Wired watch: ID of tourist in hoax photo is revealed

01/03/2002

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

WIRED WATCH

After months of Internet rumors and a proliferation of websites in his honor, the "Tourist of Death" has apparently been unmasked.

Wired News (www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48397,00.html) reports that the man in the black cap and glasses pictured atop the World Trade Center is a 25-year-old Hungarian who wants to be known only as Peter.

TouristGuy.com
The tourist depicted atop the World Trade Center in a doctored photo has emerged.

The digitally doctored photo, which zipped around the Internet within hours of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was originally mailed to a friend as a joke, Peter told Wired.

Peter said he pasted a jetliner into a 1997 picture of himself taken on the World Trade Center's observation deck. After e-mailing it to a few friends, he forgot about his Adobe Photoshop gag. But the snapshot took on a life of its own. It became a Web meme, a rapidly proliferating idea passed among millions on the Net.

Soon, websites such as TouristGuy.com and TouristofDeath.com sprang up with more sightings of Peter, including inside President Kennedy's limousine in Dallas and alongside the USS Cole.

A Brazilian man first claimed to be the Tourist of Death, but Peter's friends then quickly identified him as the photo subject in a Hungarian news site.

City Hall rebuilt on the Internet

The city of Dallas has launched www.dallascityhall.com, a revamped Web portal designed to allow residents to get mundane chores accomplished online rather than in line.

Driver's license renewals, building inspection scheduling, and city employment applications can all be handled via home computer.

More services, including paying water bills online, are planned for this year.

"The new website is designed to be more user-friendly and simple to navigate, and many pages are available in Spanish as well as English," said acting Mayor Mary Poss.

Net notes

Microsoft users, beware. Your system may need patching if you use Internet Explorer 6.0 or one of the most recent versions of Windows. With IE 6.0, a weakness in the coding could allow attackers to have full run of your machine after simply viewing a malicious Web page or e-mail. See the patch at www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-058.asp. For those with Windows 98 or later, the Universal Plug and Play feature could lead to your computer serving as a zombie for Net-wide attacks. See the alert and patch at www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-059.asp .

CNet has posted a wonderful look back on development of the Web on occasion of the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. Web page (news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-8182805-0.html). Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of modern graphical Web interfaces, reminisces about designing the first Web protocols and predicts that the next Web revolution will be led by the Semantic Web, a system of organizing information for the sharing and processing of Web data across a variety of programs and applications.

Compiled from staff and wire reports