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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
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* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
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"My name is Dave Rhodes. In September 1988 my car was 
repossessed and the bill collectors were hounding me..."

Over the last few years thousands of messages bearing the 
plight of Dave Rhodes have been posted to net.news. If you 
believe absolutely everything you read, this hard luck story 
had a happy ending. Dave Rhodes asked everyone on the net to 
send him $5. It wasn't charity, you see, because if a kind soul 
sent Dave Rhodes $5, he could add his name and home address to 
the bottom of a list of others who sent in their $5. Rhodes' 
entry could be removed from the top of the list, everyone else 
could be moved up one, and the message could then be re-posted 
to hundreds of newsgroups. Since the re-posted message's 
subject was "Make Money Fast" others would naturally want to 
make money fast and keep this amazing cash making system going 
... unless of course the user found his access cut off and the 
message cancelled by an irate postmaster.

Although a Make Money Fast message (aka MMF) hasn't likely had 
the name of Dave Rhodes in the actual list since the late '80s, 
his name has lived on in the introductory paragraph of many 
MMFs. There is, however, some question as to whether Rhodes 
ever existed. One FAQ reports Rhodes was a Maryland student who 
used his account at Columbia Union College to spam the net in 
1987 or 1988. Some users have reported an earlier snail mail 
version bearing Rhodes' famous plight. Further, no one has 
actually produced an archived message with Rhodes' name in the 
From line. No big surprise. Computer people are computer 
people. They are, unfortunately, not historians.

There seems to be little that can stop MMFs, despite possible 
criminal prosecution for mail fraud or even the common sense 
notion that you don't distribute your home address to millions 
of strangers. Most people usually killfile MMFs. There is, 
however, a breed of user that believes when faced with an 
inescapable irritant, you may as well study it.

I conducted my own personal study of MMFs before I figured out 
how to use a killfile. I noticed the Rhodes' rags-to-riches 
intro tale was increasingly being replaced by a strange all 
caps, over exclamated plea to "PLEASE READ THIS!!!! DON'T FLAME 
ME!!! THIS WORKS!!!" Like that was going to help. One of the 
better sites on the net devoted to MMFology is the Make Money 
Fast Myth Page (www.pacifier.com/~klucke/mmf/mmf_myth.html). 
The page's author shows the mathematical futility behind this 
scam. If you come in at the number 10 slot, you'll need two 
million people generating 8,000 gigabytes of data to move you 
to the magical number one slot. It ain't gonna happen.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

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