On the Planting of a Ridiculous Apple Rumor That Many Fell For

Lukasz Lindell, of the design company Day4:

One afternoon we sketched out a screw in our 3D program, a very strange screw where the head was neither a star, tracks, pentalobe or whatever, but a unique form, also very impractical. We rendered the image, put it in an email, sent it to ourselves, took a picture of the screen with the mail and anonymously uploaded the image to the forum Reddit with the text “A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws”.

Then we waited …

First hit, John Brownlee at Cult of Mac, with the delightful headline “Apple May Be Working on a Top Secret Asymmetric Screw to Lock You Out of Your Devices Forever”.

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

★ Monday, 13 August 2012