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Comment by spacesanjeet | Hacker News Reader

I am trying to grasp what I have just read. I may be able to understand if this is sarcasm probably

I don't know if this story is true, but the story of Greek police raiding my local D&D store and confiscating all books to check for satanism in 2001 is very true. For a long time, Kaissa (the store) was left without manuals or adventure books.

Having lived through the 90s as a young adult, I can assure you back then the Family Values crowd was just as annoying and censorious as the Woko Haram is today. 2011 seems a bit late for that kind of thing, but it's entirely plausible a few NPCs didn't get the patch yet.

Down under, we have a term for them: wowsers [0]

The term was coined a hundred years ago. Every generation has a different version of the moral scare that will corrupt the children and needs urgent policing. The policing is always about controlling other people's behaviour (rather than, for example, educating the children).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wowser

The latest version also goes after adults.

> Woko Haram

Brilliant (≧▽≦)

It sounds like a fake story. Doesn't pass the smell test for me:

> I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service.... The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad.

What "owner of a hotel," 1) knows this much about BSD to explain to a random guest and 2) outsources their wifi hotpot service? Then everyone, owner and guest starts calling the service provider about controversy, instead of the guest relocating to other hotel in the area.

Yeah obviously fake, who ever calls people. It's not the owner of the hotel, it's the person / company who setup their WiFi. Presumably on the wifi connection page there's a number to call for tech support.

http://lariat.net/

The first sentence says:

"I just got a call from the owner of a hotel..."

The story is probably all true, even though it does have a bit of that "Elderly man set cruise control on at their RV then got up to make a sandwich" urban myth/chain letter vibe to it.

Yeah, they even went to the length of setting up a fake ISP with a FreeBSD nerdesque 1995 web design vibe too.

If you've ever done tech support you know this call is all too real.

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