Would there be any other kind of Yes Men stunt if there wasn't Youtube video? Even by the standards of the group's anti-consumerism pranks — portraying themselves as spokespeople for McDonalds, Dow Chemical, and organizations such as Housing and Urban Development and the World Trade Organization — this stunt was something of a cerebral sommersault. The idea was to turn the word of authority from these figures on its head and in the process reveal an inconvenient truth.

In this particular case the Yes Men were aiming their pointed satire at the statement from the Chamber of Commerce that asked for the science of global warming to be put on "trial."

Several companies have dropped their Chamber of Commerce membership over their lobbying against climate change bills currently making their way through Congress, most notably, Apple. Nike has stepped down from their board but not entirely from their membership.

"Survivaball." Read all about it on the website. "Worried About Climate Change? Don't sweat it." Instead, you can wear a ridiculous rubber-ball body suit to protect you from the ravages of global warming. It's an example of the world's largest corporations using engineering to replace ethics, with humorous results, etc.

This sort of fake corporate reductio ad absurdum is The Yes Men's specialty. They've previously posed as corporate spokespeople and weaseled their way onto unsuspecting news shows, where they made humorous, evil corporate statements, and filmed rooms full of unsuspecting corporate suits applauding politely at some outrageous presentation for an idea like using shit to feed the poor. They also had a hand in last year's Fake New York Times.

So! A tipster tells us this Survivaball website and promo video are just laying the groundwork for next week's stunt:

The plan so far is to put a bunch of people in like 50 inflatable "Survivaball" suits and float them down the East River. It's about the UN meetings that are happening that day, and it's going to be pretty crazy.

The group's already been handing out this Survivaball flier down on Wall Street. Everything appears to be in order here. All you unsuspecting corporate whores who don't read this website or watch lefty documentaries on a regular basis will soon pay—with your dignity.

This guy was out to prove that young Tony Castro could be got. And he got him. With Yahoo Messenger:

Mr Dominguez, who was born in Cuba, said his sting operation had been designed to "shatter the myth of an impenetrable" security network around the country's first family.

He could have, what, come slithering through the webcam like the girl in The Ring and strangled Castro Jr., mysteriously? Not quite clear on the concept here. Let's let the people decide.
[Miami Herald, Independent. Pic via]

Fancy shelter mag Domino folded in January. How are the former top staffers going to support themselves? By selling off all the swag they accumulated! A bunch of former editors there are having a tag sale of their "choice effluvia" left over from photo shoots and whatnot. Man, those gigs where you get all the effluvia are the sweetest ones.


A list of the 50 most popular newspaper blogs. Huh.

Here's the deal that's keeping the Boston Globe alive, pending union approval: an 8% pay cut, an unpaid one week furlough, the end of retirement plan contributions, the end of "lifetime job guarantees," and more layoffs. That'll hold off death for, oh, eight more months or so.


TV ratings have been delayed for days! How will we know which shows to accurately mock?

In the L magazine, Amy Shearn recounts being forced to pull "the worst magazine prank ever" at her former women's mag gig: rolling her friend up in a rug as if she was dead, then calling moving services to help dispose of the package. Yea, that's kinda bad, but the worst magazine prank ever would probably be "Portfolio."

The @dinalohan account on Twitter, supposedly written by the reality-TV star mom of Lindsay Lohan, was exposed last weekend as a hilarious fraud perpetrated by a Matt Cherette, a 24-year-old Michigan man. But Handler and her guest commentators seem unaware that it's not actually Lohan behind the tweets. Handler was completely taken in by Cherette's main schtick — writing tweets which bump up against Twitter's 140-character limit, which the imaginary Lohan attributes to "censorship" by Twitter's "tech support."

The stupid tradition goes back to, who knows, British newspapers, who had this prank thing down pat, because they make shit up every day. But, you know, the BBC did the spaghetti tree thing in 1957, and the papers still run almost-plausible stories every year. We have some small modicum of respect for the well-executed Fleet Street April Fools' prank, because, hey, they're actual real legitimate newspapers that print lies for laughs once a year. Subverting the 'authority' of a printed newspaper with bullshit is just funnier than, like, making your "funny news" web community look like a social networking site for a day.

The problem is everyone, especially on the internet, is so clever now, and hip to the joke—that is the primary tone of 90% of all communication these days, "in on the joke"—so all the fun has just been leeched out of the pranks. You know no one at all will buy it, and everyone, at the same time, is expecting it, so it's actually just this depressing obligation to make a joke that you know no one will actually enjoy.

Google has to "outdo" themselves every year with a stupid new pretend feature or application, and the only time it's ever been funny was when they actually for-real announced Gmail on April 1, 2004.

Just look at this exhaustive/exhausting list of every lousy prank going on today and tell us you wouldn't rather just read any given issue of The Onion than slog through DailyCandy's yukfest. Maybe the last genuinely amusing 'pranks' left are the internal media memos. They at least have the benefit of seeming bitchy, and not just more "oh aren't we cheeky" fun-for-public-consumption. (The Politico memo is more "funny because it's true"—or maybe not funny because it's true?)

It's all a depressing parade of sad clowns jeered at for not being funny enough by the onlookers congratulating themselves for not finding clowns funny anymore.

All that said, we agree that this one's kinda funny.

April Fool's is always a big event for Silicon Valley companies. The annual festival of pranks is a defining event for geek culture. When he worked at Sun Microsystems, colleagues of Eric Schmidt, now Google's CEO, disassembled a Volkswagen Beetle and reassembled it inside his office. Google's pranks over the years have ranged from Google Romance to a toilet-based Internet service provider.

Since he joined, a Google tipster tells us, Krantz has been the wordsmith behind Google's tomfoolery — "Google uses the same weird writer genius every year." He promises the prank will be "very good and totally insane." But isn't the ultimate April Fool's joke here that Google, which worships at the altar of the algorithm, actually employs a veteran of the world's most prestigious magazine?

(Photo by Ted Thai/Life)

Earlier today, we wondered whether Dina, the mother of Lindsay Lohan, was tweeting for real. The constant complaints about "haters" and deranged defenses of her daughter, not to mention the sheer volume sustained over the past two weeks, seemed nearly impossible to fake.

The key word being "nearly." Cherette, a relative newcomer to Twitter, seems to have quickly learned the potentials of this new storytelling medium. One thing the Lohan impostor quickly figured out: By pretending that Dina didn't get the service's 140-character limit on posts, he'd be able to draw a small army of enraged Twitter nerds eager to correct Lohan's gaffe.

According to our tipster, who says he's privy to some of Cherette's private postings on LiveJournal, Cherette has been posting comments crowing about his coup. Here are screenshots:

Assuming this prank doesn't have yet another layer to it, congratulations, Matt. You have endless opportunity ahead of you getting paid to pretend you're a celebrity.

Update: We just heard back from Cherette, who's admitted to the stunt and demonstrated that he controls the Twitter account. "What would you like to know?" he asks. Leave questions for him in the comments. Cherette also says he's the person who created Rosie O'Donnell's fake Twitter account.

A scan of the contents (PDF) reveals a fairly dry collection of fake stories about the detrimental effects of capitalism on the environment, along with fake ads and fake sections correct right down to the back-page Lex column.

Unlike the Yes Men, these pranksters, led by blogger Raoul Djukanovic, aren't making any mystery of their identities. In a press release (see below), they said they collected donations through the internet and printed "tens of thousands of copies... almost as many as the FT sells here daily." Volunteers then fanned out to distribute the 12-page paper in London (the printed paper can be seen in the videos here).

Whether the paper will strike a meaningful blow against unbridled capitalism is up for debate. But that so much money was spent printing it suggests that the Web won't rout dead trees from every last news niche: There appears to be no substitute for paper as a vessel for emotional watersheds, be it an activist group's proselytizing (resonant to the group if no one else), a racially and politically momentous inauguration or the rise of a dreaded enemy.

In other words, the newspaper will remain as a powerful cultural icon long after it ceases to have much point as a communications medium. Good look making much money off that, though, unless you sell one last gullible billionaire on living his childhood publishing dream.

Press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

27 MARCH 2009

Fake FT wakes up London to radical action

Concerned Londoners today handed out copies of a spoof Financial Times, urging journalists and big business to make the future possible by putting people first.

Set in 2020, the 12-page paper revealed how action in 2009 reined in climate change, saving billions from extinction. Carbon rationing didn't kill us, it explained, despite the inconvenience to multinational companies. But we couldn't have endless growth with finite resources. Editors even apologised for suggesting otherwise.

"We live on financial crimes," the paper confessed in a front-page advert, which satirised a recent Financial Times billboard. "In a world of cold harsh truths," it said, beside a panting St Bernard atop a mountain, "we rescue stories from the facts."

Launched at dawn from behind Waterloo station, this coup was aimed at everyone's excuses for apathy. Unless we change the way we live radically, we'll make our world uninhabitable within decades. It's time for drastic action, and if governments won't take it, we have to do something ourselves.

"Journalists frame public debate, and the City frames public policy," said Raoul Djukanovic, who edited today's fake FT. "If they reframed their thinking, they could help build a different world instead of conning us with lifestyle porn and bubbles."

The paper was a full-colour replica of the iconic pink ‘un, including news from Britain and abroad, and editorials and comment, poking fun at FT columnists. It was funded by donations on the Internet, and given away for free by volunteers. Tens of thousands of copies were printed – almost as many as the FT sells here daily.

Why bother, some commuters asked. "Newspapers won't change the world, but they do spread words that can make people think," said Marcos Marcuse, who handed out papers near London Bridge. "What are we going to tell our children? That we thought about trying to save ourselves, but it wasn't ‘good business' or ‘objective reporting'?"

Well, OK, they only profile a few people, mainly a magazine editor and a prissy French designer who gets the joke but only sort of.

From the inelegant English of designer, Lloyd Klein, caught unawares at Studio 54:

I go backstage to try to find my manager to ask 'Who the hell is this person?' But I stayed very cool with the situation ... I know the way French people react because I am French. They don't have a big sense of humor. They're very bitter, so I think it will be a tough one.

From Marie Claire (high fashion!) editor Joanna Coles, who got Bruno'd in Milan last year:

We literally didn't realize it was Bruno. We said—thinking it was just some Italian tagalong—'You can't come in, we don't have a ticket for you!' If we'd realized it was him, we'd have totally taken him in—why not?

Cohen fooled lots of other people too, like Stella McCartney—apparently he waved a tampon around at the designer's Spring '09 show in Paris—and supermodel Tom Brady-dater Gisele Bündchen, of whom Bruno claimed to be an old friend ever since they met one time in Los Angeles. To her credit, Gisele didn't try to fake that she remembered him. Most of these high-nosed fashion waifs were pretty okay about it and found it funny. You know, after the fact. At least they took it better than those cage match attendees. Though, I hear that Jonathan Antin can really throw down.

Now Wired's Threat Level blog has the inside story of how it all went down. The hacker's handle is GMZ (no relation to the AOL dirt-hub), a clever 18-year-old who used a rather primitive but effective system to break in. Noticing that Twitter allowed unlimited login attempts, he fashioned a program that would feed English words into the account of a frequent Twitter follower named Crystal. The next morning, "happiness" did the trick, but GMZ learned he hadn't just hacked into any account—Crystal was a Twitter staffer with full administrative access.

Realizing he had access to reset any account's password and login, GMZ did the responsible thing: He threw it open to hacker forum Digital Gangster, offering access to any account by request:

President-Elect Barack Obama was among the most popular requests from Digital Gangster denizens, with around 20 members asking for access to the election campaign account. After resetting the password for the account, he gave the credentials to five people.

He also filled requests for access to Britney Spears' account, as well as the official feeds for Facebook, CBS News, Fox News and the accounts of CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez and Digg founder Kevin Rose. Other targets included additional news outlets and other celebrities. Fox won the hacker popularity contest, beating out even Obama and Spears. According to Twitter, 33 high-profile accounts were compromised in all.

That means that the poet behind the Britney vagina tweet was not the same author as the minimalist O'Reilly entry, in case you had trouble rectifying their wildly differing voices. Let this be a lesson to you all: a word in the dictionary is not a secure password. Make it eight characters, mixing letters and numbers—otherwise anyone can break in to your account and pass off outrageous statements like "Fred 62 is so good" as your own.

