment and arrested him for DMCA violations.

Explained the FBI&PV prosecutor, "The photograph of Dmitry came from a newspaper website. Nolluck illegally used an anti-circumvention tool -- in this case, his browser's 'Save To Disk' command -- to make an unauthorized copy of the Dmitry photo. In addition, the name 'Dmitry Sklyarov' is so hard to spell that we suspect that Nolluck copied the name from another website without permission using another illegal anti-circumvention tool -- in this case, his operating system's cut and paste mechanism."

Eric Nolluck has also been charged with defacing a website, a crime under federal law. The victim of the website defacement, Mr. Nolluck, declined to file criminal charges against the accused, Mr. Nolluck, but that hasn't stopped the FBI&PV from pursuing the case.

"We can't let perps like this run around," an FBI&PV agent exclaimed. "Won't somebody please think of the children of media corporation executives who will be harmed if hackers and pirates like this continue their evil deeds?"

While interrogating him, the FBI&PV learned that Eric Nolluck has the ability to translate ROT13-encoded documents into plain text in his head. As a result, the FBI&PV has initiated a nationwide manhunt to find Nolluck's parents and arrest them for giving birth to a copyright-infringement device, a federal crime.

In response to the news, Microsoft stock climbed 15 points in heavy trading. Said one spokesperson, "Maybe now we can get some peace and quiet without all of the geeks of the world breathing down our necks when we try to innovate. Thank you, John Ashcroft, for taking everyone's attention away from Microsoft!"

In other related news, our Vast Spy Network(tm) has learned that the FBI&PV has started files on several Humorix employees. Because these employees have published lame humor articles poking fun at the agency, the FBI&PV considers them to be "national security risks".

Attack Of The "Omnivore" Virus

Fake News written by James Baughn on July 27, 2001

For years, we here at Humorix have been investigating evil conspiracies concocted by everyone's favorite monopoly, Microsoft.

What a waste of time. While we've been twiddling our thumbs, everyone's favorite privacy-invading law enforcement agency has been concocting the most sinister, audacious, vile conspiracy in the history of... conspiracies. We're talking about the Federal Bureau of Investigation & Privacy Violations.

A handful of former geeks have joined the dark side to create the world's most deadly computer virus. During the past three months, they have toiled away in the secret "Janet Reno Laboratory" at a bunker somewhere in North Dakota to produce "Omnivore", the FBI&PV's ticket to world domination.

Omnivore is not your typical virus written by some script kiddie with poor English skills. This supervirus utilizes all of the hot PHB buzzwords -- it's cross-platform, it's polymorphic, it's peer-to-peer, and it's proactive. Omnivore extracts sensitive documents from the hard drives of its victims, and then uses a combination of email, FTP, Gopher, HTTP, NNTP, IRC, and IM protocols to deliver the goods back to the FBI&PV.

A beta version of this virus has already been unleashed to the unsuspecting world -- "SirCam", or "SirCam Intelligently Records & Collects All Material". SirCam only infects those machines that have already been infected with Microsoft Windows and Outlook and need to be thinned from the herd. Omnivore won't be so forgiving.

If you're running Linux, don't look so smug. The Good Ole Days of laughing at those poor Windows schmucks will soon come to an end. The Omnivore virus exploits a security hole in certain versions of Pine and other mail readers that enable it to execute arbitrary Perl scripts automatically as root.

According to our Vast Spy Network(tm), several shipments of Red Hat Linux CDs were hijacked last month after leaving the factory. We have reason to believe that these CDs were replaced with forged discs containing altered, insecure versions of Pine. It's not entirely clear whether the FBI&PV is responsible, or whether some other organization bent on world domination made the switch-a-roo. Either way, tens of thousands of Linux boxes are ripe for infection.

And if you're running Windows 2000, or Mac OS, or BeOS, or even OS/2, don't look so smug. Omnivore knows about at least one exploit on your system. The only way to protect yourself from the coming epidemic is to unplug your machine and relocate to some nice, obscure place the FBI&PV doesn't care about -- Kathmandu, Abu Dhabi, or maybe the North Pole. (Well, the virus won't infect computers running MS-DOS. But installing DOS on a machine is almost the same as unplugging it. So why bother?)

