The latest from my personal heroes, The Yes Men. If you don't know who they are, they are a couple of guys who go to elaborate lengths to impersonate representatives of corporations and other entities like the WTO who are involved in shady dealings yet try to pass themselves off as upstanding. They publish fake websites, send out fake press releases, give outrageous conference presentations of some pretty shocking and outlandish ideas, just to see if anyone will call them on it since their ideas are so awful it should be obvious. The sad part is...sadly no. Which makes for some great entertainment in between banging one's head against the wall because it's all too real.
I couldn't find much on this posted at their site, so here are some excerpts from the latest email. Although I did find hints that they are working on a new movie? The site is so haphazardly up-to-out-of date it's hard to tell...so here they are:
June 28, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
EXXON HACKS THE YES MEN
Yes Men badly need sysadmin, server co-location
Contact: mailto:people@theyesmen.org
One day after the Yes Men made a joke announcement that ExxonMobil plans to turn billions of climate-change victims into a brand-new fuel called Vivoleum, the Yes Men's upstream internet service provider shut down Vivoleum.com, the Yes Men's spoof website, and cut off the Yes Men's email service, in reaction to a complaint whose
source they will not identify. The provider, Broadview Networks, also made the Yes Men remove all mention of Exxon from TheYesMen.org before they'd restore the Yes Men's email service.
The Yes Men assume the complainant was Exxon. "Since parody is protected under US law, Exxon must think that people seeing the site will think Vivoleum's a real Exxon product, not just a parody," said Yes Man Mike Bonanno. "Exxon's policies do already contribute to 150,000 climate-change related deaths each year," added Yes Man Andy
Bichlbaum. "So maybe it really is credible. What a resource!"
After receiving the complaint June 15, Broadview added a "filter" that disabled the Vivoleum.com IP address (64.115.210.59), and furthermore prevented email from being sent from the Yes Men's primary IP address (64.115.210.58). Even after all Exxon logos were removed from both sites and a disclaimer was placed on Vivoleum.com
on Tuesday, Broadview would still not remove the filter. (The disclaimer read: "Although Vivoleum is not a real ExxonMobil program, it might as well be.")
Broadview did restore both IPs on Wednesday, after the Vivoleum.com website was completely disabled and all mention of Exxon was removed from TheYesMen.org.
If you haven't seen their movie, put it at the front of your Netflix queue, or just go rent it directly. You won't know whether to laugh or cry. If you can help them out with their co-server or sysadmin problems (they are based in New York) drop them a line at the email address above.
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