What’s your favourite conspiracy theory?

Do you believe in conspiracy theories? Like the one that got Mel Gibson into hot waters in Conspiracy Theory? You know, the "there's a big cover-up involving the US Government and a ham-handed, bumbling CIA" sort?

In the fifties and the sixties, there used to be stories that G-Men in Black cropped up out of nowhere every time there was an "incidence" involving UFOs and aliens and muddied the water so much that, in the end, no one knew what had really happened. (In the 1997 hit, Men in Black, Jay/Will Smith and Kay/Tommy Lee Jones had to wield their neuralyzers to deal with the scum of the intergalactic space, remember?) Read the script: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Men-in-Black.html.

Now let me point you to the once-familiar Internet conspiracy theory with Microsoft as everybody’s favourite villain. At http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2823588,00.html, you'll find a typical conspiracy theory scenario. It's about the control of – no, not intergalactic space – the Internet. The secret weapon – Windows XP and the bundled IE browser – were to be allegedly used by Microsoft in cahoots with the US Government to help it control the distribution of information over the Internet. (Don't forget Congress had by then already given the US Government unlimited electronic surveillance power.) The article, Microsoft: Too much control of the Web?, was written by the well-respected CEO of UserLand Software, Dave Winer, who kept a daily blog, "Scripting News," at http://www.scripting.com/.