As it happens, it’s worth updating this story. Yes, Rupert Murdoch joined Twitter and we’ve been analysing every single tweet as if it’s being delivered on a stone tablet. But while that was happening, Twitter decided to verify not only Murdoch’s Twitter account but the one belonging to his wife Wendi Deng.

Except they verified the wrong one. @Wendi_Deng was a spoof account set up by a chap in London. Business Insider ran a transcript of the fake Deng coming clean, and questions were asked about Twitter’s still-secret verification process.

It should’ve been @wendideng, without the underscore, although as I write this the real account has been taken offline.

Mathew Ingram’s piece at GigaOM summed it up nicely: Why Twitter’s “verified account” failure matters. It’s about trust.

Anyway the ABC Radio conversation wandered well into other matters and hardly touched upon Rupert and Wendi. The pace of news. The appropriateness of Twitter marketing. Potential revenue streams for Twitter. And so on. And so forth.

The Sundays presenter was Jennifer Fleming, who’s filling in for James O’Loghlin over summer. The producer was Siobhan Moylan.

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Apparently Sundays is usually podcast, but I’m going to post my interview here anyway.

I spoke about this with Matt Parkinson on ABC 774 Melbourne this morning. It’s the usual message. This stuff is common. Scammers act quickly. The aim is to infect your computer and steal your money. I continue to be surprised that most radio presenters seem completely oblivious to what goes on online.

There’s also the now-common ABC glitch of hedging the way they introduce my name. I’ll have to put a stop to that.

The audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but it usually isn’t posted on their website and I don’t get paid for these spots, so here it is.

The supposed leaked memo from McDonald’s that I wrote about on Saturday is itself a fake.

The memo, which like the original fake by serial prankster David Thorne was posted on Reddit, purported to be an email from McDonald’s Australia’s Corporate Communications Manager Bronwyn Stubbs outlining their response.

Someone also attempted to post the text of the memo as a comment to my original post.

However Stubbs emailed me yesterday to say it’s a forgery.

The Purported McDonald’s Memo that you include as part of the article is based on a piece of internal communication that I sent out to my colleagues, however, it has been doctored and changed in various places. Most particularly the final paragraph regarding David Thorne has been completely made up.

That made-up paragraph read:

According to recent news articles and other information we have been provided, the fabricated letter was created by an Adelaide man named David Thorne. At no time should any member of McDonald’s mention the name David Thorne to any media representative. We have spoken to police and are in the process of filing charges against Thorne. We are also speaking with legal regarding a possible law suit. At no time should any member of McDonald’s contact Mr Thorne or engage in any correspondence with him. Should Mr Thorne contact you in any way please let me know immediately or forward any emails.

This certainly kills our speculation as to why someone at McDonald’s would have leaked this memo — they didn’t.

The question now becomes who posted this fake memo, and why? If we’re talking opportunity and motive, well, anyone on the entire Internet has opportunity. Motive? How about a certain prankster seeking attention for his book?

Bugger. I just linked to it myself.

Another question is how businesses can respond to fakery like this, particularly when it’s a brand which people already love to hate.

Well-known burger-tossers McDonald’s would be pissed off about that fake email tarnishing their reputation, and understandably so. But are they now responding with unethical tactics?

I don’t know. But here’s my little bit of evidence, and maybe The Power of Crowdsourcing [read: "expecting everyone else to do your work for you"] can fill in the gaps.

1. A document purporting to be a leaked internal memo outlining McDonald’s response policy, and claiming they’re taking legal action against prankster David Thorne, was posted on Reddit — which happens to be where Thorne promoted the original fake memo. The account used to post this new memo, the oh-so-revealing 9911882882288, was created at that time and this is their only post. I’ve included the full text of the purported memo below.
2. This morning someone tried to post a comment here which was merely a copy and paste of that same memo. They used a clearly false email address, which is presumably what caused their comment to be tagged as potential spam, and an Apple Mac running Safari sitting on an IP address on the Hutchison 3 mobile network.

