Steve Jobs is not dead (again)

Davey Winder
Saturday, 24 January 2009 17:07

IT Industry - Strategy

Yesterday the blogosphere and Twitterverse were buzzing with yet more rumours of the possible death of poorly Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Not surprisingly so, given that Wired.com appeared to be reporting that he had suffered a heart attack.

As we all know, appearances can be deceptive. Which is probably why there have been so many stories over the last six months or so about the death of Steve Jobs.

Back in October we reported how one claim that the Apple CEO had suffered a heart attack impacted upon the company stock value.

And there have been plenty of rumours floating around about how Jobs was planning to leave Apple. Of course, in a way these have been proven accurate as just 10 days ago Steve Jobs announced a six month leave of absence due to ongoing health problems.

But while the fake Steve Jobs is dead the real one most certainly is not. Although that did not stop what seemed like the entire online world speculating that he was yesterday.

The cause of that speculation was what appeared to be a genuine Wired story, spreading virally through the usual social network channels, claiming that he has suffered a heart attack.

It quickly climbed towards the top of the most shared links tree on Twitter. I saw it, and at first glanced it did indeed look like the real deal. A Wired page, with a genuine Wired banner, published at Wired.com and carrying a three paragraph story.

Look closer and you quickly discovered the spelling mistakes pointing to a hoax, albeit an elaborate one.

The malicious hoaxer had exploited the Wired.com external image viewer which enabled them to display an image, in this case the mocked up Wired magazine story page, into the Wired URL. The result was something that, as I say, looked pretty valid at first glance thanks to that genuine Wired logo banner.

Wired has since patched the holes that allowed this to happen.