Teacher's head explodes due to Wi-Fi, mobe radiation

Taste?

"In the interests of good taste the Reg has refrained from linking to the vid."

Since when has the bounds of good taste stopped the Reg from linking to some juicy video or image?

hard to tell the difference

between some of LP's usual bespittled ranting and an April Fool's posting.

Maybe the new A160T "SOCOM Skynet killdroid" or whatever got to him.

Believable April Fool jokes

Many years ago, The Guardian published a story about a new automated bus control system for London. All buses were to be driverless, and controlled remotely by operators who would view the traffic through a CCTV mounted in the driver's cab, connected in real time to a video screen in the control centre. One operator in the centre would be able to control up to five buses simultaneously, tests had shown.

I was so taken in, I nearly posted it to risks@csl.sri.com

A few years later, a net-friend who was an aviation specialist published a story that the flight crew on an Airbus A320 had experienced an outage of the flight control system on approach to landing. When they tried to restart the system, it gave a message saying "PIN not recognised". Apparently, this was due to Airbus using second-hand ATM chips to build their on-board systems.

The "incident" turned up a few months later in the final year undergraduate dissertation of one of my software engineering students, quoted without irony as an example of the risks from computer systems.

A few years after that, I broadcast my own story that Airbus had subcontracted the maintenance of the flight control software on the A320 to a third-party support firm. I had just just returned from a meeting in Copenhagen, and said I had seen the story in the Danish magazine "Godaj" ("Hello" in Danish). I said that the head of the third-party support firm was Wolf Larssen (the villain of "The Sea Wolf" by Jack London) and quoted him as saying that he was not worried that the original developers of the flight control system would not give him the source code, since his employees could download the binary and de-compile it.

At least three experts in safety-critical avionics were totally taken in and expressed their concern to the discussion group on which I had broadcast the story. I was still receiving concerned enquiries 5 years later from people who had read it in the archives, and hadn't noticed the date on it.

Moral: Make the spoofs believable, but perhaps not *too* believable! :-)