TechList: Famous April Fool's Tech Pranks

You can go to the tech Stuff podcast page and subscribe to listen to all sorts of episodes about tech from all realms, and hopefully this will provide a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of education, and probably more than a few puns, because that's kind of how I roll. Enjoy this playlist. Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to

tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech, and today we're going to listen to a classic episode for our entertainment playlist. This one published all the way back on April first, two thousand nine. It's all about April Fools tech pranks, and my co host Chris Palette, and I talk about some pretty classic tech gags that

were done back in the day. I hope you guys enjoy we have some sad news to announce that they're going to cancel tech stuff and replace it with old episodes of stuff you should now. Yeah, apparently we just don't have the appeal of Josh and Chuck. So we tried to hire Ira Glass to do uh this how stuff works dot com life, but right is an available and we really wanted to see if someone out there would draw a comic strip of us, just like Josh and Chuck got But um, yeah, since I'm animated and

not actually a real person, that was a problem. So I guess now we can just take the rest of this time to um to bad mouth everybody else, and then we can leave in a huff. Except that this is actually an April Fools joke. Yeah, they're actually taking out I hope you weren't taking that seriously, um if you were, got you so? Anyway, April Fools. April Fools has been really big in the tech sector for a really long time, and there are some tech journalists who

absolutely despise April First with all their heart. Can't imagine why, Yes, with a hatred that burns brighter than a thousand exploding suns, but yeah, and it's because this is the day when a lot of people think they're really clever and they make goofy jokes across the Internet. And some of them are really funny, some of them aren't so funny, and some of them are convincing enough to send the nation

into a tizzy every year around this time. Truthfully, I think on the web it's gotten to be sort of a situation where everybody goes looking for the funky websites. Yeah, they're actually websites out there that just all they do is aggregate all the different April Fools jokes that that people notice as the day goes on, they'll they'll submit say, it's almost like a dig, except its specifically for April

Fools pranks. And uh, I think snopes dot com sometimes does it, and some mother sites probably do as well. So yeah, you can just keep your eyes open for that. But there's certain, um, well, there's certain websites out there that have made a reputation out of creating funny little April Fools gags that we can talk about. I've got too. In particular, I was thinking of that we can chat about for just a second. Alright, one of those would

be Think Geek. I sink Geek, the website that offers various toys and gadgets for the geek you know and love the mountain dew swelling cubicle dweller who works on tech stuff. Yeah, actually we should um go ahead. And you know, that's a good way of pointing out that a lot of the gag gifts, the April Fools gifts that Think Geek has come out with over the years, have to do with caffeine and Geek's fascination with caffeine.

So they're they're they sell caffeinated soap and that's not a joke, No, that really is a product they actually sell, So you would that that of course makes these other caffeinated products semi believable, so you might actually fall for them. For example, the first year they ever did in the April Fools stuff, one of the products they offered was

caffeinated meatloaf. That, yeah, I'm sure you would. They also have offered things like, uh, the caffe doerm patch, so it would be sort of like a nicotine patch, um, a caffeine inhaler where you could just in hale you're caffeine directly and get that blast as soon as possible. They also what about spas Troid's the caffeinated cereal. So yeah, caffeine is big over it, I think geek and they probably make fun of, you know, make up some caffeinated mints,

except they sell those two. Yes they do. And they have plenty of other jokes that they have put on all of us throughout the years, and some of them have backfired. But we'll get to the backfired one. That's the that's then you're going to go there. The piece to resistance is my my uncle would say. But some of the other things they've said that they were going to offer on April one include remnants of the Mere

Space station UM and ATARID system. They offered that for a brand new ad on April one, UM Wheaton X, which was an operating system created by Will Wheaton. I actually, I bet he'd get a real kick out of it. I'm sure I'm sure that he did get a real kick out of that. They offered Duke Nuken Forever noticed that the it was Nuken, not newcome. So they had a PC easy bake oven that would attach via USB. That's not real not at the time that they offered

be Now. They also a USB fonduce at USB Tanning Center. Uh they were. They're big on the USB devices, um so is everyone else, which is why it makes him believable exactly. My favorite, my favorite until we get to the backfire one, anyway, is the Beta Max to h D DVD converter, so you can convert all those Beta max videos to h D DVD. That was awesome. Now, of course we all know that's a lie because HD DVD doesn't exist anymore. It's gone the way of Beta Max.

I think more people are using Beta Max now than ding professionals still use it, probably, But the one that backfired on them was last year two thousand and eight, they introduced the Soundtrack t shirt, a shirt with a speaker in it that would play prerecorded sounds, and I think they even had a slot for a card so you can insert your own music if you wanted to.