This strikes me as rather curious.

Since McDonald’s is the big fast food chain that haters of big fast food chains love to hate, I don’t see that many anonymous bystanders rushing to its defence. Something in my waters says this is more likely to be someone acting on McDonald’s behalf — but that’s just a gut feeling.

And since McDonald’s is a big company, presumably they have a big respectable PR firm too.

So why, therefore, the anonymity?

The Public Relations Institute of Australia’s Code of Ethics talks about “dealing honestly”, which in my books means identifying yourself — although I’ll admit I’m hazy on how the PRIA itself would interpret that.

Has anyone else had someone attempt to post this memo as a comment? Is anyone seeing McDonald’s posting official comments in their own name?

And what do you make of the fact that prankster David Thorne works for a design agency which lists McDonald’s as a client?

Purported McDonald’s Memo

This is the full text of the comment which someone attempted to post on this website earlier today.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bronwyn Stubbs
Date: 14 October 2009 11:56:45 AM
To: 372 Recipients
Subject: Fabricated letter

Hi All,

As most of you are aware, a fabricated letter (attached) appeared on a US blog about a week ago. I contacted the blog and had them post a confirmation that the letter is fabricated but despite this it went viral and is now circulating via email.

A response was provided to media and customer service and we are currently have an alert on our corporate website which can be viewed here: http://mcdonalds.com.au/#/home/promo2

Should you be contacted by any media representative in regards to the letter, the following text must be used: “The memo in circulation supposedly written by the Proprietor of Frewville McDonald’s in South Australia is a complete fabrication. ‘Robert Trugabe’ is not a McDonald’s Australia employee and never has been. The contents of the letter are also completely fabricated. McDonald’s practices the highest standards of consumer ethics and would never encourage employees to act in a way that undermines our core customer values.”

According to recent news articles and other information we have been provided, the fabricated letter was created by an Adelaide man named David Thorne. At no time should any member of McDonald’s mention the name David Thorne to any media representative. We have spoken to police and are in the process of filing charges against Thorne. We are also speaking with legal regarding a possible law suit. At no time should any member of McDonald’s contact Mr Thorne or engage in any correspondence with him. Should Mr Thorne contact you in any way please let me know immediately or forward any emails.

Please inform all those who should be made aware.

Cheers,

Bron

Bronwyn Stubbs
Corporate Communications Manager
McDonald’s Australia

What do you reckon? Comments please!

Following yesterday’s news that a memo claiming McDonald’s deliberately rips off customers was a fake (pictured), I spoke about Internet pranks on ABC Radio 891 Adelaide this morning. I figured you might as well see my notes.

Oh, and the audio is below.

The fake memo was the work of Adelaide-based satirist and prankster David Thorne who, amongst other things, runs the website 27bslash6 as troll-bait and is flogging t-shirts and a book of his pranks called The Internet is a Playground.

Personally, I reckon pranks that just waste people’s time or otherwise annoy them without making any more significant point about society are pretty cheap.

Thorne’s attempt to pay a bill with a drawing of a spider is perhaps amusing, and it’s good that the victim saw the joke. But I put it at the same level as The Chaser bringing a horse into shops. Whereas The Chaser‘s breach of security at APEC, which you can see on video, made an important point about security theatre and social engineering attacks.

Anyway, this is what I discovered while poking around…

A US ABC News story listed their Top 5 Website Hoaxes of All Time, including the original website for The Blair Witch Project, Bonsai Kittens, a Victorian-era robot called Boilerplate and The Yes Men‘s stunning disruption of Dow Chemicals.

The Web site DowEthics.com looks pretty convincing at first, but it has no affiliation with Dow Chemical’s real Web site, Dow.com.

Even so, it fooled the BBC in 2004 when an unknowing researcher used the Web site to book an interview with a Dow Chemical executive.

While on-air the “executive” said Dow would finally clean up the toxic chemical plant in Bhopal, India and pay billions in compensation to the victims on the 20-year anniversary of the disaster. Dow Chemical’s stock dropped sharply.

