By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

Dr. Baczewski is taking a break from the "Network Connection" this month. We thought a reprise of this column from January would go nicely with the "Junk Mail and Hoax Viruses" article in this issue. -- Ed.

It's a Myth

A friend of mine once told me a story which he swore was absolutely true. It really happened to this mother of a cousin of a friend of his. It seems that a woman noticed an ad in the paper selling a luxury sedan for $50. After calling the number listed and setting an appointment to see the car, she brought her auto-knowledgeable son to look it over, and seeing a late model car in mint condition, they immediately wrote a check for $50 to the woman who placed the ad. But their curiosity got the best of them and they asked why such a low price for the car. The reply was that the seller's husband had run off with his secretary, asked her to sell the car and send him the money. It's a great story, but in spite of my friend's assertion, it is absolutely false. It is what's called and urban myth. (Author Jan Harold Brunvand wrote a series of books about urban myths, the first of which is called "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," W.W. Norton & Company, February 1989, ISBN: 0393951693).

The Myth of the Internet

Perhaps these types of tales are so alluring because we want to believe they are true. They seem to resonate with fears and beliefs that we all carry as we navigate through the world. Even well educated and otherwise skeptical people often accept such stories as fact and retell them to their friends. With the Internet age, a whole set of myths has developed on and around the Internet. It seems that the Internet makes the transmission of these stories even easier and faster than before, and it also provides a source for new stories. The following unattributed e-mail transmission I received references a number of the more well known myths that have sprung up on and been perpetuated over the Internet:

I know this guy whose neighbor, a young man, was home recovering from having been served a rat in his bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. So anyway, one day he went to sleep and when he woke up he was in his bathtub and it was full of ice and he was sore all over. When he got out of the tub he realized that HIS KIDNEYS HAD BEEN STOLEN and he saw a note on his mirror that said "Call 911!" But he was afraid to use his phone because it was connected to his computer, and there was a virus on his computer that would destroy his hard drive if he opened an e-mail entitled "Join the crew!" He knew it wasn't a hoax because he himself was a computer programmer who was working on software to save us from Armageddon when the year 2000 rolls around. His program will prevent a global disaster in which all the computers get together and distribute the $600 Neiman Marcus cookie recipe under the leadership of Bill Gates. (It's true! I read it all last week in a mass e-mail from BILL GATES HIMSELF, who was also promising me a free Disneyworld vacation and $5,000 if I would forward the e-mail to everyone I know.) Anyway, the poor man then tried to call 911 from a pay phone to report his missing kidneys, but reaching into the coin-return slot he jabbed himself with an HIV-infected needle around which was wrapped a note that said, "Welcome to the world of AIDS." Luckily he was only a few blocks from the hospital--the one, actually, where that little boy who is dying of cancer is, the one whose last wish is for everyone in the world to send him an e-mail and the American Cancer Society has agreed to pay him a nickel for every e-mail he receives. I sent him two e-mails and one of them was a bunch of x's and o's in the shape of an angel (if you get it and forward it to twenty people you will have good luck but ten people you will only have ok luck and if you send it to less than ten people you will have BAD LUCK FOR SEVEN YEARS). So anyway, the poor guy tried to drive himself to the hospital, but on the way there he noticed another car driving along without it's lights on. To be helpful, he flashed his lights at the other car and was promptly shot as part of a gang initiation. And it's a little-known fact that the Y1K problem caused the Dark Ages.

Debunking the Myths

It is amazing to me that otherwise intelligent and technically competent people will forward e-mail virus warnings and Bill Gates e-mail test program messages without applying enough skepticism to think through whether or not they could be true. The common thread is that most of these stories get passed on through e-mail in an informal manner. Some are actually harmful because they transmit misinformation for which companies must spend much time and resources to deny or correct.

Fortunately for skeptics everywhere, a couple of good web pages will help debunk the myths. The Urban Legends and Folklore Web Page found at http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/mbody.htm covers a number of urban myths and Internet hoaxes. You'll find a number of popularized stories refuted amongst the documentation on this page. The Computer Virus Myths Home Page (http://www.kumite.com/myths/) does a similar job on those mythical e-mail viruses that reportedly can erase your hard drive. This page can help sort out the real threats from the imagined ones.

The folks who write a popular e-mail newsletter called The Internet Tourbus (http://www.tourbus.com/) have compiled what they call the "Urban Legends Combat Kit" (http://netsquirrel.com/combatkit/) This not only provides information about currently popular myths and hoaxes, but also provides suggested response letters that you can send to those who forward the dire warnings to your e-mail inbox.

Armed with the resources above, even an Internet novice can test the veracity of many of the stories that are transmitted via e-mail. Sometimes a dose of skepticism can be good and prevent us from compounding a problem or discouraging people from using the Internet by reinforcing their fears of a often unfamiliar online environment. After all, we need to spend our time on more important matters, like solving the Y10K problem.