And they had this goofy video of a guy going through all these different scenarios, and every scenario he had the perfect music to play in the background so that it would be the right mood. So like in the chase scene he had chase music, and in the fight scene it was a Showdown music and in the love scene it was that wonderful seventies walk a Wow music. Um well, there are so many people who wrote in and said this is a great idea. They said, why

don't we do this? And so they did, and now you can actually buy a soundtrack t shirt on Think Geek, which before was just a joke. Well, you know what, I'm willing to bet, having been a Thinking customer for for several years, that they would love if they could do that every year and have one product that took off so well and it's fakeness that they wanted to actually make it a real thing. I bet they would

do that. Yeah, they would be happy with it. I don't think that would have been a burden to them. Another website that's known for doing lots and lots of jokes Google So not only are they taking all your information and putting it up on the web for you, they are making light of it as well. So here's some of the Google jokes that have happened over the years.

There was the Google mental Plex that was a device that you were supposed to just stare at and think about what you wanted to search for and then click on it. And your search results would come up. And if you did this, the search results were all about April Fools, and you got a message at the top saying there were too many voices in your head and

it couldn't get the right search results. Uh. Then they had Pigeon Rank, which is where they revealed the page right right where where they revealed the secret to their search engine results pages, where a battalion of pigeons that would type them up in real time. There was the Google Gulp that was a drink that would make you more intelligent and make you better at searching on the internet. There was Google Romance, where you could find your soul mate.

By searching certain terms, you would find other people who are also searching for it. Supposedly. There was Gmail Paper where you could save the email. They would convert your email to hard copy format in paper, complete with advertising, and then deliver it to the person that you were sending it to. So essentially it was a letter not great of course, it again, this is just a joke. Chris and I will be back to talk more about tech pranks in just a moment, but first let's take

a quick break. There was the Google toilet Internet service provider where they were supposedly running uh internet cables through the sewer system and you would thus have a toilet that was hooked up to the Internet and would act as your wireless router. And then of course there was Good Day g d a Y, which was an Australian based web search engine that could search for web pages that hadn't even been uploaded yet. They could search for web pages twenty four hours before they came to exist,

because of course Australia is a day ahead of us. True. And weren't they going to build an interstellar base too? Yes, there was the Copernicus, which was a moon base. You know you can find all those online still. Yeah, so if you are curious to read the whole thing, and some of them have some quite amusing illustrations too, right, and there these are long jokes and and it's just it's not just like a long joke with a punchline at the end, their punchlines throughout the whole thing. Yep.

So let's see, do you have any more sites? Now? Those were the two big sites. I've got plenty of other jokes, but I figured i'd give you a chance to talk for a while. So I can drink my tea. Okay. Well, I started doing research and I found a list of some very famous ones at the Museum of Hoaxes UM and basically I just I found tons of them. And of course they are all kinds like the the Taco bell buying, the Liberty bell, and some of the other ones. But I stuck with some of the tech stuff, and

some of them I had never even heard of. Um, you know talking about you know, John C. Warhe and PC Computing talking about the bill going through Congress, and uh, apparently it was going to make it illegal to surf the Internet while you were drinking, right, because you can't drink, drink and drive on the Internet super highway. That's right. Of course, nobody gets the fact that the bill's number is zero four zero. One wrote this in the contact

for that. By the way, if you're interested, is lerpa sloof which is April fool spell backwards. Apparently, said Senator Edward Kennedy's office had to field a lot of phone calls because people said he was sponsoring this bill, and so people were calling his office to complain that they didn't want This's gotten a lot crankier since then. But man, and that was way back in. Think about that. The World Wide Web was essentially two years old at that point. Well, um, okay,

here's here's another one actually. Uh in four there was announcement going around that the Soviet Union was going to join us NET. Oh yeah, here's another one that backfired because it was it came from an address from Turnienko at krem vax. Uh. For those of you who are probably the majority of our audiences who don't know what a vax is, it was a giant main framish computer, uh, from Digital which later evolved into Compact and then HP um and uh. You know, these giant computers were how

you used to get on the Internet. And everybody freaked out. They said, oh this is great, you know, they want to join the Global Community. Well it turned out it was a sort of a wishful thinking hoax for for for a prank, but um in when they actually came around, they chose krem vacs that is there as their their host names. So it gives you the warm fuzzies. That's kind of a you know, alright, alright, you got us,

but you know, but there's tons of those. A little stuff like in BBC and they love their pranks too, said that Big Ben was going to go digital, yes, which just makes me think of the Simpsons episode where you see the shot of Big Ben and it's flashing twelve over and over because no one's set the clock after the power went out. Um, well, how about in nine seven there was a prank going around that said the Internet would have to shut down for a full day.