In reality, Dow Chemical does not claim responsibility for the lethal gas that killed at least 8,000 people and poisoned about half a million.

The Dow stunt was pulled off by The Yes Men, a loosely knit group of Internet pranksters who spoof prominent corporations and organisations.

I also stumbled across the Exploding Cactus Spider Hoax, how the story of Jeff Goldblum’s death was created and spread using a “celebrity fake news generator” at FakeAWish.com, and the Museum of Hoaxes’ list of The Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time.

I suppose I should mention that to check if something’s a hoax or not, Snopes is your friend.

So, which are your favourite Internet hoaxes?

[The radio interview is probably Copyright © 2009 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but since they don't archive them I reckon it's fair enough putting it here provided you just listen to it and I link back to the ABC Adelaide website and encourage you to listen.]

• No Snooping – Design Issues: Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s notes on a discussion at the House of Lords by Baroness Miller on 11 February, looking at Deep Packet Inspection and the threats to privacy, democracy and growth of the Internet.
• Deep Packet Inspection | Office of the Privacy Commisioner: Canada’s Privacy Commissioner puts a collection of essays online. What has Australia’s equivalent done, I wonder?
• April Fool prank tanks Telstra stock | The Australian: A magazine publishes a hoax story about Telstra being split up, and the share price rises 5%, increasing the company’s market capitalisation by $1.9 billion. Temporarily.
• Thinking the Unthinkable Parable of the Future of News | Networked News: An essay that deserves a comfortably-paced read over a cup of tea.

• The Australian Sex Party: “The Australian Sex Party is a political response to the sexual needs of Australia in the 21st century. It is an attempt to restore the balance between sexual privacy and sexual publicity that has been severely distorted by morals campaigners and prudish politicians.”
• Measuring the Information Society: The ICT Development Index 2009: Australia is ranked #14 based on figures from 2007. In 2003 it was at #13.
• Ho Hum, Sweden Passes new anti File Sharing Legislation | Perceptric Forum: Tom Koltai’s analysis of that new Swedish law: It’ll make no difference long term.
• As Sweden’s Internet anonymity fades, traffic plunges | Ars Technica: A new Swedish law that went into effect 1 April makes it possible for copyright holders to go to court and unmask a user based on an IP address. Sweden’s Internet traffic dropped 40% overnight.
• Study: online sexual predators not like popular perception | Ars Technica: This survey rejects the idea that the Internet is an especially perilous place for minors, and finds that while the nature of online sex crimes against minors changed little between 2000 and 2006, the profile of the offenders has been shifting — and both differ markedly from the popular conception.
• What Is Fail Whale?: The complete history of the Twitter’s error-bringing Fail Whale, along with all the art and craft it’s inspired to date.
• Voda/Hutch merger rattles ACCC | ZDNet Australia: Australia’s competition watchdog tonight issued a strongly worded statement of concern that the proposed merger of mobile carriers Hutchison and Vodafone could lead to increased retail prices on mobile telephony and broadband services.
• All the news that’s fit to tweet | guardian.co.uk: The Guardian has also announced a new 140-character commenting system. “You’ll never again need to wade through paragraphs of extended argument, looking for the point, or suffer the unbearable tedium of having to read multiple protracted, well-grounded perspectives on the blogs you love.”
• Share This Lecture! | Viddler.com: Mark Pesce’s annual lecture for “Cyberworlds” class, Sydney University, 31 March 2009. About the significance of sharing across three domains: sharing media, sharing knowledge, and how these two inevitably lead to the sharing of power.
• Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink | The Guardian: One of the better April Fools’ Day pieces. I particularly like the extracts from the Twitterised news archive. 1927: “OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise *sigh*”
• Flappers, wine, cocaine and revels (Pt II) | The Vapour Trail: A few hours after five Melbourne girls were arrested for vagrancy in late March 1928, the headline of Melbourne’s Truth broadcast their misdeeds: “White Girls with Negro Lovers. Flappers, Wine, Cocaine and Revels. Raid Discloses Wild Scene of Abandon”.
• A Blacklist for Websites Backfires in Australia | TIME: Time‘s take on the leak of the Australian Internet censorship blacklist portrays it as a joke and a scandal. There are some factual errors in the story, but this looks like how it’ll end up being perceived internationally.

