The last weeks of 2007 and first weeks of 2008 provided a double helping of brilliantly scary new tech conspiracies to be very afraid of. This is great news: I haven’t managed to reach this level of paranoia since reading Whitley Streiber’s Communion in the ‘time before X-Files’. Here they are:

1. From the Guardian 30 December: Storm Botnet - a colossal network of zombie-virus computers (aka ‘La Botnet’) has been created by evil nerd-masterminds. No-one knows who’s behind it or what they want. It could be Russian nerds, Chinese nerds, Iranian nerds or even (gulp) American nerds - it doesn’t matter: they are *well* evil. The Botnet is so huge already that it could bring a whole country to its knees - for example, by making Facebook totally unavailable. According to the Guardian this might happen in 2008. It’s like Die Hard 4.0 meets Web 2.o. ‘Storm Botnet‘: what a cool name.
2. Facebook is run by the CIA - and you are in danger if you even have a profile. Despite said danger, the clandestine renegades most worried about this threat are organising themselves using a Facebook group called ‘The Truth About Facebook‘. Doh. I urge all right-thinking people to join this group. It’s pretty funny.

We can only pray that these evil phenomenon manifest at the same time, thus canceling each other out.

Tags: botnet, conspiracy, evil, facebook, virus