The FBI&PV -- in cooperation with the National Park Service and the Bureau of Missing Socks -- is expected to unleash Omnivore into the wild within the next 30 days. Infected machines will propogate the virus, send sensitive documents to the FBI&PV, initiate denial-of-service attacks against the websites of anti-virus software producers, and will finally begin to log all keystrokes and mouse movements, sending periodic updates to the FBI&PV. All of this will occur transparently without the user's notice, although some people may experience glacial slowness while the virus uploads their entire pornography and MP3 library to the FBI's master database.

The virus contains a self-destruct sequence that will activate if the user attempts to install anti-virus software or otherwise attempts to remove the virus. This self-destruct code exploits a flaw in certain models of Pentium CPUs which can cause them to overheat and literally explode under certain conditions. If the virus can't cause the computer to blow up, it will instead format the hard drive.

Once the virus spreads across the globe, the FBI&PV will have access to all of the sensitive information it needs to successfully pursue world domination. Anybody with any kind of incriminating files on their hard drive -- MP3s, ROT13 decryption tools, pornography, electronic copies of "Tax Evasion For Dummies", DeCSS, pirated versions of Windows and Solitaire, even virus creation kits -- will suddenly find themselves in jail.

Once a large portion of the US population is behind bars, the rest of the sheeple should fall in line rather quickly. Meanwhile, all of the other sensitive information collected by Omnivore should be enough to eventually conquer the entire world.

Be afraid. Be very afraid!

The above article is fake; we shall not be held liable if you or somebody else suffers a heart attack as a result of believing that the FBI is plotting world domination (when in reality it's the NSA that's engaged in a global conspiracy). So there.

Vast Spy Network Captured... While Spying On Itself!

Fake News written by Bernhard Rosenkraenzer on 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®.

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!"

Crashback: Lawyers, Idiots, Redundancies

Real News posted by James Baughn on July 22, 2001

At one time, Humorix was a bastion of fake journalistic integrity. When we wrote a fake news story, it remained a fake news story. We didn't have to issue any corrections or apologies.

But unfortunately things have changed. Obviously our writing skills have dropped, because now our supposedly fake news stories turn out to be true. We apologize for sometimes publishing fake news that isn't fake, and we sincerely hope that you don't file a lawsuit against us for violating "Truth in Advertising" laws.

Direct Money Capturing Act

Recently, we "reported" that a company had found itself on the wrong end of a DMCA lawsuit after they distributed an illegal plastic decoder ring in boxes of cereal.

Little did we know that somebody would be thrown in jail for devising a way to crack electronic books encrypted using ROT13, a method that is even less secure than using a kid's toy. Well, okay, Dmitry Sklyarov wasn't arrested for using ROT13. The Big Evil Corporation that pressed the charges (Adobe) actually uses a far more sophisticated encryption algorithm to protect its intellectual property: ROT26.

This Lawsuit Is Not A Hoax

The idiots at Symantec and other anti-virus makers still believe that our "Tuxissa virus" story was intended as a real hoax. They posted a copy of our fake hoax story, without attribution or even proper HTML formatting, and then proceeded to append the text, "Please ignore any messages regarding this hoax and do not pass on messages. Passing on messages about the hoax only serves to further propagate it." (But apparently it's okay if they pass on the message!)

Obviously, this is a clear violation of the DMCA because our content is encrypted using ROT26.

Our legal counsel, Mr. Noah Morals, has threatened to file a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Symantec. Unfortunately, somebody else has already tried -- and failed. Symantec's legal department argued that they are allowed to post virus warnings by virtue of the "Fair Use Doctrine".

That's not a typo. Our research staff believes this is the first time in human history that a corporate lawyer has actually admitted that the "Fair Use Doctrine" is a valid defense. We're stunned.

