The XP Conspiracy

Yet another reason to switch to Vista?

We're all familiar with conspiracy theories about subtle messages in rock music or the Bible. But who would have guessed that these sneakyisms could be hiding under the noses of hundreds of millions of PC users for the last half-decade?

The folks here at the FCN Lab grew suspicious after a tragic but non-lethal spill of lemon juice on the non-glare coating of my not-so-new IBM Thinkpad T42. While carefully wiping it off with the back of my sleeve, I noticed an odd shape in the clouds of the classic Bliss wallpaper that has become a trademark for XP. Without removing any more lemon juice, I rushed my wounded computer to the FCN Lab. After several hours of testing, we managed to pull out the hidden image.

That's right, folks: There is a hidden image in the clouds of the windows XP desktop! What it means exactly is anyone's guess, but we think it's safe to say that Bill Gates has some explaining to do (if he didn't already after evidence of sweatshop cubicle conditions surfaced on the BSOD).

Further testing revealed other images hidden on other popular XP desktops. We would have done them all, but someone found us and kicked us out of the Science building with a warning. We have attached our limited but significant findings below for your objective analysis (click the thumbnails). The questions are many: how did these pictures get here? What do they mean? How could they appear on so many desktops without anyone noticing - until now?

We here at FCN will be lying awake at night cuddling our teddy bears for the rest of the week.