Virus Scares and False Authority Syndrome

Fifth of Five writes: "Ran across this article on the IS-IT-TRUE.org site regarding False Authority Syndrome and the spread of virus misinformation by the media, users and Folks Who Probably Ought To Know Better. If you've ever watched the TV news and gritted your teeth over what is being presented as 'fact' this may shine some light on just how it got to be like this."

Comments

Re:Slashdotted - copy here

[vsync64]

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You need to take out the "ahVwga1Oq1o" stuff; whenever you do anything on Google involving a URL, they prepend it with a hash string to (I presume) speed up lookups in their database. If you change just the URL, Google will still bring up the original page if you leave that hash in.

Re:Slashdotted - copy here

[Placido]

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I admit it. I should have checked first. Couldn't edit my post afterwards. *sniff* I'm sorry! =)

Google Cache of Pages.

[Chmarr]

Here's links to google's cache of all pages:

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Authority is effective

[Have Blue]

Before anyone posts some rant along the lines of ["They should have been smarter"|"They should have known better"|"Why are people so stupid as to fall for this all the time"], they should read this essay on Milgram's studies of authority. It's frightening.

Re:Slashdotted - copy here

[Elminst]

Yeah great the first page.. what about the other 4+ pages?

Re:ultracrepidarian

[Cruciform]

Actually you waited with bated breath, unless you were into munching worms and crickets at the time :)
As for reporters and their fancies, I did an interview with the Ottawa citizen 10 years ago that ended up on the front page. The reporter used every word of our conversation, unfortunately not in even remotely the same order. What began as a discussion on failures within the local social assistance branch of the government and the abuses I'd seen soon became a twisted version of the original where I bragged of helping others perpetuate fraud.
There were seven witnesses to my interview with him, so I could easily have sued the prick and won, but my parents wanted me to let it slide before their peers found out and it cost them their jobs.
Revenge was sweet though. A TV show doing a followup story contacted a friend of mine about the article and when he explained the truth of the matter they investigated the reporters practices. Last I'd heard he'd been fired :)

It works the other way, too:

[Bonker]

A few days ago, I was involved in a conversation with a computer neophyte after I had been off the net for a few days.

She told me she had heard of a new CD format that was supposed to copy-protect CD's by making them damage your stereo speakers.

Knowing quite a bit about the Red-book standard, I told her that such a format was impossible and that it was almost certainly a hoax.

Once I got back on the net and read about the Macro-vision scheme now in use in thousands of CD's, I had to call her and tell her that I was mistaken.

Re:It works the other way, too:

[Juan Epstein]

Well, according to TheRegister, CD Macrovision WILL NOT, in fact, damage Hi-Fi equipment.

Slashdotted - copy here

[Placido]

I love you google cache!

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:ahVwga1Oq1o :www.vmyths.com/fas/fas1.cfm+&hl=en (remove the space that /. so helpfully adds. ;)