Among Bloomberg’s web pages on April 7th appeared a story that looked ordinary enough: PairGain, an American telecom equipment manufacturer, was to be bought by an Israeli company for about twice its market value. The company’s stock price, predictably, rocketed from $8.50 to $11.13. All fine and normal—except that the story wasn’t true. Somebody had copied Bloomberg’s logo and layout and posted a bogus report on the Bloomberg site. When Pair Gain queried the report, it was taken off, and the share price crashed again. Bloomberg is now suing unnamed parties who posted the page. As more and more of life moves on to the Internet, so the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction on it becomes more and more of a worry. This problem springs from the Internet’s central virtue: low barriers to entry. In the real world, being a publisher costs a great deal of money. You have to have manufacturing facilities and distribution networks. So real-world publishers have a great deal invested in their reputations and consequently need to be careful about what they print. On the Internet, being a publisher costs next to nothing. Many Internet publishers, therefore, have little to lose from printing untruths and plenty to gain in notoriety if the story they put out is sensational enough. What’s more, faking the real-world newspaper, which has to be both manufactured and distributed, would be next to impossible; faking an Internet page is dead easy. Not all the efforts of the lowering of the barriers to entry are bad. Big, established news organisations can be too cautious and too protective of their more powerful sources. Many scandals have been unearthed first by outsiders with scrappy news sheets and little to lose by way of influential contacts. The Internet is a golden age for what used to be the newsletter. The downside is the ease with which error spreads. Rarely, though, falsehood takes the form of international fraud, more often it appears as malicious gossip, slovenly reporting and Chinese whispers. Last year everybody on the Internet knew that Tommy Hilfiger, a fashion designer, had made racist comments on the Operah Winfrey Show. Except that he didn’t. Pierre Salinger, former television newsman, claimed at a news conference that TWA 800, a passenger plane that crashed into the Atlantic killing all aboard in 1996, had been downed by a missile—all on the basis of a web page of dubious origin. Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune wrote her column one week as a spoof graduation speech. Somehow this column became tagged on the web, as Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement speech at MIT. Cyberspace can also be risky, for now, because even sophisticated people can be gullible about what they read there. This may be because of a lag between technology and perception. Smartly produced pages, and things on screens, impress us with an authority that springs from the resources needed to produce them in the old paper medium. Perhaps everyone should be more worldly wise about what can turn up on the web. The Bloomberg incident in the first paragraph is a case of ______.