Was that that was my next one? Yeah? Okay, well you go ahead and talk about that. Well no, I mean you were supposed to turn off, turn off your machines that were connected to the Internet because they were going to clean out email, FTP and Gopher sites. Again, this was and people were still using Gopher, and they said between March thirty one and April two, you would you should turn not only turn things off, but if you could disconnect them so that they would not be

affected as the Internet was cleaned. Then of course that's just a joke, and that joke dates back. I mean there were jokes that are similar to that that went back to like the phone company. Well, they told you used to have to place a bag over your phone so that they blew the dirt out of the lines and you don't want it to get all over your house. Well, you know it was coming from the Interconnected Network maintenance

staff from the main branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yeah. Actually, it reminds me of another one where the m I T announced that they were that they were selling out to Disney for six point nine billion dollars and they were gonna they were gonna move it to UH, to take apart the entire school and move it to Orlando. UH. As a matter of fact, they accompanied that with a picture of the famous dome on campus with mouse ears

on top of it. Um, you know it was gonna have the School of Imagineering and the Scrooge McDuck School of Management in the Donald Duck Department of Linguistics. Awesome. Turned out the web page was hacked. It wasn't actually an official m I T. So yeah, so that doesn't even follow the real M I T hack philosophy, but well it kind of does kind of shows. I mean, M I T wouldn't do anything that would cause damage, and you could argue that by hacking a site you are,

in theory damaging somewhat. But um, I've got a couple of cell phone related pranks. In two thousand four, Virgin Mobile announced that it was creating a line of left handed cell phones and all the digital number pads were going to be reversed, and people were immediately excited and thinking like, wow, that's really cool. Let me clue you in, folks, I happen to be of the sinister persuasion, which means

I'm ghosh, which means I'm left handed. And while I might be easier to dial that way, UM, I still read numbers left to right like everybody. ELPs. I don't have to turn a book upside down or anything in order to read it. So just a little well, okay, I don't have to, is what I'm saying. I might enjoy it, but I don't have to. Um. So, yeah, that was a joke, And if people have thought about a little bit more, especially considering what day that announcement

came out, they might have figured it out. Another good one though, all same year two thousand four, a Swedish newspaper and I'm not even gonna try and to pronounce it because there's there's no hope, but a Swedish newspaper announced that if you shook your old cell phone hard enough, and long enough you would be able to access the new three gen network even though your phone is on the old network. You just had to shake it. So I'm I'm wondering how many customers lost their cell phones

in a frenzy of shaking and like flying. I just see cellphones flying everywhere in Sweden on this day. It's a beautiful site, although I'm sure it wasn't when you had saw like all the batteries and suff laying on the ground. Oh great, you know. Um, there was a press release about this company called web Node. They had gotten this government contract um, and it was for the

next generation Internet. UM. Basically you could buy a node for about a hundred dollars or more than fifty million of them, and basically the more traffic that came through your node, the more valuable it would be. UM. Unfortunately business wire, this this press release went out over business Wire. They didn't find it so funny. They actually filed suit against people pulling a rank for fraud, breach of contract, defamation,

and conspiracy. So uh, not really so funny. I got a I got a couple of actually have a trio of video game ones. Okay, the first one just comes from someone being industrious and going out and registering a domain name. Uh, and it was for g t A Chicago, which would be Grand Theft Auto, which immediately made all the fans of Grand Theft Auto think that there was going to be a new entry into the series set in the Windy City. Of course, I ended up just

being a joke. Another one, which I think is even better, Bungee has a long running gag, Pimps at C. They announced this game years ago. I think maybe two thousand one was when they first announced that Pimps at Sea would come out, and not only not only were you a Pimp at Sea, but it was supposed to have the most comprehensive and deep economic system ever seen in video games up to that point. It was supposed to be incredibly realistic, and it was going to be a

real time strategy game. And over the years they have occasionally brought Pimps at CE back as a joke and added more features, so now it's like the most incredible video game that never existed. It's like Pimps at C plus something like that. Very nice programming language jokes. So anyway, the final one in this group is Monkey Island five fans of the LucasArts Monkey Island series. I was a huge fan. Now in two and two there was a group called Mix and Mojo that managed to contact Dominic

ar Motto. Dominic was the voice for guy Brush Threepwood, the main character in the Monkey Island games. And they got Dominic to record a bunch of fake uh sound files, and then they uploaded the sound files on April one and said that this might be evidence of a brand new Monkey Island game. And the sound files are hysterical and you can still find them on the on the web at the International House of Mojo um or actually uh if yeah, if you go there, you can find

the sound files. They host them there. You listen to them. They're really really funny, but one of them does give away the fact that it is in fact an April Fool's joke. Alright, then you know, I got a couple more British ones. The Guardian reported that British scientists had created a machine that would let them control the weather. You know that means that they get long summers rain it would only rain a night and but always smell at Christmas time. You know, it might be nice. Basically,

the camel. They yeah, no kidding, And they also send whatever whatever else to the rest of Europe, Continental Europe. We've got a little bit more to say about Shenanigan's, but before we get into that, we're going to take another quick break in this is going to ring a bell with a lot of you probably when you hear it. BBC said that they were going to introduce Smell, a vision where they could do things on the screen and

then you could smell things, and people called in. They cut onions on on TV and brewed coffee and they said, can't you smell this? And people called in they said they could. It's amazing how psycho semitic stuff can take effect, doesn't That isn't that nice? So in two thousand seven,

