The Internet is Wrong - Volume 3
Wednesday, 22nd June 2011, 13:21

Page 1 Page 2 Bored with writing useful articles that might contribute something to the Internet, I'm back this week attacking blatantly wrong articles other people have written on the aforementioned Internet! Check me.


Lipstick Gives You Cancer is Wrong

Excuse the insanely tabloid headline, but stevemark122000, who has published so much that is wrong over at hubpages.com it is almost depressing to think how many people are reading it and believing people are following this quack. In his impressively bad article entitled, "Lead in Lipstick: Healthy Alternatives Include Arbonne Wild Mango Butter And Other Ingredients Names" you can't help but think this came from some marketing blurb and he forgot to replace Other Ingredients Names with, well, something that makes some kind of sense.

He starts off with this fantastic line, "Most woman today use lipstick which contains lead." Only they don't, this is wrong. It so immediately smacked of marketing bullshit I managed to uncover this as a myth within seconds, courtesy of Cancer Research UK. If you visit their website you'll see that this sort of scare mongering is common place in hoax emails, and that lead is banned from ALL cosmetics in Europe, apart from hair dyes.

The rest of his article reads like nothing more than an advert for Arbonne, which I won't bother talking about, but if you are interested in how they market themselves as being completely natural and unlike anything you can buy in the shops, you might find some joy in two articles over at TheBeautyBrains.com.


The Daily Telegraph is Wrong

Everyone must know who LulzSec are by now, if you don't they are a small group of computer hackers who enjoy amongst other things scampering around the Internet breaking into or denying people access to systems and leaking things they find there, and they do it for nothing more than giggles. They even have their own Twitter feed, where they recount tales of wrong doing with often amusing prose.

And, according to a news story in The Daily Telegraph they hacked into US defence contractor Lockheed Martin and got hold of the entire 2011 UK census data, which they will be posting on PirateBay.

The thing is, this is news to LulzSec, who are pretty blatant about admitting anything they've done even though some of it would most certainly result in any of them caught being extradited to America for some serious charges from a trigger happy government.

On top of the denial from people who really are the last to deny anything they've actually done, albeit anonymous as they are, the entire evidence for this claim by the Daily Telegraph is thrown into the sort of serious doubt that any half decent journalist would be filled with. Not so for that newspapers technology correspondent Christopher Williams.

Chris, if you ever read this, a little tip from me to you. As a technology correspondent, learn a bit about technology and the Internet. Realise that if your entire story is pretty much based on a website that people share code on, like oh I dunno Pastebin.com, anybody could have pasted it there.

Once armed with that knowledge, read what is actually pasted there, notice that it actually does indeed contain a link to a torrent on PirateBay, but for nothing to do with the census data at all. Then start to think, oh wait, I wonder if someone copy and pasted release text from a previous LulzSec effort and threw in the census claim as a joke. I mean, nobody has ever done anything like that before on the Internet have they?

Okay, so none of this is any proof either way and who knows, maybe LulzSec may one day turn out to have actually hacked whatever systems the Census data was on and obtained it. Until then, perhaps alarmingly reporting this had happened all based on a single anonymous paste to a webpage isn't solid journalism. Yes, Telegraph, you are as bad as a trade publications like MVC UK, grats.

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Posted by Robert John Shepherd