Earlier today both Slashdot and Digg have had articles promoted to their front pages that cover the story of the Fake Steve Jobs being threatened by Apple over “trade secrets”. There have been several posts on Fake Steve’s blog, and the entire thing has been played out like it is real.
Fans have gotten riled up, and some have even started campaigns against Apple over the situation.
There’s just one problem.
It’s a Hoax. At least, it looks that way after contact “Steve Jobs” at Apple. I don’t know who actually answers sjobs(at)apple(dot)com, but multiple sources have informed me that it is “high-level customer service representatives”, and they have confirmed that, as far as they know, this is a joke.
So don’t get too bent out of shape over it just yet. It looks like the whole thing is another fabrication by the Fake Steve Jobs blog – what makes this one different than previous entries is that it’s being played out by Daniel Lyons (a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs) like it’s real. This is the first time, that I know of, that he has broken character on the blog for a fake story.
5 thoughts on “Fake Steve Jobs getting sued by Apple is a HOAX”
It’s great to hear this was all a hoax. Here i was thinking Apple was going on a blog shutdown frenzy.
you don’t even need the real steve (or his “impersonators” answering the mails) to tell you this is fake. the fake steve blog site is officially (!) affiliated with forbes. everyone knows by now who the man behind fake steve is, and he is a full-time forbes employee. so practically, the blog is being run by forbes, meaning that apple would neither have reason nor legitimation to directly be suing lyons as a person.
this is a point many have made; if apple were to be serious with shutting down fake steve, then it would be a thing between apple and forbes. no way would lyons be personally involved in this. and seriously: who would have needed inside sources to predict there would be new hardware to be shown on wwdc 2007? my mom could have made that prediction.
so the whole thing was pretty obvios from the beginning, in my opinion… but it’s still funny to see how many people can get all riled up over something like this without ever doing a bit of thinking in the process.
@Phil
I don’t think the blog is owned in any way by Forbes just because he works there. I am full time employee of Bloggy Network LLC and they don’t own anything on my personal blog, or anything that I write that isn’t specifically for them.
If Lyons is the owner of the blog he would be the one responsible for any litigation that might take place.
well… it does say “a forbes.com site” on the blog. and i’m dead certain that lyons could instantly come up with a contract proving that he is writing the blog as a part of his work with forbes, should the need arise. no way in hell is he going to be held personally responsible for this.
then again, american law practice tends to be incredibly strange a lot of the time, so what do i know? i’m still rather certain about it though.
Hes broken character many times since his revealing. But I thought it was fake when I was reading them.