Claims that two schools in China were the source of cyberattacks against Google (GOOG) and other U.S. companies have become the butt of a state-run media joke in the country. First came vehement denials from Shanghai Jiaotong University and Lanxiang Vocational School, which dismissed the stories as unfounded. “We were shocked and indignant to hear these baseless allegations which may harm the university’s reputation,” an SJTU representative told Xinhua News, the official press agency of the People’s Republic of China. He denied any ties between the school and China’s military, as did a rep for Lanxiang.

A relatively diplomatic condemnation of the claims at issue here, but it quickly devolved into outright disparagement and mockery. A subsequent news story, also published by Xinhua, bears the title “Chinese netizens make fun of Google hacking report.”

An excerpt:

A report claiming cyber attacks on Google and other firms originated from two Chinese educational institutions is being jeered at by Chinese netizens.

“The report is sheer nonsense. Is it April Fools’ Day?” netizen sdh13814021912 commented at the www.tianya.cn forum.

“The news is doomed to be a joke.” netizen Jinse Xueguang said.

“A vocational school being used as camouflage for military-sponsored hacker training camp. Am I reading a science fiction?” said another netizen azydn.

Is it April Fools’ Day? Am I reading a science fiction? Clearly Sino-American relations around this matter have sunk to a new low. Still, it’s no surprise that China’s digerati–or the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officials impersonating them for state-run media–have reacted this way.

Confirming the schools’ involvement in the attacks or their alleged links to the Chinese military is impossible without Beijing’s cooperation. And Beijing is clearly not going to cooperate. Why would it? It has already denied culpability. And ensuring that it remains blameless is as simple as refusing to disclose traffic data from the schools’ data networks.

PREVIOUSLY:

• World War WAN: Google Hack Traced to Schools in China
• Nearly a Month After Debut, Google’s “New” Approach to China Still a Lot Like the Old One
• Google CEO: Ask Not What Google Can Do for China–Ask What China Can Do for Google
• China on “Google Farce”: Our Internet Is Open
• China to Google: No Worries, We Were Planning to Clone Those Android Phones Anyway
• U.S. State Department to Complain to China About Google Hack. Not That China’s Going to Listen.
• Microsoft: “Don’t Be Evil” Is Google’s Motto, Not Ours
• What’s the Chinese Word for Bing? Google Threatens to Leave China.

Qualcomm (QCOM), for example, has a very slick video on YouTube that initially seems to be a typical piece of corporate B-roll hyping the latest development out of their labs. Then it turns out they are discussing putting cellular base stations on pigeons to form a flying wireless network, which prompts the need to develop a beast called the wolf-pigeon to defend the network, which inspires the creation of a shark-falcon to control the wolf-pigeons, and so on.

Amazon.com (AMZN), reacting to the gaseous conversations about a trend known as cloud computing, contends in a Web posting that it has a new high-level offering in the field–on a blimp. It’s called “the Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE for short. Using the latest in airship technology, we’ve created a cloud that can come to you,” the company writes.

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This despite the fact that he is chomping on this weirdly long pipe on his glam headshot (pictured here) and that we are the first blog listed on his “Sites We Like” list and that he always links to us, even as he calls us twits (but not in the unnaturally obsessive media-admiration-of-Twitter way).

He wrote last fall: “Sure, All Things D isn’t very good and it’s insufferably smug, but if you trash publications on those grounds you’ll soon be reduced to reading cereal boxes.”

Jump back, Jack! You can call us names and say we stink, but insulting cereal boxes is beyond the pale.

But, hey, Schofield also links, so we love him.

In other words, if we get the traffic, you can call All Things Digital anything you want–just don’t call us late for dinner.

Thus, in the spirit of April Fool’s Day, we thought we should let this blooming blighter get a photographic version of what insufferably smug truly looks like, unveiling a new “About Us” look, Sherlock Holmes-style.

Click on the image to make it larger:

The software giant has jokingly renamed it Omuk, which is Kumo spelled backwards.

No kidding, but BoomTown likes it better!

As I wrote about Kumo and Microsoft (MSFT) efforts to compete better with archrival Google (GOOG) in early March:

“Sources at Microsoft said the company has not yet decided whether it will keep the Kumo name, which sounds a little too much like that crazy dog from the Stephen King novel.”

Thus, I was heartened when I obtained this internal memo, sent suspiciously on April Fool’s Day.

The Bernie Madoff and “muk it” jokes are actually funny.

Here’s the screenshot (click on it to make it larger) and the memo:

From: Brian MacDonald
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 5:16 AM
To: Search FTE’s
Subject: Yesterday’s brand leak

Based on all the mail I have been getting on the topic, I imagine most people have seen the blog posts from late yesterday leaking the new brand. Marketing has asked me to share some of the “why” behind the final brand decision, but everyone should know that we are still officially keeping a “no comment” stance on the leak. We shouldn’t be discussing the new brand name externally until after the official launch.

In picking the new brand, marketing tried to have a brand that resonated with power users. We want to increase our fanbase amongst the heaviest searchers and want to pick a brand that will support that. Google had the scientific/math term kind of savvy user appeal and we wanted something akin to that. One of the real clever product names of all time was the operating system Gnu, which stood for Gnu’s Not Unix, with the G not really standing for anything. Kind of quirky and kind of fun.

So this same kind of thinking was behind the brand name. So it was Kumo after all, but with a twist. Kumo was just our new brand spelled backwards. The new brand “Omuk” stands, gnu-like, for “Omuk means unlimited knowledge.” The phrase “unlimited knowledge” really resonated with focus groups as something they most wanted to achieve with a search engine. It is rare that you can get the brand promise so neatly tied directly to the brand name. It also ties in corporate wide with the Unlimited Potential group etc.

There is a lot of riffs marketing can do in advertising with “unlimited knowledge.” If you recall the Dreyer’s Ice Cream ads where they brought in people who said they were abducted by aliens etc. and then did the tagline “unbelievable product from an unbelievable spokesperson” etc., we can do something similar. For example, tying Bernie Madoff, Unlimited Chutzpah with Omuk, Unlimited Knowledge. That type of thing.

In testing, Omuk scored very high on attributes like “empowering”, “organized” and “warm/fuzzy.” Another key attribute was ease of spelling and Omuk did very well. There was some concerns that people might spell it ohmuk or omuck but that didn’t happen.

The final key feature for the brand was verbability. Here marketing is planning to go with a little ingenuity and drop the o and just push “muk it.” In ads they will get playful and have the actors talk about the joys of accessing unlimited knowledge by just “muking around”, etc. The hope is to generate a lot of word-of-mouth and free impressions on the internet the way that the very successful Bill and Jerry commercials did for Windows.

Below is a sample homepage screenshot with the new brand. Really looks great. This also has the latest thinking on default “scopes.”

–Brian