The Lurker

Blind trust in anonymous Internet users

This Wired story is about a man who entered "humorous" CD track titles into his girlfriend's computer, not realising his media player would submit the titles would to a widely-used Internet CD information database.

The titles of the eight tracks on the CD, the album's name and the name of the artist displayed on media players all revolved around urination and defecation. "Maybe I Fart on Your Face" was not what the classical fans had been expecting.

It turned out that one of the 8,000 subscribers who received the promotional CD was a university student in the southern New Zealand town of Christchurch. And he'd used an Internet-based media player to listen to the tracks.

"He received the NZSO promotional CD, put it into his computer and then he was prompted to put the titles in," said Constable Todd Webley, to whom the student unburdened himself when the titles became news.

Related topics: Mindless Link Propagation