The news is moving through the blogs now, so I will assume you already know that the ‘new’ asymmetric screw was a fake. This happen quite a bit with Apple, especially around new iphone / ipad releases. But what was different about this rumor was the post analysis by the guys who started the rumor in the first place.
Check out the Day4 blog for more detail, but here is the basic summery.
They created a fake fact, an asymmetric, mocked it up in CADD and then emailed an image to themselves. They then uploaded this to Reddit. And waited. It did not take long. 12 hours in fact.
Less than 12 hours later it had happened. First came Apple blog Cult of Mac, who reported ”Apple May Be Working On A Top Secret Asymmetric Screw To Lock You Out Of Your Devices Forever” and then it just went on. More and more blogs wrote about the alleged leaks from Apple headquarters in Cupertino, USA. Yahoo, Wired and MacWorld jumped on. On Twitter, numerous posts raged about the issue. On YouTube, people made video blogs about the new screw. Google + talked about it page after page. Try it yourself, go to www.google.se and search on ”asymmetric screw”.
What is interesting is that many posts were skeptical in the beginning, but as the rumor moved further from the source, and more people were commenting about its impact, and less about its validity, the less the validity was even called into question.
The split between the two camps, was quite unequal. An estimate would be that 90% regarded the screw as a fact and based all the further opinion on that, only 10% were critical to accuracy.
I want to call out Eric_E for calling BS on this. An upvote for you good sir.
