But the Web wasn't done with Jobs yet. A few months later a "citizen journalist" on CNN's iReport site wrote a fake story claiming and was rushed to the emergency room. The only actual heart problems were suffered by Apple shareholders, who on the faux news. The SEC investigated whether the "citizen journalist"--apparently a teenager using the name Johntw--planted the story to manipulate Apple's share price, but the agency concluded "Johntw" .

September 2008: The most chilling Web snafus are those in which humans are barely involved. The ghost in the machine was hard at work last September, when news hit the wires United Airlines was filing for bankruptcy, causing its stock to plummet faster than a broken B737. UAL shareholders lost more than $1 billion before it was discovered that the story was nearly six years old.

"UAL files for bankruptcy" originally appeared on the Chicago Tribune's Web site in December 2002--when UAL did in fact go into Chapter 11. For reasons that are still a little foggy, a link to that story resurfaced on the Tribune's sister site, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, in September 2008, where . An editor at the Information Securities Advisors news agency saw the story and posted a short summary of UAL's "new" bankruptcy filing, which was picked up by Bloomberg News (see "Bloomberg whacks Steve Jobs," above) and fed directly to brokers' terminals all over Wall Street.

That's when the finger pointing started.