The following article has some good resources for investigating the hoax
email that's increasingly common.  Personally good old common sense does
the trick for me most of the time, although it is mildly amusing to see the
schemes people dream up.


July 1, 1999

Chain of Foolery on the Internet

If 'Thoughts Travel Faster in a Vacuum,' the Net May Be the Perfect Medium
for Spreading Hoaxes

By TINA KELLEY

[First, the bad news: Bill Gates is not going to send you to Disneyland or
give you free Microsoft software or pay you to test it. No one is going to
close the Internet down for a day of spring cleaning. And the Miller
Brewing Company is not celebrating the millennium by giving away free
six-packs of beer to two million computer users.

Next, the good news: the Federal Government is not going to start charging
for each e-mail message. And that dying English boy of 10 years ago who was
trying to collect enough get-well cards to make the record books? He
actually got well, thank you very much. Well enough to wish that he and a
variety of charities were not still getting cards.
Hoaxes can spread through the Internet faster than viruses, to which they
have been compared. They are more tenacious in some ways because they are
passed on by every new person to get online and they mutate freely. And
with just a few clicks in your address book, it is easy to forward a chain
letter, a virus warning or a list of specious True Facts. It is harder to
figure out which messages are true, especially when many people check their
powers of critical thinking at their Internet portals. As Joe Wells of
Antivirus Online ( www.av.ibm.com ) said, "Thoughts travel faster in a
vacuum."
It would seem to be easy enough to avoid what has been termed the
gullibility virus, by just deleting any e-mail that smells like a hoax. But
few people, especially those who are new to the Internet, can resist the
urge to forward a message about the need, say, to send around a picture of
an angel made out of repeated keyboard symbols to insure good luck.
While forwarding such e-mail might seem harmless, consider what would
happen if everybody did it.
"If each of the so-called good Samaritans sends the letter on to only 10
other people (most send to huge mailing lists), the ninth resending results
in a billion e-mail messages, thereby clogging the network and interfering
with the receiving of legitimate e-mail," according to the Computer
Incident Advisory Capability Web site ( ciac.llnl.gov/ciac ) of the
Department of Energy, where hoaxes, false virus warnings and chain letters
are listed.




One chain letter or hoax may seem harmless but can quickly propagate into
billions of copies.






One Internet hoax resulted in death threats against a man whose name was
falsely attached to the online sale of T-shirts with offensive slogans
about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
Someone on America Online posted the name of the man, Kenneth Zeran, and
his home telephone number on a bulletin board with an advertisement for
"Naughty Oklahoma T-shirts." Zeran was not selling any such shirts. (He
eventually sued AOL in a Federal court; the suit was dismissed there, and
Zeran lost on appeal.)
Of course, hoaxes are born every minute, and they have been around since
the computer was an abacus.
Take, for example, the fraud perpetrated by one Lozier in 1824, who
convinced hundreds of New Yorkers that all the new construction around Wall
Street was making Manhattan bottom-heavy and that therefore the island
needed to be sawed off at the northern end, towed out to sea, turned around
and reattached, or it would tip and sink. More than 300 men signed up for
the project, according to contemporary accounts collected by Rick Brown,
Webmaster of the History Buff's Home Page, which includes a list of great
hoaxes ( www.historybuff.com ).




GULLIBILITY THRIVES ONLINE
E-Z Tenure
Chain letter offers professors a quick route to job security.
A Taxing Issue
Phantom legislation would tax Canadian e-mail.
Mickey Mouse Offer
Try Microsoft products, go to Disneyland.
Web Cobwebs
The Internet cleans itself up. It even does Windows.
Going Postal
The postal service puts its stamp on e-mail.
Don't Ask, Just Do It
Send messages, get free footwear.
Killing With Kindness
Get-well cards are the best revenge.



