Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Google announced that it would be releasing a new operating system called Google Chrome OS this week. One mysterious blog entry popped up soon after, claiming to have snagged some screenshots of the OS as Google demoed the product to Acer.
Here’s an excerpt from that post:
Hi there. I work for a company (Sorry to be secretive, but what I am about to post could get me in big trouble) that supplies parts for Acer laptops. Today, a Google Rep visited the Acer team to install and quickly show off some of the features of the Google OS in development.
I was invited by Acer to come and view the demo.
I can say and give only what I know and have.
…
After roughly 12 hours, the person who posted this posted the following video, pretty much laughing at the tech media industry for jumping on board and linking to the screenshots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uDQJoK12p8The video lists all of the sites that linked to it, and shows all of the diggs and tweets that got these fake screenshots a nice bit of attention. To be fair though, at least some of the publications/blogs that mentioned the screenshots were quick to acknowledge that they could indeed be fakes.
It is interesting to see how quickly false information can spread though, and that is clearly the point this person was trying to make. What do you think of his/her little prank? Share your thoughts.
Meanwhile, Google has released some more details about Chrome OS.