Of all the moments of frustration in last night’s SBS program Insight — and there were many — the most revealing was from host Jenny Brockie. After almost an hour debating Internet “filtering”, Brockie said, “I’m still unclear about whether it works or whether it doesn’t work, as a system.”

Thus begins my article in Crikey today — though it’s behind the paywall. If you’re not yet a subscriber (and why not?) you can get yourself a 21-day free trial. [Update: Things are only behind the Crikey paywall for 14 days, Click away!]

My key theme is that the reason no-one can agree on whether “the filter” will “work” is that no-one has defined exactly what it’s supposed to do — least of all the Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy.

“I have only ever identified [the material to be blocked as] Refused Classification in terms of child porn, bestiality, rape, incest sites, those sorts of things,” Conroy said last night. “For adults who want to be able to watch the other sort of material, we’re not proposing to do that. We’ve never proposed to do that.”

Except that, as the article details, the story has changed over time.

OK, this morning’s post about Senator Conroy being sacked was a little April Fools’ Day jokette. But with the continuing controversy over Internet censorship, the delayed National Broadband Network (though that finally gets an announcement of something or other this week), and yesterday’s gaffe about iiNet spying on its customers, could it soon be true?

There’s lots and lots of good material to read here, but I don’t want it to dominate my home page so they’re all over the jump.

