Oz RLY?

[lederhosen]

Via reynardo, the Murdoch press gives us the high-quality journalism that made it famous:

Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra, says terrorists can gain training in games such as World of Warcraft in a simulated environment, using weapons that are identical to real-world armaments.

Even on the article's main focus, Second Life, the Oz can't resist embellishing. Compare the shocking lead sentence:

The bomb hit the ABC's headquarters, destroying everything except one digital transmission tower.

With this admission, buried way down in the article:

The ABC has discovered that its bomb was a computer server error that it was able to fix within a couple of hours. Nonetheless, it is taking the likelihood of a terrorist attack seriously.

Which is to say, it wasn't a bomb, not even in SL's pretend universe. There are other genuine SL attacks, discussed in the article, so I'm not sure why they felt the need to pad it - maybe they wanted an Australian connection?

(BTW, before we go lambasting Zuccato for that remark, note that the Oz doesn't actually quote him there; my money would be on the stupidity coming from a journalist.)

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

*If* Zuccato said that r made anysimilar claim, he is an utter nong.

Most journos are #$%^&* these days, especially Murdoch journos, it's true.

[insaint.livejournal.com]

I'm still amused at the thought that World of Warcraft provides weapons identical to real-world armaments. We're about to be attacked by a group of terrorists with wands...

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Zug zug!

[elynne.livejournal.com]

If the terrorists have fireballs, velociraptors, and people that can turn into trees... I'm switchin' sides. o.O

[mr-figgy.livejournal.com]

My experience with Second Life attacks is that most of them involve things above and beyond what's currently possible--weird stuff is one of the things that keeps people logging in to that laggy environment, so you might expect weapons to be weird as well.

If terrorists, for example, can build a gun capable of creating a spinning little brown cabin (possibly constructed of faeces) out of which jump dozens of big squares displaying Goatse images, with the lyrics "What is love/Baby don't hurt me/Don't hurt me/No more" blaring incredibly loud, causing reality to crash, then we have no hope except to run reality on a better server.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

The stupidity is even more likely coming from an editor, and the poor writer will be spending the next six months apologizing for something s/he didn't write. And people wonder why I don't miss what laughingly passes for journalism these days.