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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
Snopes usually comes in handy when people are being difficult about believing hoaxes.
They have a few articles which may help you.
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