Status: Hoax
15-year old Tom Vandetta found a neat trick described on the internet: how to upload a fake press release to a free wire service, and get Google News to pick it up and disseminate it, thereby making it look like real news. Of course, he couldn't resist trying this trick out, so he decided to write a release from Google itself announcing that they were hiring him:
(I-Newswire) - 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant's offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw's in Google's beta e-mail service, "Gmail". Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student's blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta's expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.
Soon word of Google's hiring of a 15-year-old kid was posted on Digg.com, and the attention of the internet (or at least a small part of it)
turned on Tom Vandetta. As the hoax spread, Tom wrote
in his blog: "My gmail account now has 130 unread email messages, as opposed to the 5 i normally get daily. My myspace has tons of friends requests, as opposed to the 3 i get monthly. This is all going out of control and I am regretting every bit of it."
Fake press releases have long been a favorite tool of hoaxers. One of the first big hoaxes on the internet, back in 1994, was the
Microsoft Buys the Catholic Church press release that circulated via email. And plenty of people have, like Tom Vendetta, used the free wire services to upload fake releases. (For instance, there was that press release about
Tom Cruise lecturing on the modern science of mental health that I posted about a few months ago.) All of which underlines the importance of Reality Rule 6.1 (from Hippo Eats Dwarf):
Just because you read it on the internet doesn't mean it's true.
Comments
Or maybe it's just the obsessive-compulsive coming out in me. Eh.
"If you read CNN as much as I do, you'll see constant typos and grammar no-nos."
That's sort of the point here, Dan. Shouldn't CNN be more professional than that? I've seen that sort of thing on a lot of "professional" journalism sites and I'm just appalled by it. SOME standards would be nice, wouldn't they?
It reminds me of what Daniel Schorr said several years ago:
"The Internet has in effect made everyone a publisher, but unfortunately, very few of those new publishers have bothered to hire editors."
From the kid's blog in question:
After searching my name on Yahoo!, I found one of the most misleading story's possible. There are several mistakes in this article that really made me laugh :D
"1) They spelled my name wrong. Haha, I really hate that, they spelled my name wrong. It just makes me mad, maybe cause for years whenever someone calls my name they always have pronounced it Tom Vandetta, but its Tom Vendetta. Vandetta sounds like the name of a Van Dealership thats involved in the mafia. Anyway, we all make mistakes [haha].
2) They seem to have made up some information maybe? Or maybe they didnt make it up, maybe they got this from there sources. But the article states
"His parents are changing their phone number and he is working to re-establish a workable online identity. On the brighter side, he has received a few emails from Google employees assuring him he has not dashed his dreams of one day working for Google, as he thought he might have."
There are a few problems with that. Up until last night, I didnt even tell my parents. They were totally out of the loop. Whenever someone would call regarding it, either A) They werent home or B) I told them it was a prank call. This story hasnt been THAT big that so many people were calling my house (lets keep it that way). The statement that a few Google employees have contacted me is only half true (only one so far, if you work for google drop me a line =] )."
For example: if most of what you read uses apostrophes correctly and consistently, then the rules your teacher explains for their use make more sense - you don't have to understand the rules so much as absorb the patterns of usage. But if you're always exposed to inconsistent usage, you have to either learn the rules or just give up.
Learning good grammar by copying is soooo much easier than stuffing rules into your poor brain!
Of course you didn't learn your grammar from the Internet; you wouldn't have a chance to! That's my point.
and
chill
out.
Being unable to write clearly is a disability, of course, as it hinders expession; being unable to recognize errors is a liability for different reasons. For one thing, spelling and style can be used to discriminate between good information and bad in an information-rich culture: as one example, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes are a very effective first-stage filter in identifying phishing schemes. Literacy also remains a reliable (though not infallible) indicator or education and thus spelling and style can also constitute a first-stage filter in judging the credibility of a source.
This case is a case in point: the spelling and grammar should have alerted even the slackest editor to the probability that this was an amateurish posting.
Oh, and when it comes to grammar on the Internet... there are reliable style guides out there (hehe!).