pwned: A corruption of the word “Owned.” This originated in an online game called Warcraft, where a map designer misspelled “owned.” When the computer beat a player, it was supposed to say, so-and-so “has been owned.”Instead, it said, so-and-so “has been pwned.”It basically means “to own” or to be dominated by an opponent or situation, especially by some god-like or computer-like force.The excellent satirical website, The People’s Cube, has pwned Iran’s propaganda website, Press TV, which used one of The People’s Cube’s spoof images to illustrate a “true” statement that Jews are welcome in Iran and that Western reports about mass emigration of Iranian Jews are “lies spread by the Zionist hegemony.” From The People’s Cube:
The spoof image in question first appeared in 2005, in our parody called Israel Dismantles; World’s Problems End, which revealed the absurdity of demands to dismantle Israel, with various nations, including Iran and Germany, celebrating the return of their long-missed Jews.
It gets better. Our Iranian friends tell us that the original Farsi-language placard says “Nuclear power is our absolute right,” which means that you, dear Mullahs, used that image as a propaganda tool to advance your nuclear program – so you could threaten and maybe even annihilate the Jews in Israel. In our spoof, we changed the message of the placard to the complete opposite, making it appear improbable. To be fair, your story about Iran’s love for the Jews was just as improbable, so it would seem only logical to put them together. It would, we repeat – if your goal were to publish a self-parody. That wasn’t your intention, however. You only did it because you didn’t know better.
The original propaganda message from Iran’s propaganda website is on the left. The People’s Cube photoshopped image used to ridicule the Iranian government’s grotesque spin, is on the right. Excellent coup, Commissar Pupovich!Update from The Peoples Cube:
(Dec.29) PressTV realized they were being pwned and replaced the image in the morning of Dec. 29, 2007, ending more than two full days of pwnage. We expected it to happen, that was why we made the following screen capture for historical purposes. Other sites that reported it made their own screen captures.
My favorite pwnage is this one.