• Famous Twits: 50 Celebrities on Twitter | Laurel Papworth: If you’re after “famous people” on Twitter, here’s a good a list as any to start with.
• When Aeroflot Passengers Rejected Their Pilot | Moscow Times: The pilot was drunk. Aeroflot’s reaction? “Meh. He only has to press a button. No problem.” You can’t make this stuff up!
• Facebook, MySpace drive mobile web use | News.com.au: A survey of 500 people by Sweeney Research has shown 31% of Australians access the web via their mobile phone handset. Or, if you prefer, more than two-thirds still don’t.
• P J O’Rourke: How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink: A classic O’Rourke rant from 1986.
• 2nd Annual PR & New Media Summit 2009: There’s a bunch of familiar names presenting at this conference on 3 to 4 March. I doubt I’ll make this one, but you never know.
• Rich man, poor man: study shows body language can indicate socioeconomic status | Physorg.com: A new study in Psychological Science reveals that non-verbal cues can give away a person’s socioeconomic status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper SES backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviors compared to participants from lower SES backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60 second clips of the videos, they were able to correctly guess the participants’ SES background, based on their body language.
• So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time | NYTimes.com: Why the iPhone app store and the Ocarina application in particular represent a whole new wave of software development.
• A Definition Of Piracy In The Digital Age | Link: I’d imagined that the use of the term “piracy” to cover copyright infringement was a recent invention of the music and movie industries. Not so. Rick Welykochy traces it back to 1906.
• Drugs ‘legal in 10 years’ claim | BBC News: The Chief Constable of North Wales reminds us (from just over a year ago) that prohibition doesn’t work. Half of all reported crime is about feeding a drug habit.
• Why telcos should fear Twitter | ZDNet Australia: The short answer is that Twitter can replace SMS with a far more flexible tool. And about time. Telcos have been charging the equivalent of $1 million per gigabyte to send an SMS. It’s a rort.
• How to troubleshoot the POP3 Connector in Windows Small Business Server 2003 | Microsoft: What it says. This article didn’t help me with today’s problem, but it will certainly come in useful.
• Ecstasy ‘no worse than horse riding’ | News.com.au: Professor David Nutt, chairman of the UK Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), is a scientist and can do the maths. “This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates — indeed encourages — certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others such as drug use.”
• Aussies OK pirated software for personal use | CRN Australia: A study commissioned by Microsoft found that almost half of Australians believe it’s OK to use pirated software for personal use. Many can’t tell the difference between genuine and illegal software.
• Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death Search Magazine: American satirist P j O’Rourke writes about his experience of being diagnosed with cancer.
• Your Vision for 2009 | GetUp! Campaign Actions: Political campaigning organisation GetUp! presents the results of its latest survey of members.
• So why is filtering a pointless exercise? | sirchriss: An education technologist outlines why trying to provide a filtered Internet is ultimately self-defeating.
• How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections | PBS MediaShift: Former ABC journalist Julie Posetti describes how her students used Twitter to cover Australian elections.
• Politics and Technology Forum: Campaigning Online | Microsoft Events: The second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum is in Canberra on 26 February. I’ll be liveblogging it on this website, and there’ll be a special Stilgherrian Live Road Trip on the way. Details soon. Keynote speaker is Joe Trippi, who’s run several (unsuccessful) Democrat US presidential campaigns, and speakers include Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner.
• Why Teens Don’t Twitter | A Meaningful Life: Marc Lehmann’s take on the reason for the (apparent) older demographic profile of Twitter users.
• Text, text, text | Inside Story: Is the energy, liveliness and to-the-pointness of text-messaging already history, asks Richard Johnstone in this article from October 2008.
• Liam Vickery’s Blog: Top Aussies On Twitter: Liam Vickery’s personal choices for the top Australian twitterers. I don’t know Liam, but have seen him about on Twitter.
• Forgive Us Our Debts | newmatilda.com: Is debt really all that bad? In this extract from her new book, Margaret Atwood measures the changing moral weight of debt.
• Entering the Mobile Ecosystem | Silicon Federation: "Would you like to put your brand on a device that customers can't be without, a device they reach for many times a day?" A seminar on creating an iPhone app for your business.
• Spot the difference? | middleclassgirl.com: Whatever happened to TV presenter Naomi Robson?
• Ten Tweets about Twitter | the [non]billable hour: Some rather good tips to getting your head around Twitter.
• Global recession – where did all the money go? | guardian.co.uk: This set of diagrams steps through the different kinds of money, showing why the global financial system is unstable and, effectively, a giant pyramid scheme.
• Of Time and Twitter | Woolly Days: Another nice overview of Twitter’s rise, with an emphasis on journalism. However I suspect that the story of an “all-Twitter newspaper” from Scotland is a hoax.
• Twitter journalism, beyond happenstance | Almighty Link: “When US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, a few non-journalists used their investigative instincts and some basic Twitter tools to find details about the news and share it with the world.” This article is another exploring the boundaries of who is and isn’t “doing journalism”.
• More Silliness: Congressman Wants to Ban “Silent” Cell Phone Cameras | Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: There’s a push of sorts in the US to make all phone cameras make a sound when they take a photo. As Weinstein points out, there’s no evidence there’s actually a problem to address, there are many other kinds of camera smaller than phone cameras, and even phone cameras can shoot in video mode — where a continuous sound would ruin the audio recording.
• Twitter | The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry: Stephen Fry, who now has 88,000+ followers on Twitter and rising rapidly, explains how he uses Twitter at this incredibly high volume — and requests understanding and a bit of self-help.
• Virtual Assistant – Nicole Hammett Business Support: This website isn’t the most brilliant graphic design (it’s a bit generic), but it builds trust in the business for two simple reasons: It explains clearly what this person does, and the rate card says very clearly what it’ll cost. None of this vague “our rates are competitive” and then asking you for all of your contact details. The only real turn-off for me is the generic stock-photography image of a harried office worker (what value does that add?) when it’d be better to have a photo of Nicole herself.

