Irish Wikifiddler hoaxes worldwide journos

In a case of Wikihistory repeating itself - again - a 22-year-old Dublin student has made a mockery of both Wikipedia and the world's news media, fooling another army of brain-dead obituarists into repeating a load of Wikinonsense. When film composer Maurice Jarre died at the end of March, The Irish Times reports, University College Dublin undergraduate Shane Fitzgerald promptly visited "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit," adding an entirely fictional quote to Jarre's Wikipedia bio. "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," read the words stuffed into the mouth of Jarre's Wikiland alter-ego. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear." Naturally, the quote later turned up in Jarre obituaries from countless news outlets, including The Guardian, The Independent, and the BBC Music Magazine website as well as various Indian and Australian newspapers. According to The Irish Times, Fitzgerald "wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source and how people are connected especially through the internet." But this has been shown time and again. The never-ending Wikinonsense could easily be stopped. The German Wikipedia has already using something called "Flagged Revisions" to prevent such hoaxing - hiding certain edits from the public unless they're approved by "trusted editors" - and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales has called on the English Wikipedia to do much the same thing.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/07/wikipedia_jarre_hoax/

Major movie studio starts targeting file sharers, demands 1000 bucks for each downloaded movie

Ordinary file sharers have largely been spared by Hollywood and its world-wide partners so far, but it looks like this is about to change: Germany-based movie powerhouse Constantin Film has started the first mass-scale enforcement effort against file sharers. Constantin has been identifying more than 10,000 file sharers as infringers in recent months, and it has started to send threatening letters to about 500 of them, according to an article published in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The company is using these letters to demand out-of-court settlements, asking for 800 Euros (about 1000 USD) per infringing work as well as the promise to not commit any further acts of infringement. Downloaders that don't pay up can expect a full-fledged lawsuit. Constantin Film is Germany's biggest motion picture production and distribution company. IMDB credits it as the production company of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Resident Evil: Extinction, DOA: Dead or Alive, as well as countless German titles. It also has Germany-wide distribution rights for Hollywood flicks like Michael Clayton and Basic Instinct 2.

Source: http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1037.html

Nuclear bomb tests help to identify fake whisky

Bottles of vintage whisky can sell for thousands of pounds each, but industry experts claim the market has been flooded with fakes that purport to be several hundred years old but instead contain worthless spirit that was made just a few years ago. Scientists have found, however, that minute levels of radioactive carbon absorbed by the barley as it grew before it was harvested to make the whisky can betray how old it is.Researchers at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, which is funded by the National Environmental Research Council, discovered that they could pinpoint the date a whisky was made by detecting traces of radioactive particles created by nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. They can also use natural background levels of radioactivity to identify whiskies that were made in earlier centuries. Dr Tom Higham, deputy director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said: "It is easy to tell if whisky is fake as if it has been produced since the middle of the twentieth century, it has a very distinctive signature.

"With whiskies that are older, we can get a range of dates but we can usually tell which century it came from. The earliest whisky we have dated came from the 1700s and most have been from 19th century. "So far there have probably been more fakes among the samples we've tested than real examples of old whisky."

The technique the scientists use is known as radiocarbon dating and is more commonly used by archaeologists to date ancient fragments of bone and wood. It relies upon the fact that all living organisms absorb low levels of a radioactive isotope known as carbon 14, a heavy form of carbon which is present in low levels in the atmosphere. After death, levels of this isotope in animal and plant remains will slowly decay away, meaning scientists can estimate their age from the amount of carbon 14 that remains in the sample.

Nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s saw levels of carbon 14 in the atmosphere rise around the world and so the amount of isotope absorbed by living organisms since this time has been artificially elevated. Most of the tests on whiskies have been conducted for the Scotch Whisky Research Institute, which is responsible for analysing the authenticity of Scotch malt whisky.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/5261586/Nuclear-bomb-tests-help-to-identify-fake-whisky.html