Fake News, Fake Grass

Back in 1999, we broke the exclusive "story" that Slashdot was actually an elaborate astroturf campaign concocted by Lucasfilms to hype Star Wars Episode 1. After our Vast Spy Network(tm) received a series of fake rumors, we concluded that "CmdrTaco" is actually a buggy Perl script that spits out articles and comments with pro-Lucasfilms hype.

Now we've received unsubstantiated real rumors that a LinuxToday editor might be engaging in astroturf. A certain editor has supposedly been spotted planting fake grass on LinuxToday discussion areas as part of a campaign to promote Internet.com and discredit Slashdot / Andover / VA Research / VA Linux / LNUX / Open Source Development Network / Whatever It's Called Now. (It's not immediately clear whether this editor is a Perl script, a Python script, or a real person.)

In related news, one of our two regular readers, Robert G. Werner, speculates that the person known as RMS may actually exist as an Emacs LISP script (rms.el). This program has been written to respond with "That should be GNU/$1, dammit!" and "That's Free Software, not Open Source!" whenever it encounters a press release.

Don't Look Directly At The Source -- You'll Go Blind

The core temperature of Hell remains well above freezing and the end of time(2) won't occur until 2038. However, Microsoft has opened the source code to at least one of its programs.

Since 1998, we have been "reporting" that Microsoft has released some of its software under an open source license -- in this case, the GPL, or Grossly Private License. But now that Microsoft has released a portion of Windows CE under the "Microsoft Shared Source License", this fake news story has become true.

Incidentally, the terms of the real Shared Source License are eerily similar to the fake Grossly Private License. Under "shared source", Microsoft shares its source code but you have to share your soul to get it, an arrangement that we have been "reporting" for years.

Final Word

Again, please accept our sincere apologies for not always publishing honest-to-goodness, bona fide fake news stories.

Our Vast Spy Network(tm) is currently working on the following articles. If you have evidence that any of these stories might not be 100% fake, or if you have reason to believe they might come true at a future date, please let us know immediately:

"Linux 3.2.0 To Include Support For World Peace; Linus Torvalds Nominated For Nobel Prize"

"Microsoft Files For Bankruptcy; Bill Gates Found At Homeless Shelter"

"Humorix Webmaster Wins Lottery"

"Linux Now Includes Support For Every Peripheral Ever Produced"

"DMCA, UCITA, FBI Ruled Unconstitutional"

Counterfeit Linus Torvalds Autographs Hit eBay

Fake News written by James Baughn on July 20, 2001

Beware, that autographed copy of the printed Linux 0.1 kernel source code you just purchased from eBay is probably fake. According to a Federal Bureau of Investigation & Privacy Violations report, several thousand forged autographs of minor celebrities -- including Linus Torvalds, Dmitry Sklyarov, and Jesse Berst -- have been discovered on eBay and other venues.

"If you see any autographs that look suspicious -- for instance, where the signature is spelled 'Linux' instead of 'Linus' -- please contact our office immediately," said Bob Smith, the Assistant Undersecretary to the Associate Vice-Chairman of the FBI&PV. He added, "Every call is strictly anonymous; you won't know the identity of the agent on the other end of the line."

The agency also warns Linus groupies to be on the lookout for fake Linus memorabilia and collectibles. "If somebody tries to sell you the 386 computer that Linus originally used to write kernel 0.1, it's almost certainly fake," explained an expert in the minor celebrity collectibles trade.

"Somebody tried to sell me a chair which Linus supposedly smashed in frustration after getting 512 different compiler errors at once. But it's definitely a fake. For one thing, everybody knows that Linus is a programming god who always writes perfect code on the first try," said the founder of the Linus Torvalds Personality Cult.

Even with all of the commotion surrounding his name, Linus Torvalds has been relatively quiet. Yesterday he simply issued a press release which stated, "This press release is not here yet." As usual, he was unavailable for comment at press time.