Facebook introduced a new feature, Live Poke. If you chose to live poke one of your friends, then Facebook would send a physical person to go out to that friend and poke them, except not really, because it was a joke. That's an awesome joke, Like live poke my buddy, and like just thinking about this person, like alright, tracking that person down and then running after him down the streets

of wherever. No I have to poke you. That's awesome. Uh. And then here's another good one in two thousand eight. You remember what happened to in two thousand eight at YouTube, every single featured video went to Rick Astley's Never Going to Give You Up the YouTube Rick rolled the internet completely blocked that thanks for reminding you, welcome, and then

I have a trio of iPod ones real quick. Yeah, So there was Gear four and two thousand six unveiled the Iron, which was supposed to be an iron iPod doc. You would dock your iPod in the Iron and it would omit steam in uh in rhythm with the music you played. Then you had pop x Spress in two thousand six and they announced the ipop Bra, which was a bra that featured a pocket for your iPod and controls in the fabric. So imagine changing the volume on your iPod right, Okay, if only you could have seen

what I just did. Unfortunately I did see what you just did. Way back in two thousand four, you had the I Shave Application Systems. Heidelberg announced it. It was an electric shaving attachment for iPods. You would uh slide this into the top of your iPod. It would turn into an electric razor. It sounds like a cut above. Yeah, awesome in it. Yeah, um, let's see you got a couple more. Uh. They came out with total home remote electricity, where Atmar Industries of Switzerland was going to let you

beam electricity through your house. You didn't have to have your uh you know, appliance as electronics plugged in. You can even make toast on your roof some very tesla esque Yeah yeah, and then, uh, you know, this reminds me of your your Google mentioned a minute ago. Um red Hearing brought out the telepathic email um tidal way of communications. You're a Maldini said that the technology for telepathic email was created from encrypted communications said during the

Gulf War. And they asked him how big it was going to be, and he just sat quietly and said, I sent you an email when they got back. Instead, it's going to be huge, simply huge. And uh, I've got one that's that's really dated. In fact, the New York Graphic in eighteen seventy eight told people that Edison had had created a food machine that would turn dirt into cereal and water into wine and other newspapers. I

mean Edison was huge. He was the big guy in tech at the time, he everybody he believed him and believe the paper, and they reprinted the story in their their newspapers and basically h the graphic picked up on it and went, you know, we got all these people nice. So you know, well, you know, um, as I recall, how Stuff Works has had one or two maybe fool's articles in the past. You want to talk about those really quickly. I don't know why you would consider me

an expert on those. Um. Yes, yes, in fact, we we have in the past. Uh, you won't find them if you search on our site. You would have to search somewhere else, like say, I don't know Google, if you were going to try to find these, but you might find uh an article about water warfare called how hydro ordinance works, or um another about how animated tattoos work that was very popular that wasn't quite a bit of email from that, and how cell phone implants work

also got a lot of email. Yeah, partly because it's sort of semi true, right, some of these have actually kind of come true in the in the years sent we've written them. But then there's the one you wrote. Yes, last year I had the honor of doing the April Fool's article and we wrote about how the Air Force one hybrid works. Um, and uh, we got to to write about the latest in airplane hybrid technology and it was and it spurred a lot of thinking about how

heavy those batteries were going to be. Exactly. Yeah, it's it's said because we actually were putting a lot of thought to how would we make this work? Well, I mean, you know what, it's not really that important. It's a joke then no, but we want to make sure we make it believable. So yeah, it's there's a there's an art to it there. Yeah, because you want to try

to make it at least semi believable. I mean, if you're gonna get onto somebody else's computer and replicate more than, you know, extra copies of their their folders so that you can't tell which ones which, or reverse their desktop or you know, something like that, you know, you want to be something that, Yeah, that's going to be confusing,

you know, remap the keyboard, Yeah, all these fun little things. Well, and so guys, while you're out there, you know, on the World Wide Web on April first, just remember you can't necessarily believe everything you see. Just keep that in mind. Also, you know, don't fire off an angry email because in two weeks you're going to find it funny. Yeah, seriously, Well, guys, I hope you enjoyed that walk down memory lane. It's always fun to listen to Chris on the show, and uh,

those are some pretty silly gags. I like the fact that even the the nerdiest of tech nerds still retains a sense of humor. It's what keeps us human. Do you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff? Reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech stuff HSW and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. Yer