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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."
This is actually a very well written Wired article. It's interesting to note that it only took him a little bit of research (or so it seems by the article) to find this guy. All he had to do was find the original hoax email, and the guys name was the first on the list! This is what started it all, and every single revision one could think of. It went from Email, to Instant Messaging, people have even started recieving them on their SMS-enabled phones as well. It's amazing to think that there are actually people who still believe this stuff... and it still continues on...amazing.. well atleast amusing to say the least.
Hmmm.
I never received much spam until that one day, someone I had emailed ONCE and LONG AGO, who obviously put me in her list of contacts (automatically or not), decided to forward a fake AMBER alert to the hundreds of people in her list, me being one.
I still rue the day I emailed her.
Hoaxes are not just powerful at getting a message across, but they can be amazingly powerful for spammers. Imagine spammers creating hoaxes that go out to 1,000,000 email addresses. Assuming 1% goes through and that each one of those people forwards to another 20 people will allow spammers to distribute a link to some product for free after the first 1,000,000. Also, this will take the legal strain off of the spammers themselves?
Are any companies currently doing this?
GroupShares Inc. - A Free and Interactive Stock Market Community
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artlu.net
As you can imagine it did our credibility no good whatsoever.
It is not just ignorant housewives and naive schoolkids who fall for these hoaxes...
Web Sig: Eddy Currents
I can remember recieving this on Usenet! Long before 1997. Circa 1992 or so. I think they got the wrong guy. He may have started one, but the incarnation of this joke was FAR earlier.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
- A lot of smart people don't know anything about the underlying technology. They don't know that an email message is usually just a bunch of alphanumerics. On the other hand, that ignores attachments and other content that can be made active by the MUA. Which brings us to:
- Don't you think that if Microsoft could make a serious buck off of it, they would implement something that allowed them to track certain bits of mail? Some bit of ActiveX that, when signed by Microsoft, would always be run by Microsoft MUAs?
Sure, the money hook is obviously absurd. But the technology end isn't as absurd now as is seemed in 1997. Back then, executing content that any stranger sent you was obviously something that any reasonable company would take steps to prevent. This is definitely a way in which Microsoft has "innovated.""It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Has anyone ever used these exploits to write a (Unix) virus?
I'm not sure about Pine, but Yes, mailer exploits did lead to a UNIX worm.
Wired's a kickass rag, even if the content is nearly all online. It looks good on the Ikea coffee table, and it advertises to all guests that you are, in fact, smarter than them, what with their piffy pedestrian Newsweek and People subscriptions. Pshaw!
I wrote it over 7 years ago for my web site, posted it to a couple of humor newsgroups to get some promo. Someone stripped my intro, sent it to a couple of humor lists with the claim it was real, and it exploded.
Sadly, my Shit Nickels Fast chain letter parody did not do as well.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
A funny story about that..
As soon as I heard about it I sent an email to a girl I know who has a horrible tendancy to believe these things explaining that it was a hoax. The following conversation ensued.
First, the important back end to the punchline: Her comptuer at the time was an old Compaq Presario, 200mhz, 32 megs of RAM, and Windows95
Her: I deleted that file
Me: I told you it was a hoax
Her: Yeah but I had the file on my computer!
(I decide to take this and run with it)
Me: I told you it was a hoax for a reason, now if you shut your computer down you aren't going to be able to start it back up again.
(she signs off and isn't seen online again for about a week)
Her: Colin am I ever going to be able to turn off my computer?
She BELIEVED me and actually left her dinosaur Win95 box running for a week straight. I was surprised after running that long she was able to get on to AOL 6.0 and IM me without the system falling to its knees in a spectacular stream of 30 BSODs.
Stupid is as stupid does I guess
...and that's all there is to it.
Not sure about you, but taking a dump with a laptop on your lap is weird. To each his own, sure, but it's not for me.
What does work wonderfully is a PDA. I just have books/articles pre-downloaded to the PDA, often before I leave the house in the morning, but you can just as easily get a wireless card for most PDAs sold today if you'd prefer.
Having a PDA with reading material is nice in a lot of ways, actually. Since I first got a PDA, a bunch of years ago, I've started reading a lot. That is, when my reading material is always waiting in my pocket and conveniently brought out and quickly put away, I will read for a single page in times that otherwise I'd just have to stand there trying to achieve zen blankness of mind. Hell, I even read when I'm taking a piss- a page here, a page there. It's a great way to get leisure reading done when you're so busy between working full-time and taking a full-time load of college credits that you can't afford to actually sit down for an hour and read a novel.
Also, there's more you can do on your PDA than just read on the toilet. I've written at least a few hundred lines of code as well, mostly in Squeak Smalltalk, but also in Lisp and NewtonScript.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad