Dateline: 04/02/01
Did anyone else find April Fools' Day on the Net anticlimactic this year? In spite of the usual flurry of overwrought media warnings about the threat of online pranksterism — hacker attacks, computer viruses, hoaxes and such — it seemed to come and go much like any other day.
Not that a few of the things we were warned about didn't happen — they did. The thing is, on the Internet hardly a day goes by when they don't. Every day is April Fools' Day online.
Thankfully, there is still a place called the real world (better known to some as "offline"), where order and civility for the most part prevail; where misbehavior is the exception rather than the rule. As this year's roundup of notable April Foolishness seems to show, the most fertile ground for practical joking still lies off the Net, not on...
Let Them Eat Cake
Babel, the Iraqi newspaper run by Uday (son of Saddam) Hussein, announced to the beleaguered people of Iraq on April 1 that meat and chicken rations would be substantially increased this year — then took it back on the last page. Rationing has been in effect in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The good news is that it's unlikely many Iraqis were fooled, given that their government has played essentially the same joke on them for several years running. In 1999 they were promised bananas, soft drinks and chocolate. In 1998 they were told that at President Clinton's behest, U.N. sanctions were to be lifted altogether. Funny, funny stuff.
Ungentlemanly of the Press
The CBC radio show "This Morning" broadcast a phony interview with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter in which the announcer, Michael Enright, called Mr. Carter — or rather, the actor playing Mr. Carter — a "washed-up peanut farmer from Hicksville." The conspirators felt it was so over-the-top that no one could possibly believe it, but the next day it was reported as fact in the Toronto Globe and Mail, where interviewer Enright was raked over the coals for his impertinence.
Self-Denial of Service Attack
Who needs hacker attacks when your software is made by Microsoft? Admittedly, this incident wasn't a prank, but its April Fools' Day timing makes it too amusing to pass up. The online auction site eBay found itself quite literally behind the times on Sunday when a programming bug caused its computers to skip the scheduled conversion to Daylight Savings. No doubt quite a few eBay customers thought they were victims of a prank, but it was an IT oversight that caused the problem. Everything was set right by Monday.
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