Christmas Lights Hoax

ro2

10/10 for this one. 4.3 million hits and they didn't cop it

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB110417399327110132,00.html

http://www.komar.org/xmas/

There's a few videos here:
http://www.public-domain-content.com/hulkster/

High-Tech Holiday Light Display
Draws Everyone But the Skeptics

By CHARLES FORELLE
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 27, 2004 4:23 p.m.

Flying in TV station KMGH's "Air Tracker 7" helicopter earlier this month, Alek Komarnitsky told the Denver ABC affiliate's audience about the 17,000 Christmas lights flashing a thousand feet below on his Colorado home.

"You can go to my Web site and not only view the lights via Web cam but actually turn them on and off," said Mr. Komarnitsky, who lives northwest of Denver in Lafayette. "Which is exactly what we're seeing right now."

"That's great," said one of the station's anchorwomen, over the chopper's whir.

"That's wild," added a co-anchor.

So wild, in fact, that it isn't true. In what he describes as an excess of desire to spread a little holiday cheer, Mr. Komarnitsky pulled off an Internet Christmas hoax worthy of April 1.

The lights on his house are real enough. So is Mr. Komarnitsky's Web site, www.komar.org, which has seen 4.3 million hits this month as word of its supposed features was spread like a virus by news media and the Internet.

But Mr. Komarnitsky now acknowledges there is no Web cam taking live pictures of the house. And, he adds, visitors to the site have no ability to switch the lights on and off. To fool KMGH into thinking it was broadcasting Web surfers switching the lights on and off, Mr. Komarnitsky says his wife was inside the house, working a remote control.

"It's fake," says Mr. Komarnitsky. He says he decided to fess up because the whole thing "had gotten too big," and he didn't want to mislead anyone any longer.

Via the ruse, Mr. Komarnitsky's abode became the Internet age's version of the neighborhood house with the dazzling Christmas show.

Mr. Komarnitsky gave radio interviews to stations as far away as Australia. Web sites from NYTimes.com to geek hangout Slashdot.org linked to his site. An Associated Press item about his site was picked up by newspapers from Los Angeles to Columbia, S.C. As of midday Monday, according to Mr. Komarnitsky, the "Web cam" was asked by online visitors to snap a new picture in the same spot 334,832 times. The lights had supposedly been changed 91,978 times. But instead of a live camera, komar.org is really showing off 32 high-resolution digital photographs, taken in four sets with different amounts of snow on the ground. A sophisticated computer program, which Mr. Komarnitsky wrote with input from a friend skilled in digital imaging, serves up a section of the appropriate photo, depending on actual weather conditions and what lights the online Web visitors expect to see.

For extra verisimilitude, sometimes the program digitally adds in passing cars. One in five pictures is generated with fake airplanes in the expansive Colorado sky. The human-shaped shadow occasionally seen walking past the ornament drawn in lights on the lawn? A digital apparition, nothing more. Occasionally the software shows the garage door up.

"I'll get e-mails saying, 'Hey, Alek, your garage door is open,'" he says.

Hoaxes have a storied history in the annals of technology, and the Internet provides a fertile field for cultivating them. Some are banal -- earlier this year, the town of Aliso Viejo, Calif., considered banning foam cups because they contained a substance called "dihydrogen monoxide." A city employee fell for a prank Web page decrying its health risks. Dihydrogen monoxide, to chemists, is water. Others are more disturbing: Several news organizations reported on a possible beheading in Iraq after seeing a fake video produced by a California man and spread on peer-to-peer filesharing services.

Mr. Komarnitsky's holiday decorations began in 2000, with 12,000 lights on his house. That rose to 22,000 by 2002, he says. Being a self-confessed geek -- he is a computer specialist for a defense contractor -- Mr. Komarnitsky dreamt up the fake Web cam. The next Christmas, he did it again with a "new and improved" Web cam that delivered larger pictures.

Mr. Komarnitsky says that actually controlling the lights via the Web would be possible, but would require a complex hardware setup to process the requests and keep up with the constant on-and-off cycles. "The systems integration is a real challenge," he says. This year, traffic surged, spread by rapid links from blogs. Pretty soon the media came calling. First the local newspaper, then one TV station, then another. "It kind of spun out of control," he says.

"We took the guy at his word, and obviously that was a mistake," said Byron Grandy, the news director at KMGH, which took Mr. Komarnitsky up in its chopper after seeing other print and TV reports of his decorations.

Ellen Hale, a spokeswoman for the AP, said the wire service's item was picked up from the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo. She added that the AP verified the Web site to make sure it "looked legitimate," but did not visit the house. "We are increasingly concentrating on high-impact journalism but still do pickups from local newspapers," Ms. Hale said. The Daily Camera's reporter said the site and house appeared genuine.

Demonstrating the hoax to a reporter logged onto his site, Mr. Komarnitsky, on command, ordered up airplanes in the sky, moving cars on the road, and a lone pedestrian. Later, on Christmas Eve, a visitor acting at the request of The Wall Street Journal visited the house without Mr. Komarnitsky knowing it and ambled up to the lighted soldier between the bays of Mr. Komarnitsky's garage. The Web cam, supposedly trained on that spot, showed not a creature in sight. Mr. Komarnitsky says he hopes his Web visitors enjoyed the show, and he says the prank wasn't malicious. Many visitors, he says, wrote to express their thanks for a bit a holiday-themed fun.

Jon Wade, the friend who shared his digital-imaging knowledge, says Mr. Komarnitsky originally hoped to actually show his house on a Web cam, but came up with the simulation idea after learning that there wasn't a widely available model with the ability to produce a image that clearly showed the lights. He was hooked by the challenge, says Mr. Wade. "Alek, with his technical wizardry, made it appear." Plus, he adds, such a detailed prank can't fail to boost "geek credibility." Web cams are beloved by technophiles, who often revere the most obscure and pointless. The pinnacle is, perhaps, what's often credited as being the first Web cam: A black-and-white camera that pointed at a coffee pot at the University of Cambridge, in England.

Mr. Komarnitsky watches details like a hawk. When local TV reporters came out to do live broadcasts from his house, he said the Web cam was out of commission because a part had broken under the stress of all the panning and zooming. That way, Web surfers watching TV wouldn't notice that there was no one standing on his front lawn during the segment.

For the real-life visiting hordes, which have included at least one bus full of senior citizens and four local TV stations, Mr. Komarnitsky prepared a nonfunctional, $30 Web cam that he duct-taped to the trunk of a tree across the street. Its "cable" is a length of cord that dead-ends in the garage of a neighbor, Marjie Hargrave.

Ms. Hargrave says that most of the neighbors know the site isn't for real, because the lights "never went off." But they kept the secret for Mr. Komarnitsky, who is something of a neighborhood hero for his outlandish projects -- including a giant, inflatable Hulk figure that rides in his Oldsmobile Delta 88 convertible during parades. "People just think he's such a wonderful person," says Ms. Hargrave.

D!ve^Bomb!

that's just too boring for me to care

segadreamcast

Pretty funny and ever so elaborate I think.