Don’t Let the Hoaxers Take You Down...
Melanie McDonald
“ Alert! It has just been discovered that the material on the keys of 99% of the keyboards used in the world can transmit a fatal disease. The first sign of this disease is an attack on the memory making users forget what site they are searching for. Without treatment, it is thought that the ailment can eventually become serious enough to attack the plaque in the human brain.The disease, tentatively named Digitis Keyboardibus, cannot be cured BUT it can be avoided if the keyboard is sprayed daily with a mixture of distilled water and OFF.
"Please forward this to everyone in your address book! It is vital that we stop this horrifying disease now!"
When was the last time you received that sort of email? Did you forward it to everyone in your address book?
If you did, you were not a good netzen, citizen of the Internet.
And did you hear about Tob y, the little rabbit, that will be cooked and eaten if readers do not send in $50,000 to save him? Or about police officers who use slimjims to help motorists get into locked cars and are killed by airbags? And shortly after 9/11 did you get the picture of the tourist atop the World Trade Center roof unaware of an airplane looming behind him?
Although your Mac will seldom if ever need to worry about a worm or a virus, its mailbox is heir to thousands of hoaxes and scams. These annoying and misleading bits of information come in the form of emails which the sender hysterically urges you to send to everyone in your address book. If you do this without first making certain of the validity of each warning, you are simply supporting misuse of email AND becoming a profound annoyance to your friends.Some standard markings of a hoax message include the command to “tell all your friends”; the assurance that “this is NOT a hoax”; repeated indications of urgency; and the prediction of horrible consequences if you do not respond to the hoax.
Fortunately, if you are willing to take the time to research a warning before you send it to countless others, you can fairly quickly separate the many hoaxes from the rare legitimate warning.In the first place, don't send along virus alerts unless you ARE CERTAIN each alert is aimed at the Macintosh and is verifiable. (Many of your less sophisticated PC friends will ship along PC virus alerts in the mistaken notion that they are doing you a service.)
A convenient site for catching email hoaxes and false virus hysterias is the Symantic site (http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html). Also the site contains some interesting articles on Macs and viruses that you can find via the site search engine.
One of the very best sources for information on Internet scams is Scambusters (http://www.scambusters.com/) which also provides an email newsletter filled with useful and interesting information. You can also find a huge list of net hoaxes if you check on the Urban Legends site (http://www.snopes.com/) with its handy search engine and lists of newest and hottest legends, daily scam report, and lots more. And, finally, a third excellent source for tracing scams and hoazes is the email scams section of about.com (http://antivirus.about.com/cs/emailscams/) with its Mac and Windows scam and virus resources.
So the next time your mail box rings with hysteria or someone tells you an improbable horror story, take a minute and check it out. Not only can you become a voice of reason but, equally important, you might be able to reduce the flood of spam that clogs our servers and hubs.
McDonald, president and CEO of MacTutor & Services in Southern Pines, is an apple authorized service provider whose business includes technical and networking services as well as system and software tutoring and design consulting. She can be reached at 910.246.2150 or mobbs@pinehurst.net.
