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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent

The curious case of Hannes Bergstrom

Over the last few days, I've been inundated with emails imploring me to help find out who this child - a victim of the tsunami - is. You might have got a similar email.

In fact, his identity was unravelled - probably before the emails even started circulating. His name is Hannes Bergstrom, and he's from Sweden - and has now, thankfully, been reunited with his family.

It's great human interest story that shows two interesting things about the web: that it's great for getting information distributed (and these kind of instances must surely be some of the most worthwhile uses of wideband communications) but also that it's quite hard to retract that information once it's sent out.

This photo wasn't incorrect, and it wasn't an urban myth - but the problem has been solved. The answer just hasn't caught up with the question yet.

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