Apr 02
Out of licenses?
Yesterday, we published a story that our licenses had run out of stock. In the press release, VP at CLC bio, Jan Lomholdt stated:
We chose a Russian license supplier - Глупая Фабрика (St. Petersburg) - because the Cyrillic alphabet would ensure an extra level of encryption, and thereby be harder to bypass by people with sinister intentions. Things have been working smoothly up to this date, with an adequate number of licenses to meet demands. If we had anticipated this situation, we would of course have increased our inventory. It’s an unfortunate situation, but our Russian license supplier is working around the clock right now in order to have a new batch of licenses ready to be flown to Aarhus - hopefully within this week.
This story is an April Fools’ prank as we have our own license generator in both Aarhus and Boston, so we can’t really run out of licenses. We of course thought it was a funny story, but essentially a prank isn’t funny unless someone believes the hoax. So when GenomeWeb decided to play along and publish the prank as well, things got really funny! Unfortunately they have since removed the article.
After enjoying a good laugh at the office yesterday, we published a retraction today, so no one is in doubt that they in fact can get their licenses from CLC bio pronto. You can read the original prank release as well as the retraction we published today, by clicking here.
Bio-IT World also ran a story on the prank, which you can enjoy right here.