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Forward This Article And Get Paid $203.15
Iphtashu Fitz writes "We've all seen it. The e-mail forwarded to us from a friend who got it from a coworker whose sister's cousin's roommate's great aunt knows somebody at Microsoft. The one from Bill Gates himself offering you cash to forward the e-mail to others in order to test out their new e-mail tracking system. If you haven't received that one you've undoubtedly gotten other e-mail hoaxes offering anything from gift certificates to free computers to free airline tickets. How do these sorts of hoaxes start and who starts them? Well Jonathon Keats at Wired Magazine decided to track down the origin of the Bill Gates e-mail tracking hoax. After a few dead ends he finally located then-student Bryan Mack, who created the hoax on November 18, 1997 while at the University of Houston. In Mack's own words: 'It was just a joke between a couple friends' that eventually got out of hand. One of his buddies had gotten a make-money-fast spam and Mack said 'I can come up with something better than that.' Three minutes later, Bill Gates' email-tracing program was born. At first he just sent it to a few friends, but those friends sent it to other friends (and so on), and it didn't take long for the e-mail to transform from a joke to a full-fledged hoax."
I tell everyone, before they forward any of that crap, or virtually anything they deem worthy of sharing, they should first check it against the Urban Legends Reference Pages.
Of course it didn't concern me because I read my email with pine
Pine Message/External-Body Type Attribute Buffer Overflow Vulnerability [Sep 10, 2003]
Pine From: Field Buffer Overflow Vulnerability [Sep 23, 2000]
Pine 4.x Remote Command Execution Vulnerability [Jun 28, 1999]
it's in my head
I disagree. Many, many internet hoxes were born before 1997. 'David Rhodes' & MAKE.MONEY.FAST dates to the 80's, many others date from the early 90s. Here's the David Rhodes hoax from Usenet in 1989
Agreed!
Didn't any of these people know enough to think that no reports are magically sent to Microsoft when you e-mail someone?
The CEO of the company was(is) not technical. From memory, what he said was that there was no cost to forwarding the email and a potential (no matter how small) financial gain so why not? - There ended up being a credibility cost of course but that was not high as it turned out.
The others I think followed in his footsteps to "suck up" to him. Company politics and all
Did the company go down in flames?
No - It had (has) a good software product and now I believe no. 1 in it's market! All goes to show....
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
Snopes usually comes in handy when people are being difficult about believing hoaxes.
They have a few articles which may help you.
Even neater after you read that it was created on November 18, 1997!
*BZZZZZZT* wrong.
Article says
It's not a big deal, but if you're going to go to the trouble of pumping up your submission with a lovely URL to a school, get the right one.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
My quick search of Google Groups seems to support the idea that it showed up in November of 1997. Search for "Bill Gates $1000" before Nov. 1997 and the hoax doesn't show up. Then do the same search before Dec. 1997 and a bunch of things start popping up, such as this thread where someone asks if the hoax has been seen prior to 25 Nov 97 and gets no reply showing a previous occurrence. Here is another message indicating that it was defnitely hot in Dec 1997 (the poster complains about repeatedly getting it).
Not proof, but likeliness of the story's truth.
I'll back you up -- I recall getting versions of this email back in 1991-2, and seeing it frequently on corporate mail systems 1993-96.
There was also a Disney version, and Nordstroms or someone. Even if the guy did write the email, it wasn't a very new idea by 1997.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
http://www.is.mines.edu/dirsearch/detail.asp?perso n=Mack%2CBryan%2CL%2E%2C
http://www.fleetmack.com/
The idea is to make people feel stupid for being a part of the chain letter, not to insult them.
This works for me as well. I usually refer them to the following hoax busting sites:
Snopes
Urban Legends
Symantec Hoax Warnings ("$800 from Microsoft" is listed first on this page!
Hoaxbusters
VMyths
If more gullible journalists and people would think a little and do some simple, quick research before hitting the SEND button then we'd all be a lot better off.
Da Blog
Minor correction to your correction: Bryan Mack attended Iowa State University(from the article), which is much different than University of Iowa.
Google archived example from 1994
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
The only chain letter I ever forwarded on was the one wherein you send your wife or girlfriend to the first name on the list and, later, receive some insane number of women. Not because I am a womanizer, but because I like sending people through the mail. ;)
Back in the olden days, modems would indeed send NO CARRIER, and many BBSi would cheerfully record it.
Many people didn't set their modems with appropriate timeout space before and after +++, so you could do goofy things like drop the server's modem into command mode (because it faithfully echoed your keystrokes) by doing that. As I recall, some modems even acknowledged the +++ when it was received from remote, so you could have even more fun by embedding +++ATH0 or worse commands into your messages.
There were all sorts of fun things to do with Hayes-compat modems, Back In The Day.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
It has nothing to do with commands being accepted from remote, and everything with characters typed at the remote end being echoed back. It's not a modem problem, it's a *software* problem.
Um... no. Some modems recognized the characters from remote *with no echo*. Most sysops fixed it on the BBS computer in a hurry, but in a few cases you could hang up on a *user's* computer because their modem defaulted to accepting commands from remote. I wrote code into the Phoenyx to escape the +++ sequence, so as not to allow that problem.
I don't think a real SmartModem had that problem (unless you set it that way on purpose) but not all "Hayes-compat" modems were fully Hayes compatible, and most of us couldn't afford a Hayes. I can't remember what brand my first 1200 was (my 300 was the manually-operated TRS-80 Modem I another poster mentioned... I've still got it) but it didn't support everything a Hayes did, and did support some things Hayes didn't (which wasn't always good).
And of course once that got fixed, it was always fun to social-engineer people into doing it (or similar things) to their own modem...
(I'm sure the bits have all rotted away, or I'd pull out the old diskettes (and an Amiga disk-reader program, I suppose) and dig up old Phoenyx messages on the subject...)
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife