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Bill The Hacker-- Or Not (10/16/00)
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Here's a quickie to serve as food for thought. By now you may have heard how Bill Gates was the "victim" in a hacker's attack on the Orange County Register. As faithful viewer Ken Hall points out, a Reuters article discusses how some nefarious individual broke into the paper's web site and altered the content of three stories which were, appropriately enough, about hacking. One hacking article in particular was changed to report that Billy-boy himself was arrested for breaking into NASA's computers.
Yes, it seems that Mr. Gates's name was "substituted for [alleged hacker] Jason Diekman's" in the NASA hack article, leading to consternation, uproar, and rioting in the Orange County streets. Poor Bill... someone actually made it look like he broke federal electronic trespassing laws, when in fact his company has only been found guilty of breaking federal antitrust laws. Frankly, we're outraged.
Or, at least we would be, if we weren't wrestling with this intriguing possibility: how do we know that the Reuters article wasn't hacked to switch Gates's and Diekman's names? In other words, what if Bill did in fact get arrested for hacking into NASA, and some hacker altered the Orange County Register articles to make it look like Diekman did it instead? Worse yet, has AtAT been hacked to switch the names as well, meaning you can't trust what you just read? And most perplexing of all, last night we dreamed we were a butterfly... are we now a butterfly dreaming of being a 'net soap production team? Pardon us, but we need some more coffee.
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SceneLink (2615)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 10/16/00 episode: October 16, 2000: Michael Dell's Apple obsession spirals way out of control, as his company eerily recreates Apple's PowerBook 5300 fiasco. Meanwhile, Apple is looking for a few good sales shills to help boost its bottom line this holiday shopping season, and Bill Gates is maligned by a hacker who altered a newspaper's web site-- or is it the other way around?...
Other scenes from that episode: 2613: Sicker By The Minute (10/16/00) It's like the man never sleeps! Mike Dell is bucking for a spotlight case study in some scholarly psych journal or something, because his ongoing obsession with Apple continues unabated-- in fact, it's obviously getting worse by the minute... 2614: C'mon, Be A Shill For Steve (10/16/00) It sure is bracing being thrust back into the "beleaguered" days again, isn't it? Sure, things aren't nearly as dire as they were in those heady days of '96 and '97, when rag-clad Apple employees were living in cardboard boxes and accosting passers-by with signs reading "WILL CRAFT HUMAN INTERFACE FOR FOOD."...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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