MOSCOW, April 1 (RIA Novosti) - An olfactory data search function. Internet-connected contact lenses. The industrial computer matrix controlling … “literally everything on earth.”
Top US and Russian IT firms spared no effort Monday to solicit chuckles, tirades and gasps of disbelief, taking advantage of April Fools’ Day to roll out prank products, services and humor – and clever promotion of their own brands – that sometimes tread a very fine line between fact and fiction.
Social network Twitter, for example, announced a plan to revert to its original name, Twttr, and begin charging users a $5 monthly premium for use of vowels, keeping consonants however free of charge and making an exception for the letter ‘Y’ which “should always be free to everyone.”
Popular Russian search engine Yandex ran a spoof of its logo showing the word Yandex “slipping” on a banana peel and teasing users to suggest a five-letter caption – an invitation Russian speakers would likely associate with a minor expletive.
And internet search behemoth Google unveiled a series of supposed new products and services, accompanied by authentic-looking promotional videos, ranging from a new smell-based search program to a “treasure map” function integrated into the Google Maps program.
“The map contains a variety of encrypted symbols and is not readily decipherable,” Google said in a post on its Google Maps blog, a small component of the elaborate lengths to which the Mountain View, California-based internet search company went to give its PR-driven hoaxes the air of authenticity.
“We need your help to decipher these symbols and find Captain Kidd’s treasures; therefore we’ve decided to digitize the map and make it accessible to everyone,” the firm said, referring to its prank “discovery” last year of a treasure map once possessed by legendary pirate William “Captain” Kidd.
In a separate prank that emerged during the weekend prior to April 1, Google also said that it planned to shut down its YouTube video-sharing service and spend the next decade judging the best videos ever posted to the site – an attempted joke that not everyone found funny.
“The Google treasure map was the best, honouring Cesar Chavez was admirable, but the YouTube joke was unfunny,” one irate Twitter user commented on the YouTube prank.
In a light-hearted response to Google’s new Google Glass product, Russian email service Mail.Ru together with Intel announced plans of their own to market computerized contact lenses.
“The lenses offer a hardware and software solution that complements Intel Atom smartphones,” a press release about the prank product stated.
According to the designers, these “innovative lenses” can transmit images from the smartphone directly to the retina. “If you look at a person for at least 5 seconds through the lenses, all the information about that person [from various Russian internet sites] will show up on the screen,” it added.
One of the biggest April Fools’ tricks of all was played by the Russia-based Kaspersky Lab (KL) cyber security firm which announced that it had discovered the world’s largest industrial cyber system called Mother-SCADA.
According to KL, Mother-SCADA ultimately determines “literally everything on Earth,” from the taste of your breakfast to your annual bonus to the regular changing of the seasons – and the company has begun analyzing how to keep it secure.
