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* CYBERSPACE *
* A biweekly column on net culture appearing *
* in the Toronto Sunday Sun *
* *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer *
* Free for online distribution *
* All Rights Reserved *
* Direct comments and questions to: *
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You probably got that email a few weeks ago claiming the
Federal government was working on something called "Bill 602P".
Ostensibly Bill 602P would levy a 5 cent surcharge on behalf of
Canada Post for every email sent.
Lots of people seemed to be fooled by this rather obvious hoax.
Even some hosts of a local Toronto radio station reported this
as fact. They were unable to see some of the readily apparent
problems with the email's contents. The name of the bill itself
should have been a reasonable tip off to any Canadian in a
position of informing others. Don't all bills introduced before
Parliament begin with C, as in C-102? Snort. Broadcast
journalists.
Anyone who has been on the net for a while recognized it as
derivation of the old "modem tax" scare. Back in 1990 a rumour
was going around that the United States' FCC was going to start
taxing modem owners. Lots of people fired off angry letters to
their congressmen. I can imagine these letters were filled with
lots of technical jargon like "modem", "BBS", and "no new
taxes". Stuff that many politicians, even today, probably
wouldn't recognize. The rumour seems to have died off with the
rise of cable modems.
Online ruses are coming fast and furious these days. There's a
page at urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blhoax.htm that helps
track the various hoaxes being passed around.
There's a good write up there on an extremely lame email
tracking software prank that was making the rounds a year or so
ago. I think I got emailed this one at least twice. The email,
purporting to be from Walt Disney's son Walt Jr, was offering
free trips to Disney World if you forwarded the email to
several friends. Supposedly you and your mysterious friends had
been selected to help test an "IP address log book database"
Microsoft was developing.
I suppose one can't be faulted for not knowing there never was
a Walt Disney Jr. But the email's rather tortured sentence
structure and obvious lack of a proof reading should have been
a tip off this email was written by some 18-year-old dink, not
the head of a communications company.
Most of these online hoaxes range from mildly irritating (for
the average user) to destructive (for the average PR person
manning the phones at Microsoft). Why so many badly written and
logically flawed emails fool people is beyond me. A few are
finely crafted, however. These masterworks are well worth
celebrating, regardless of whatever irritation they may have
caused.
The April Fools Day on the Net page at www.2meta.com/april-
fools archives some of the better pranks pulled on netizens
over the last 19 years. Most of the good ones predate popular
culture's embracing of the net (1995/1996 depending on who you
talk to).
One of the net's all time favourite April Fools jokes goes all
the way back to 1984. Someone spoofed a posting to net.news
claiming to be K. Chernenko from the Moscow Institute for
International Affairs. Chernenko proudly announced his
institute's VAX computer (a mainframe computer popular with
universities at the time) was now part of the fledgling Usenet
network. The computer's name was "kremvax" (when Russian
academics did eventually join the Internet a computer named
kremvax really did get hooked up to the net).
The message itself, while technically well executed, is really
more famous for the chain of responses it generated. The year
1984 was the height of the cold war. A good portion of netizens
then were working hard on weapons that would melt the skin off
of people like K. Chernenko.
Surprisingly, many users were very welcoming. A good number
spotted the ruse. One user couldn't see the obvious, machines
like the VAX couldn't be legally exported to the Soviet Union,
and posted a small rant about the goof ups at customs.
One of the least funny hoaxes posted to the net, one that got a
lot of the techie crowd pretty upset, was a reputed transcript
of the Challenger astronauts' last words. NASA's official
transcript of the crew's cockpit conversation ends at 1 minute
13 seconds after launch with the pilot saying "uh oh". Yeah.
The hoaxed transcript picks up two seconds later and "reveals"
two minutes of the crews' panicked pleas as they fall back to
earth. It's pretty chilling stuff. You'll find a page exploding
this myth and tracing its possible origin at
www.winternet.com/~radams/chall.
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