Some hoaxes are not born, however, but made from what begins as a
legitimate e-mail letter. In Hubbards, a rural fishing town in Nova Scotia,
Glynda Wimmer's fifth-grade class at Mill Cove District School decided, as
a geography project, to send e-mail to a total of 15 family members and
friends, asking them to reply with their geographic locations and to
forward the message to their own friends, asking them to do the same.
All was fine at first (except that the class's computer was soon overloaded
with e-mail). But then two people called from Florida to say they had
received obscene replies from the school. It turned out that someone had
altered the return address on the original message, routing mail to an
account that generated rude responses. The school was able to fix the
problem soon after it was discovered.
The sick-child hoax has also been mischievously modified. Originally, Craig
Shergold, a 10-year-old with brain cancer, tried to get in the Guinness
Book of Records for receiving the most get-well cards. His efforts, and his
surgery, were successful, but he and several children's-last-wish charities
are still receiving cards.
His story also lives on in various permutations, one naming "Timothy
Flight" as the sick child. "Someone took the name Timothy Flight and
replaced it with an actual kid at an actual high school in Pittsburgh,"
said David Emery, the guide to urban legends and folklore for the About.com
search site. "Apparently the guy who perpetrated the hoax was jealous of
this kid because they were both in love with the same girl." The family of
the Pittsburgh child has put out public requests for people to stop calling
them to see if he actually needs get-well cards, Emery said.



TRACKING HOAXES
Don't Spread That Hoax:
http://www.nonprofit.net/hoax/hoax.html
Includes a listing of possible hoaxes that are still being checked out.
Hoaxes and Urban Legends:
www0.delphi.com/navnet/legends/legends.html
Includes a section on how to detect hoaxes.
Computer Incident Advisory Capability:
http://ciac.llnl.gov/
This is from the Department of Energy and includes up-to-date warnings and
sections on chain letters and hoaxes (as well as viruses.)
About.com/Urban Legends and Folklore:
urbanlegends.about.com :
Tracks current Web hoaxes; message boards are included.
Hoax Kill
www.hoaxkill.com
Helps people track hoaxes and will track the recipients of a hoax and
notify them about the deception.




Besides jealousy, motives for hoaxes include the ageless desire to pull a
fast one and the hope of foiling spammers (by sending, for example, an
e-mail message falsely asserting that any e-mail with the subject "Make
Money Fast" contains a virus so people won't read it).
Financial gain can be a motive, too. In April, the share price of a company
called Pairgain Technologies increased by 30 percent in a few hours after a
false report that the company was being bought was posted on a personal Web
site.
The stock price eventually went back down -- after the report was debunked,
but presumably not before someone made a lot of money.
Emery sees larger motives for telling improbable tales and disseminating
them. People like to scare themselves, he said, whether they are gazing at
a campfire or into the glow of a computer screen.
They also like to unite against the behemoths of the business world.
"There's just a general spirit of hating big corporations," Emery said.
(Hence all those rumors about Nike giving away free clothes to everyone who
forwards a particular e-mail message.) "When you start to scratch the
surface and challenge the information," he added, "people are so convinced
that big corporations are evil that they won't let go of a specific rumor,
even if you can prove it to be false."
Besides, the people who start hoaxes are almost assured of anonymity, for
better or worse, because verification of a letter's authenticity is nearly
impossible.
"If you really want to believe in the chain letter, you should be able to
click through to some U.R.L. and be able to verify it through some
independent source," said Rob Rosenberger, who runs the Web site
www.kumite.com , which dispels myths about computer viruses. "But I can
easily concoct a Web site that would 'validate' a chain letter."

"Lots of people have tried to trace an e-mail back to the original," Emery
said, "but it just has to get a generation or two beyond the original and
the original is lost. You can't get caught doing it, or I don't think
anyone has so far."
And justice is hard to come by if you or your business has been the victim
of an anonymous hoaxer. Internet service providers are not responsible for
the information posted on their bulletin boards or flung through the gossip
mill of e-mail.
Charles Hymes, a Hewlett-Packard engineer who runs a nonprofit Web site
that exposes hoaxes www.nonprofit.net/hoax/hoax.html tenure. I've still
seen this circulating years later, in different incarnations."
Other hoaxes have mutated as well. Electronic rumors that the Postal
Service would soon start charging a 5-cent fee for every piece of e-mail
eventually developed a Canadian strain, which urged e-mail recipients to
lobby members of Parliament to vote against taxing e-mail, though no such
legislation was in the works.
Rosenberger calls that an example of "E-Darwinism." "The speed of e-mail
and its incessant forwarding capability make it easier to evolve," he said.


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html