UnNews:UnNews wire hacked; President is unhurt
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UnNews wire hacked; President is unhurt |
25 April 2013
WIKIA CITY, California -- Renowned world news source UnNews claims that its Twitter account was "briefly" hacked on Tuesday, resulting in a 12-word "tweet" that reported that bombs had exploded inside the White House, that President Barack Obama had been incapacitated, and that — God help us — Joe Biden had taken charge of the United States, much as Alexander Haig had done a generation earlier.
In the mere minutes that it took UnNews executives to realize that the tweet was fake, to stop furiously writing acerbic op-eds on Mr. Biden's incompetence, and to hastily draft a 20-page apology, denial, and proof of impossibility, American investors dumped $134 billion worth of stock. Many also sold vacation homes and drove their cars off cliffs. In addition, NORAD went immediately to CONDOM 5, its highest level of panic, and the U.S. Air Force scrambled all its assets, except for a few that were poached.
Mr. Obama assuaged fears by opening a window upstairs at the White House and waving at reporters. "Hey, folks," he said, "that was just a bunch of, uh, stuff." However, obvious concern remains about the condition of his TelePrompTer.
UnNews Editor-in-Chief Morris Greeley said it was obvious that the "tweet" was a fake, as no one at Uncyclopedia harbors any animosity toward the U.S. President, nor even considers him a fertile target for satire. To be sure, however, the famed news source pledged to conduct a detailed review of all its releases in the last five years to ensure that each one is literally true.
Markets quickly recovered, and the cars driven off cliffs quickly came to a complete stop. On some of these, the hoods pointed upward, which Mr. Obama called "proof that we are headed in the right direction." But the incident highlighted the danger of handing control over trades to computers that answer to no one, except the stockholders who entered the sell orders. It also raised questions about whether regulators should be doing more, such as a three-day waiting period for buying mobile devices or a total, nationwide ban on fearful "assault apps."
Uncyclopedia Senior Editors, meanwhile, are searching for the hacker who was able to cram so much panic and calamity into a 12-word "tweet." Mr. Greeley stated, "We are always recruiting authors who can produce the dense, turgid prose by which we guarantee that we will never face imitators or competitors."
Sources[edit]
- Bernard Condon and Matthew Craft "How a phony tweet and computer trades sank stocks". Associated Press, April 24, 2013