I just found a link to a story titled Cambodian Troops Quarantine Quan’sul at BoingBoing. You can see the post here. This BBC story tells us about a new malaria strain in Cambodia that kills the victim and then somehow restarts their heart making them come back to life for few hours with severe brain damage and violent behavior. My initial reaction to this was “HOLLY FUCKING SHIT, ZOMBIES!!!” In fact my head nearly exploded from awesome as I was reading the article.
And then I looked up, and quickly realized that this was a hoax. Let me show you how I know this. The URL of the story is http://65.127.124.62/south_asia/4483241.stm.htm. See anything wrong with that? Look at the IP address.
The IP of bbc.co.uk is not 65.127.124.62. BBC is located at 212.58.228.155. If you don’t believe me click on both of the links and compare the results.
A quick reverse DNS search reveals that the domain name that points to 65.127.124.62 is in fact baserape.com. I probably don’t have to tell you this, but a respectable news agency probably would not register such a domain, or blast heavy metal music on their front page. Who owns baserape.com then?
According to a whois query that domain was registered by Godady to Domains By Proxy:
Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United StatesRegistered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: BASERAPE.COM
Created on: 08-May-03
Expires on: 08-May-10
Last Updated on: 03-Jan-06Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration BASERAPE.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599Technical Contact:
Private, Registration BASERAPE.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599Domain servers in listed order:
HELIUM.INTEGRALCORP.COM
CALVIN.INTEGRALCORP.COM
What is Domains By Proxy? It’s a company that acts like a proxy between a private user and the domain registrar. For example, you may not want to have your home address and phone number associated with your personal blog, or some silly fan site that you created. So you use a company like Domains By Proxy that will act as a mediator between you, the registrar and the people who need to contact you regarding your website.
What does this all mean? It means that just about anyone on the planet earth could have registered baserape.com. It is definitely not affiliated with BBC in any way. And if you do a wee bit of research into this, you will probably see that this is an old circulating story that was already debunked by snopes.com.
Come on Xeni – you know better than this!
Update Fri, September 15 2006, 09:12 PM
Oops, it seems that BoingBoing took down the article. I guess they were too embarrassed that they fell for it, that they didn’t even want to post a clarification like they usually do :P
[tags]bbc, zombies, cambodia, Quan’sul, Cambodian Troops, malaria, boingboing[/tags]
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If you had a third grade reading level, you would see the Date of the article. Nice job buddy. April Fool is You!
If you had a third grade reading level, you would see that I was simply responding to the fact that Xeni Jardin posted this on Boingboing on September 15th 2006 and then promptly deleted it an hour or so later. So yeah…
of course it’s a hoax you douche. No one is that stupid. IP or not,.
Again, it was posted on Boingboing (which is usually credible), by a respectable blogger (Xeni Jardin) and in the middle of September.
I’m simply commenting on the fact that they fell for it.
That makes me sad…. They could have come up with a sicker and more interesting story. I would have believed it anyhow because I’m gullable,lol.
No BBC writer would ever say that malaria is a virus. Respectable sources do research first.