The Null Device

2005/1/11

A militant Islamist group's website recently published a report saying that the CIA has opened a facility for training agents to impersonate muezzins and infiltrate mosques:

The CIA opened its first muezzin school at a deserted army airstrip in Virginia in 1989, with the school being specially equipped with six minarets from which its agents could practise, the report said. It added that the CIA was now capable of producing up to 100 qualified muezzins each year.

Unbeknownst to them, the original story was a piece of satire, published by British satirical website The Rockall Times in 2001. Apparently the members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who republished the story almost unchanged, either did not notice the satirical content on the rest of the site or wrote it off as authentic reportage of the corruption and decadence of British society.

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The People Who Owned The Bible, a speculation on the neo-Galambosian logical extremes of the recent copyright extension fad:

A 500 year extension would let Disney track down Shakespeare's heirs and buy all rights to the Bard. No matter how much the heirs wanted, the deal would pay for itself in no time. Every school that ever wanted to perform or study Shakespeare would have to send a check to Disney. Every newspaper or magazine or radio show that wanted to quote the Bard would have to send one, too. So Disney asked, and Congress gave, and the World Intellectual Property Organization followed Congress's example. Disney paid off Shakespeare's heirs, then used the Shakespeare profits to buy all rights from the heirs of Dumas, Dickens, Twain, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker and more. Once most of the films in every other studio's library were subject to Disney's copyright, they went bankrupt or became divisions of Disney.
Then Jimmy Joe Jenkins's DNA proved he was the primary descendent of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible.
(via bOING bOING)

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A pretty funny Clerks/bOING bOING mashup, which has Dante and Randal going through the blog's various obsessions:

Jay: Some fucker from Gizmodo fucking e-mag [link] is outside, and he says digital rights management is the wave of the fucking future that will save fucking intellectual property rights, an' still present a marketable format for files that appeals to the consumer. [link]
Dante: WHAT?!?
Jay: Yeah, he's spouting some happy horseshit about how fucking crucial it is to a capitalist economy that the fucking hermaphrodites keep their fucking videos from being copywrite-violated when pirates hack into their IPs, and the only goddamn solution is a fucking eBook reader with clout, and also convenient DRM to really break open the fucking market, or some shit. [link][link]

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