Fundoo Times
Read about some Internet April Fool hoaxes, net pranks for April Fool's Day and net trick and prank stories.

Internet April Fool Hoaxes

At the time in 1984, when Internet was in its first stages, a message was distributed to the members of the online messaging community of the Usenet by some Konstantin Chernenko (from the address chernenko@kremvax.UUCP) announcing that the Soviet Union was joining Usenet. Immediately, a great debate issued on the subject and the cold war security concerns surfaced in the minds of many American and European people. The message explained that in this way Soviet Union wanted to 'have a means of having an open discussion forum with Americans and Europeans.' It was only after two weeks that the real perpetrator of the prank, an European man named Piet Beertema, admitted it to be a hoax (it was the first hoax on the Net). Six years later, when Moscow really linked up to the Internet, it adopted the domain name 'kremvax' to honor the hoax.

In the April 1994 issue of PC Computing magazine, John Dvorak wrote an article about a bill supposedly numbered as 040194 (i.e. 04/01/94) that one could not use Information Highway or Internet while drunk or discuss sexual matters over a public network. The bill could be used by the FBI to tap the phone line of anyone who 'uses or abuses alcohol' while accessing the Internet. The contact person was listed as Lirpa Sloof (April Fools spelled backwards). Senator Edward Kennedy was alleged to be responsible to bring out the bill and he and the Congress was bombarded with so many outraged phone calls to Congress that he had to release an official denial of the rumor that he was a sponsor of the bill. Yet another April Fool e-mail message that created quite a furor in 1997 stated that the internet would be shut down for cleaning for twenty-four hours throughout the world from March 31 until April 2 to cleanse 'electronic flotsam and jetsam' from the network that included purging the dead email and inactive ftp, www, and gopher sites.