When fact collides with fiction, who comes to your rescue?
The rush to be first, following ‘world’s first Internet Birth' faces unusual
opposition...
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| Published in Oct. 98 |
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| CYBERSPACE AS
VIRGIN TERRITORY |
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HACKERS, like journalists, have been recently taking the bum rap. In the
new era of E-commerce unraveling before our eyes, both got a shot at vindication. Everyone
knows how dangerous it is to believe everything 'published' on the Net, so it did not come
as a shock to the president of Cirrus Logic, Inc., Mark Hackworth, when he read his
obituary on Yahoo! "Notice of my death", observed the 57 year-old CEO, "has
been greatly exaggerated". The incident echoed a previous 'death' posted by mistake
on the Internet. While Hackworth's obit was an act of mischief --purportedly posted as a
phony press release to lower the price of Cirrus stock-- the Associated Press in June
inadvertently uploaded Bob Hope’s obituary that had been prepared in advance since
the comedian was ailing. It wouldn’t have caused a buzz, had not House majority
Leader, Dick Armey picked it up when it was on the web page for a brief moment. It then
took on a life of its own, with Bob Stump making a grave announcement to the House, a
statement that was carried live on C-SPAN.
But of course, everything is not ticketyboo in the world of electronic
information moving at the speed of sin. But guess who came in like a knight in shining
armor and killed a web site that was setting itself up to Webcast live sex? A hacker by
the name of MagicFX decided if anyone could save the reputation of the Internet, he could.
But aren't hackers supposed to be the disenchanted, no-good Generation Xers bent on
infiltrating government networks, and spreading a gospel of mischief? Someday social
scientists will tell us that these broad generalizations were all the invention of, you
guessed it, Cyber-journalists!
Truth
is, among people's opinion of hucksters and malcontents, Hackers are WAY up on the scale --above telemarketers,
lawyers and tabloid journalists. In this instance, MagicFX broke into the Web site of
ourfirsttime.com, a site that was about to feature two 18 year-old teenage virgins, doing
it for the first time. Just months after the much hyped ‘world’s first Internet
Birth’ (where a Florida woman webcast the birth of her son live on the Net), it comes
as no shock that adult web sites would want to carve up this virgin territory, so to
speak. "These scum simply want to capitalize on the media-doped people of our
country", read the hacker's message left behind on the site he had scrubbed clean.
Going on to name and humiliate the site's promoter, Oscar Wells --whose real name was Ken
Tipton-- the hacker signed off with this admonition: "turn off the pornos, Oscar; go
read a book and get a life". Heavy stuff coming from a hacker, who, we were
conditioned to believe, desperately needed a life, too.
So what can we learn from this?
There are obviously harmless hackers, just as much as there are a few
rogue journalists. Whatever the reason behind this 'Oscar Wells' fellow cultivating an
Orson Welles persona, he was following in the footsteps of millions of con artists who
inhabit any medium. The male 'teen virgin' turned out to be a 23 year-old actor, and the
girl from Texas who wanted to reveal everything, was suddenly reluctant to reveal her age.
As for 'Oscar Wells', who was last spotted giving a press conference at a condom store, he
could probably change his name to Jose~ Conrad, for all we cars, and make a living off the
Web’s heart of darkness. Yet he taught us one thing about the blurry line between
Fact and Fiction in Cyberspace: At the press conference, journalists called him a liar,
but Conrad…I mean Wells…I mean Tipton, replied that it was only a soap opera.
My question is: what's the difference? |
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