**************************************************************
*                                                            *
*                         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:                          *
*                                         *
*                                                            *
**************************************************************


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.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)