On the other hand, Richard M. Stallman is always available for comment at press time. He issued this statement: "Unlike Linus Torvalds, I have made my signature available to the public under the GNU General Public License. It may be freely copied, distributed, and modified. However, I do request that users continue to write my signature as 'GNU/Richard M. Stallman'."

Music Industry Discovers Perfect Anti-Piracy Scheme

Fake News written by James Baughn on July 19, 2001

CALIFORNIA -- Get ready for a deluge of CRAP (Copyright Regime Against Piracy). At a press conference held earlier today, the RIAA and various other Big Evil Trade Associations hyped this new acronym as the ultimate solution for ending copyright infringement.

"Lawsuits and restrictive software can only go so far. But with CRAP, we can boldly embrace the Internet revolution while still padding our wallets with enought megabucks to buy that fifth luxury mansion we so desperately need."

Mr. Sim O. Leons, a spokesperson for the RIAA, explained, "Under recently deployed technology, if an evil pirate duplicates a protected CD, the resulting copy will contain a bunch of annoying hisses and noises. Buy stop there? Under the CRAP(tm) regime, the original CD will contain so many annoying hisses and noises that would-be pirates won't even bother trying to copy it. Now that's a solution."

And that's not all. "We've signed record deals with a bunch of upcoming stars to produce songs so CRAPpy, so horrible, so awful, and so gut-wrenching, that nobody will ever want to copy one of their CDs in the first place. Piracy will suddenly halt!"

But what if consumers don't want to listen to these new songs? Mr. Leons has the answer: "They won't have any choice. By 2005, every single new song will be produced under the CRAP system. Meanwhile, all music stores will be required by 2003 to destroy every CD in stock that doesn't conform to the CRAP system. Consumers are going to enjoy this new business model, dammit!"

Microsoft doesn't seem too thrilled about the new music regime, however. Said a spokesperson, "We've been trying this idea since 1984 and it simply doesn't work. Even though Windows contains code designed to make it crash at random, that still hasn't stopped pirates from making illegal copies of it."

The spokesman added, "A far better solution is to require retinal scans, DNA samples, and criminal background checks before any person can install Windows on their machine. Each Certificate of Authenticity would then contain a GPS device so that our fleet of satellites can track every installation of Windows during every second of every day. Now that's the ultimate solution for stopping the epidemic of evil pirates."

Here's Your Bill, Bill

Fake News written by Matthew Adair on July 8, 2001

[Editor's Note: The management managed to pry Mr. Adair out of his maximum security cubicle at basement level 42 of Humorix World Headquarters long enough for him to fire off this incoherent rip-off of the bill that China recently sent the US.

We're not sure if he's sane, as he hasn't spoken to us in a long time and when he does speak it's in a mish-mash of various languages including Perl, C, and even Pascal. This, of course, makes him all the better to write this, as it will make us less prone to lawsuits if we can blame this on someone who is quite possibly legally insane.]

B I L L

To: Microsoft Corporation
From: Humorix World Domination, Inc. (Nasdaq: FAUX)
For: Cost of Damages Incurred and Services Rendered (seventh attempt)

To whom it may concern:

The following costs were incurred during the recent unsuccessful Microsoft raid of our corporate offices:

• 27 computers damaged by Microsoft Intellectual Property Police for a total of $5,700 worth of damages. (Yes, we're that cheap, so sue us.)

  [Note from our lawyer, Mr. Noah Morals: Please refrain from suing Humorix World Domination as the writer of that comment is legally insane and is thus NOT to be believed, except when we explicitly state that he is telling the truth.]

• 7 glass windows shattered; total damage $410.

• 10 abandoned copies of Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Patch 16.7.3141 discovered lying on the floor. We were forced to hire a specialist in toxic waste cleanup to remove this unsightly trash for a total cost of $1,200.

• Medical services rendered to 7 unconscious IPP officers who fainted at the sight of a Microsoft-free work environment. Total cost, $890.

• Supplies to clean our bathrooms, cost $83.

• Carpet cleaning supplies and labor, cost $235.

