3/29/02 apology

Vea Culpa, Corrections editor
Friday, 29 March 2002

Editor Rob Rosenberger's 3/28/02 column poked fun at SecurityNewsPortal for running a hoax virus alert on their front page. "These things can happen when you carry someone else's newsfeed," he observed. "Vmyths, for example, carries one of the Moreover newsfeeds. If Moreover should ever get duped by a hoax virus alert, then we'll automatically carry it. And we'll automatically look stupid, just like SecurityNewsPortal did."

We at Vmyths ironically let false authority syndrome creep into our site.

One day later, Vmyths reader Mark Siegel noticed Moreover carried the very same hoax virus alert as legitimate news, and the headline showed up on our website just as Rosenberger predicted. He promised in his column to "make every effort to poke fun at ourselves if/when it happens," and he fulfilled the promise by archiving two embarrassing & ironic snapshots (full, cropped).

Vmyths accepts full responsibility for "looking stupid." We don't blame Moreover for our own embarrassment. We erred the day we carried a newsfeed maintained by a company not involved in computer security. To put it bluntly: we at Vmyths ironically let false authority syndrome creep into our site.

A hoax-busting website should never display a known hoax as real. Vmyths humbly apologizes to our readers for our inferior service. We sincerely regret the error.

This event created irony for other hoax-busting sites who carry the same newsfeed ... and it caused us to rethink our newsfeed policy. We now will only carry newsfeeds maintained by computer security teams. As such, we deleted the Moreover newsfeed from our website. (Repeat: we don't blame Moreover for our own embarrassment.)

Vmyths will give this apology top billing on the front page of our website (in keeping with Rosenberger's promise to poke fun at ourselves). We will archive snapshots of our front-page apology (full, cropped) as a permanent record of our embarrassment. A permanent "corrections & clarifications" link (to this page) will appear in place of our previous Moreover newsfeed, and in Rosenberger's 3/28/02 column, and on the page where we dispel the hoax virus in question. A link to this page will appear before any other items in our next newsletter.