Harry Potter Book Seven Hacked?

If you keep a tab on my del.icio.us bookmarks at the top of the blog’s homepage (feed), you might have noticed this link to Gizmodo announcing that the book seven in the Harry Potter series has been hacked. The news was announced by someone on a forum who claimed to have hacked into Bloomsbury’s, JK Rowling’s publisher, servers and retrieved the manuscript.

The person who did that then posted the series’ climatic ending on the forum including many spoilers on how the series would end. Interestingly, the hacker was disturbed by the Potter’s undermining of the Christian faith and promotion of paganism and made the spoiler “to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring.” Now, that’s hilarious and almost akin to the Shiv Sena hiring software programmers to find out people in the U.S who are posting hateful messages on Orkut so they can go thrash them. By the way, that is true.

The Spoilers

The spoilers were posted here. Don’t bother clicking because the page has been removed [Update: here is the updated link in case you want to torture your Potter fan friends by threatening to reveal all; warning doing so can be extremely dangerous to your health]. I did manage to read it before it was removed and trust me, the ending seemed far too melodramatic. It would suit a Bollywood movie better and given how the series has proceeded so far I do not think that is happening.

Anyway, you have to wait for just one more month to find out how it all ends. The book has been pre-ordered but I am not a maniacal fan to burn the midnight oil trying to find out what happened. However, i just might go over to the nearest book store to witness the Potter mania.


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5 responses to “Harry Potter Book Seven Hacked?”

  1. Luther Blisset said:

    The Harry Potter hoax, or manipulating the mass media for fun and for profit.

    Harry Potter book has not been stolen.
    It is an homebrew experiment of a well known military tactic named Psychological Operation (PSYOP), applied to Information Warfare.

    In less than 48 hours a fake news has realized 200 newspaper publication (including BBC, CNN, REUTERS) , 10.000+ blogs, many TV reportage, from the India to Southamerica.

    PSYOPs can be summarized as: the creation of fake information, a partial description or censorship applied to mass media.

    PSYOPs are widely used by non-democratic governments in different countries around the world and by big political-economical lobbies in western countries.

    Our goal was to provide to the world citizen a proof of the vulnerability of today information society and let them think seriously about that

    http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.harry-potter/browse_thread/thread/aa25070e7c0959f8/9a04b6779b5a0c2f

  2. Abhishek said:

    Hey Patrix! This is a wonderful way of “virally” spreading the word on the web! I am sure even if the book were stolen and the manuscript was hacked, and let’s assume for one moment that all that the man has posted is true, there can be a few harry potter fans or the publishers themselves who can spread other information in the name of spoilers and confuse the fans! I think that’s what they did with the Indian rip off of reservoir dogs when an SMS was circulated that Lucky Ali was the killer. The producers promnptly spread the word that Suanju baba, Suniel Shetty, Amit(ji) was the killer…

    Of course, we are talking about a different scale altogether… but, this was bound to happen, don’t you think!

  3. Patrix said:

    Luther, hmmmm…interesting.

    Abhishek, Given how much information is out there on the web and the rumor factor being so high, you can no longer trust anything you read unless you are sure about its source. That was an interesting strategy by producers of Kaante. I remember the identity of the killer in Gupt being revealed similarly. My friend Shelby screamed out loud – Kajol is the killer – in the theater just before movie started. I’m sure if people wished that would have been his last movie or rather day on earth.

  4. Abhishek said:

    Yeah, I agree the source counts! And you know what, they posted on the Notice board of Podar that ‘Kajol is the killer in Gupt!’ They are still tracking the guy who did that!

    Oh, yeah and your friend owes you more than a movie!

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