• Weak Password Brings 'Happiness' to Twitter Hacker [Wired]

A user on eBaum's World, a site which posts pictures and invites often profane discussion, suggested his peers search on a string of icons — "✈ ▌▌" — and thereby launch it onto Google Trends, the search engine's tracker for swiftly rising Internet phenomena.

The trick worked; Google's algorithm declared the glyph's rise "volcanic." And despite a surge of protests about its tastelessness, the Googlers have yet to censor the term, as they've been known to do with other offensive searches which show up on Google Trends, like a swastika symbol which showed up last summer.

Officially, Google says it has robots which take care of this: "The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material." In reality? The 9/11 hack shows how easy it is to fool Google.

[via Twice.com]

New York Times Special Edition Video News Release - Nov. 12, 2008 from H Schweppes on Vimeo.

[A more generous response from Alex S. Jones, a former Times reporter and author and Harvard professor: "I’m just glad someone thinks The New York Times print edition is worthy of an elaborate hoax." That is correct.]

[The group that produced the paper put out a statement announcing their work this morning. It doesn't say that the Yes Men are responsible, but they are. And to the one guy who's already put a copy of the spoof issue on eBay for $199, good luck, you nut. People are going to be a little smarter after going through this.]

We have done some sleuthing based on intelligence received yesterday. First of all, this stunt needed a lot of volunteers to distribute the papers. They were rallied online, via BecauseWeWantit.org.

This email went out to the collaborators last night:

TONIGHT - and especially, TOMORROW MORNING (WEDNESDAY) - a year of work
involving dozens of collaborators comes to a head. Here's the schedule:

** TOMORROW (WEDNESDAY) MORNING, 7am-11am: **

Take a break in your commute to pick up materials, then distribute them
on the rest of your commute. (Or if you want to come back and refill,
fantastic.)

Look for the white UHaul vans near:

- UNION SQUARE: probably near the northwest corner of Union Square Park
- COLUMBUS CIRCLE: probably on 56th St. between 8th and 9th Ave.
- GRAND CENTRAL: probably on 43rd St. between Vanderbilt and Madison,
near west entrance of Grand Central Station.
- PENN STATION: probably on 33rd St. between 6th and 7th Ave., just NE of
Penn Station

Locations will be confirmed and updated by text alert (sign up at
http://becausewewantit.org) and email around 7am tomorrow.

** Also, TONIGHT, 5pm-8pm (if time is tight tomorrow or you just can't wait): **

Look for a white UHaul van near the NORTHWEST CORNER OF UNION SQUARE
PARK. You'll pick up the materials and KEEP THEM SECRET until TOMORROW
MORNING, when you can distribute them wherever you happen to be, or on
your commute.

WATCH TEXT ALERTS FOR ANY LOCATION CHANGES (sign up at
http://becausewewantit.org). We'll also send another email around 5pm.

** THINGS TO BRING: **

- A bag that can hold a big bundle of printed matter - as much as you
can carry. Think big canvas bags, big backpacks, rolling carts, etc.
- Warm clothes
- Friends (or we will team you up)

What will happen:
Something cool! You'll receive materials and instructions when you
arrive. NOTE: YOU DON'T KNOW WHO DID THIS. We want to maintain maximum
mystery around this, for as long as possible - at least for a couple of
days.

Tomorrow morning we'll also have an online viral campaign - a quick
click before you take off for work can make a big difference!

Thank you again for volunteering your time and energy!

See you soon,
The many secret people YOU DO NOT KNOW

BUT: The email address that sent out this message was linked to the site of The Yes Men, longtime liberal prank group that has been doing things just as complex and finely tuned as this for years. The Yes Men run the Because We Want It site, through which they set up this prank. They wanted to be anonymous for a while allegedly, but too late.

Well done, sirs. We hope the Times doesn't sue you for copyright violations.

Victim: NextNewNetworks cofounder Timothy Shea

Victim: Yahoo ad exec Mike Walrath

Victim: Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson

[Stereohell via Copyranter at Animal]