• Foodstuffs consumed in our cafeteria, cost $35.

• 22 bottles of various caffeinated beverages consumed, cost $110.

• Lost productivity, $90,000. (Productivity being a loosely defined thing here at Humorix World HQ)

• Damage incurred to our secret GNUist launch facility, $500,000. (Well, it WAS a secret!)

SUBTOTAL DUE: $598,663

PENALTIES DUE TO REPEATED DENIAL TO PAY: $2,000,000

TOTAL DUE (Before applicable taxes): $2,598,663

THIS IS YOUR FINAL NOTIFICATION. ANY FURTHER ATTEMPTS TO AVOID PAYMENT WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION AGAINST YOU. AND SINCE WE ARE DESPERATE FOR MONEY, WE WOULD RATHER YOU CONTINUE YOUR PRESENT COURSE OF INACTION SO THAT WE MAY SUE YOU AND WIN INSANE AMOUNTS OF MONEY THAT WILL BE AWARDED TO US BY THE COURTS.

Signed,

Mr. G. E. Trich
Humorix's Chief Accountant and Executive Book Cooker

NOTE: This document is a publication of The GNUist Party, which is a branch of the Free Software Foundation, which is a branch of... some even more secret and shadowy organization that we haven't invented a name for yet.

Australia To Ban Windows?

Fake News written by James Baughn on July 8, 2001

Two years ago, Australia passed legislation that effectively outlawed Linux. Now, the nation appears poised to pass legislation that would effectively throw all Windows users in jail.

Australia wants to make it illegal to possess "hacking paraphenalia", including the source code to malicious viruses. However, every Windows computer connected to the Internet has undoubtedly received at least one macro virus coded in Visual Basic.

Thus, millions of users have the source code to a virus sitting somewhere on their hard drives.

Thus, thousands of email servers have the source code to a virus sitting in some poor schmuck's inbox.

Thus, hundreds of Internet Service Providers have the source code to a virus flowing through their network even as you read this sentence.

The bottom line is that countless Australians could shortly become criminals because they use Windows and Outlook. Oh darn.

The developer responsible for integrating Visual Basic into Microsoft Outlook was unavailable for comment at press time.

Linux Boxes As Far As The Eye Can See

Fake News written by James Baughn on July 6, 2001

Last week, Humorix received a bark letter from Microsoft and the BSA requesting that we verify that all of our Microsoft licenses are legitimate. If not, the letter warned, we might be attacked by a fleet of unmarked black Microsoft helicopters and then sent away to the maximum-security dungeon underneath Redmond reserved for copyright violators.

Mr. Noah Morals, our crack[pot] attorney, sent a nasty response saying, "Do your worst!"

Yesterday morning, Humorix World Headquarters became ground zero for an attack by the Microsoft Intellectual Property Police. Agents carrying machine guns assaulted the building and immediately ransacked all of our computers looking for unlicensed copies of Windows.

Of course, they didn't find any. The agents were shocked and horrified to discover that every single piece of silicon in the entire World Headquarters compound was running 100% non-Microsoft software. Some of the Microserfs fainted at the sight and had to be ferried to a local hospital.

Said one hired goon, "I've never seen anything like this! To think that an entire business can operate without using even one pirated copy of Windows... That's simply amazing. This is the only time in Microsoft history in which we have come back empty-handed from a raid like this."

Okay, so they didn't actually leave empty-handed. Several goons attempted to plant incriminating evidence by installing bootleg copies of Windows on our machines, but their evil deed was foiled when the Windows setup program kept crashing with the bluescreen. We made sure they took their copies of Windows back out with them.

During the raid, the Microsoft goon force trampled our grass, scuffed our carpets, dirtied our bathrooms, and attempted to contaminate our LAN with the virus known as Windows. The Humorix law firm of Lowe, Morals, And Scruples has already filed a lawsuit seeking $2.5 million in actual damages and $4.5 googleplex in punitive damages. (However, we would be happy to settle for a copy of the Windows source code licensed under the GPL.)