The Great Chrome OS Fake Out of 2009 or Why the Real-Time Web is Broken

Ear­lier today gad­get blog Giz­modo posted a story link­ing to a site pur­port­ing to be a Google Chrome OS down­load site. Thirty sec­onds of look­ing around you could tell some­thing wasn’t right. The site was a hosted site on “Google Sites” not a Google prod­uct site (ex. google.com/chromeos), sec­ond and most damming was the line of text at the bot­tom of the down­load page “Chrome OS is not related to Google.”  That’s odd Google is not claim­ing their own flag­ship OS? Surely Giz­modo vet­ted their info through con­tacts at Google or received the link as part of an offi­cial Google press release? Even if the news got past the sharp eyed reporter the edi­tor would care­fully ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion at hand before post­ing a link to a pre­vi­ously unknown site and announc­ing to the world that this was the OS they had been wait­ing for, go and down­load it? No, none of this hap­pened. Instead, the lure of the almighty Inter­net “FIRST” award caused the author at Giz­modo to post the link with­out any edi­to­r­ial or jour­nal­is­tic review. They real­ized their fault soon after and deleted the post, unfor­tu­nately the dam­age was done. It was already cached in Google Reader and announced to their 34,940 Twit­ter fol­low­ers (at the time of this post). They have yet to offer a retrac­tion or pub­licly state that the link was bad.

This was only the begin­ning. Soon peo­ple began retweet­ing the news and glee­fully down­load­ing the new OS onto their com­put­ers. It soon became a snow­ball effect as more and more peo­ple sim­ply fol­lowed the mob and retweeted. Even peo­ple like John Gru­ber posted the link which gave it extra rel­e­vance. All this with only a hand­ful of peo­ple actu­ally look­ing at the site and real­iz­ing it was a fake. Cur­rently “Chrome OS’ is the num­ber 4 trend­ing topic on Twit­ter and grow­ing steadily. The num­ber of peo­ple who will be duped into down­load­ing the ISO will prob­a­bly num­ber in the thou­sands. It is not yet known if the fake OS con­tains any harm­ful software.

All of this because of one care­less blog­ger try­ing to make a name by being the first on a big tech story. I hope we can learn that the Inter­net is a great resource of infor­ma­tion but we must use a lit­tle dis­cre­tion before pick­ing up out torch and pitch fork and join­ing the “Infor­ma­tion Mob”