April Fools' Day-late

April Fools' Day
By the time you read this April 1st will have been and gone for
another year, but the online prank postings will remain. So we thought
it would be cool to present our very own round up of the top five IT
related April Fools' Day pranks of 2010, just in case you missed any
of them:

One

Lexmark, the printer manufacturer, claimed to have invented invisible
ink. Who would buy into that you might be wondering, well Lexmark had
the answer in true April Fools' so stupid it could almost be true
fashion: those wanting to print confidential information such as law
enforcement agencies, government special forces and home users
concerned about privacy.

Two

Google reckoned it had changed its name to Topeka. The reason? SWell,
Google claimed that the mayor of Topeka, Kansas had taken the decision
to change the name of the city to Google and this was the search
giant's way of acknowledging that move. There was also the
announcement YouTube that it was starting a text-only mode. A
spokesperson explained that by "replacing the images in the videos
with a series of letters and numbers the videos are far less taxing on
our system."

Three

Opera, developers of the well known alternative web browser client,
insisted that it has developed a really alternative version of the
browser: Opera Space Edition. As the name suggests, Opera informed me
through an official press release, this edition of the client was
being produced for use in, erm, space. In order to convince the wary,
an Opera spokesperson added that it not only supports the
Interplanetary Network Transport Protocol (INTP) for a stable
connection at extreme distances, but would also operate efficiently in
a vacuum.

Four

Security vendor Sophos distributed a press release which claimed its
SophosLabs research team had discovered a novel, quite literally,
method of preventing hackers from breaking into your networks. Called
'Protection through Distraction' the system used strategically placed
chunks of romantic fiction text in website source code and on servers.
It did also warn that the bad guys were already developing
Anti-Romance Scanners though...

Five

Virgin Media, one of the largest broadband Internet Service Providers
in the UK, announced it was speeding up delivery of its fibre
broadband service by employing highly trained ferrets to lay cabling
and save both time and money in having to dig up the roads in rural
areas.


Member of the Month
Please welcome our newest member of the DaniWeb hall of fame, jonsca
who has been a member of the DaniWeb community since September 2009,
during which time he has made quite an impact here. With a posting
average of 10 per day, he's clocked up more than 2000 posts already.
By far the majority of them are in the C++ forum, with plenty popping
up in the C# and C forums for good measure. However, jonsca is one of
those conscientious members who 'does the right thing' and diligently
reports bad posts such as spam or those posted to the wrong forum, so
many of posts are hidden from view to all but moderators and admins in
the reported posts forum. Highly deserving then of a Featured Poster
badge and entry into the DaniWeb Hall of Fame, let's find out what
makes jonsca tick.