Burned!

For the second time I was able to pull what I would describe as a successful April Fool’s Day joke. The first was in Brazil 2002 when Klas, Tomas and myself managed to convince the people we were going with that the airline we were flying home with was on strike and that we were stuck for at least two weeks. We’d been in Brazil for almost three months so a lot of people were rather anxious to get home.

The second time was yesterday when my site got “hacked”. I copied a defacement from the zone-h archive and configured it to appear automatically on the 1st of April. Quite a few people actually fell for it. Click here for the hacked version of www.vegard.net.

There are a lot of lists of this year’s pranks available on the interweb, here’s one of them.

And now for something completely different: If you haven’t heard already, EMI has decided to remove the DRM from their albums available through iTunes. This is a big step in a right direction towards a world where the music companies don’t look at their costumers as potential thieves. It will also enable honest punters to get a product that’s as good as the one the pirates have, e.g. the capability of listening to the music on all AAC-enabled devices. Press releases from both EMI and Apple are available.

I’m wondering how long it will take before other major record labels do the same thing?


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