• New Twitter Anti-Spam Bot Causes Chaos | ReadWriteWeb: The real reason Kevin Rudd’s Twitter account was misbehaving.
• Too many twitters drown out Rudd website | theage.com.au: The Age‘s article claiming the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Twitter account “crashed&” because of overload.
• Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd Joins Twitter – The Reponse: No Clean Feed | Young PR: Australian PR expert chap Paull Young’s take on Kevin Rudd’s launch into the Twitterverse. He reckons it’s a waste of time because the audience is too small.
• Internet addiction disorder | Wikipedia: The Wikipedia article says that the definition and status of Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) is still somewhat controversial.
• China classes Web addiction as clinical disorder | The Inquirer: China appears to be the first nation to official classify Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) as a clinical condition.
• Reservoir Thunderbirds | YouTube: YouTube recommended that I watch this mashup of Thunderbirds and Reservoir Dogs. I agree.
• Was Simpson Desert closed because of aliens? | AdelaideNow…: The South Australian government refuses to rule out that their closure of the Simpson Desert Conservation Park was due to the presence of aliens.
• A senior fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence | International Herald Tribune: The news report that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent was a hoax, set up by two guys developing a character for a new TV series.

• NSLU2-Linux: Technical information for hacking the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device, along with the Synology DS101, the Iomega NAS100d, the D-Link DSMG600 and other ixp4xx-based devices with large attached storage.
• Hacking WD MyBook World Ed: Western Digital's My Book World Edition network storage device is actually a little Linux RAID server. This Wiki has technical information on how to hack them.
• Sarah Jessica Parker Looks Like A Horse: Well, she does. And here's the website. Proof that people have too much time on their hands.
• A twittering experiment | eicolab: An interesting use Twitter, with a comment added by yours truly.
• Friends, Enemies and My Army | Viddler.com: Another recent presentation by Mark Pesce, this one at the 2008 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, on 25 May 2008. A nice trip through the power of Twitter, the "nuclear option", and the surprising influence of Josh Marshall's army.
• Phoenix Lander “Talks” to Twitterers | NYTimes.com: Includes an interview with the NASA employee who's been playing the part of the Mars Phoenix spacecraft on Twitter (@MarsPhoenix).
• Australian Strategic Policy Institute: "One for the feed reader", I've been told. I haven't explored this site yet.
• A discussion paper on the singular use of “they”: This link looks like it solves this question forever. If only people read it…
• Twitter Co-Opted by Users as Better SMS, Social Media Platform | URBEINGRECORDED: Yet another superb essay on the impact of Twitter.
• The Gruen Transfer | ABC TV: A new TV series looking at the art and science of persuasion as used by the advertising industry. Much good stuff here.
• Ern Malley | Wikipedia: Not exactly a new story, but I was recently reminded of this wonderful literary hoax from the 1940s.
• Scaling a Microblogging Service – Part I | Hueniverse: A comprehensive but fairly technical explanation of the problems Twitter faces.
• The Digital Media Revolution | YouTube: Mark Pesce, Technology Futurist speaks about the Digital Media Revolution at the SAGEM conference, April 2008, in Adelaide. Will the government heed his advice? In 5 parts, this links to part 1.
• Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address | YouTube: An inspirational 15 mins about the importance of following your dream, even if the end result isn't clear. "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back."

The hack took place on 17 June 2007, when viewers watching webcam shots of Czech mountain resorts saw an explosion in the Krkonose or Giant Mountains.

Even though they’re being charged with a crime, the group was also awarded the NG 333 prize for young artists by Prague’s National Gallery together with a cash prize of 333,000 koruna (around AUD$21,000).

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

I’ve been looking at this photograph for hours, scattered over the last few days.

It was apparently taken from the space shuttle Columbia. No it wasn’t, scroll down for the comments. I shouldn’t need to point out that the big lumpy thing in the foreground is called Africa, and further back there’s the thing they call Europe.

It fascinates me because it — literally! — puts things in perspective. Some of the world’s greatest cities are invisible, at least in daylight. The Low Countries are just starting to blaze in artificial light. But the brightest lights are the flares of oil wells in the deserts of Algeria and Libya, and off the coast of Nigeria.

Hey, aren’t the people there starving? That can’t be right, if they’ve got all that oil, surely?

Thanks to Memex 1.1 for the pointer.