************************************************************** * * * CYBERSPACE * * A biweekly column on net culture appearing * * in the Toronto Sunday Sun * * * * Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer * * Free for online distribution * * All Rights Reserved * * Direct comments and questions to: * * * * * ************************************************************** You probably got that email a few weeks ago claiming the Federal government was working on something called "Bill 602P". Ostensibly Bill 602P would levy a 5 cent surcharge on behalf of Canada Post for every email sent. Lots of people seemed to be fooled by this rather obvious hoax. Even some hosts of a local Toronto radio station reported this as fact. They were unable to see some of the readily apparent problems with the email's contents. The name of the bill itself should have been a reasonable tip off to any Canadian in a position of informing others. Don't all bills introduced before Parliament begin with C, as in C-102? Snort. Broadcast journalists. Anyone who has been on the net for a while recognized it as derivation of the old "modem tax" scare. Back in 1990 a rumour was going around that the United States' FCC was going to start taxing modem owners. Lots of people fired off angry letters to their congressmen. I can imagine these letters were filled with lots of technical jargon like "modem", "BBS", and "no new taxes". Stuff that many politicians, even today, probably wouldn't recognize. The rumour seems to have died off with the rise of cable modems. Online ruses are coming fast and furious these days. There's a page at urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blhoax.htm that helps track the various hoaxes being passed around. There's a good write up there on an extremely lame email tracking software prank that was making the rounds a year or so ago. I think I got emailed this one at least twice. The email, purporting to be from Walt Disney's son Walt Jr, was offering free trips to Disney World if you forwarded the email to several friends. Supposedly you and your mysterious friends had been selected to help test an "IP address log book database" Microsoft was developing. I suppose one can't be faulted for not knowing there never was a Walt Disney Jr. But the email's rather tortured sentence structure and obvious lack of a proof reading should have been a tip off this email was written by some 18-year-old dink, not the head of a communications company. Most of these online hoaxes range from mildly irritating (for the average user) to destructive (for the average PR person manning the phones at Microsoft). Why so many badly written and logically flawed emails fool people is beyond me. A few are finely crafted, however. These masterworks are well worth celebrating, regardless of whatever irritation they may have caused. The April Fools Day on the Net page at www.2meta.com/april- fools archives some of the better pranks pulled on netizens over the last 19 years. Most of the good ones predate popular culture's embracing of the net (1995/1996 depending on who you talk to). One of the net's all time favourite April Fools jokes goes all the way back to 1984. Someone spoofed a posting to net.news claiming to be K. Chernenko from the Moscow Institute for International Affairs. Chernenko proudly announced his institute's VAX computer (a mainframe computer popular with universities at the time) was now part of the fledgling Usenet network. The computer's name was "kremvax" (when Russian academics did eventually join the Internet a computer named kremvax really did get hooked up to the net). The message itself, while technically well executed, is really more famous for the chain of responses it generated. The year 1984 was the height of the cold war. A good portion of netizens then were working hard on weapons that would melt the skin off of people like K. Chernenko. Surprisingly, many users were very welcoming. A good number spotted the ruse. One user couldn't see the obvious, machines like the VAX couldn't be legally exported to the Soviet Union, and posted a small rant about the goof ups at customs. One of the least funny hoaxes posted to the net, one that got a lot of the techie crowd pretty upset, was a reputed transcript of the Challenger astronauts' last words. NASA's official transcript of the crew's cockpit conversation ends at 1 minute 13 seconds after launch with the pilot saying "uh oh". Yeah. The hoaxed transcript picks up two seconds later and "reveals" two minutes of the crews' panicked pleas as they fall back to earth. It's pretty chilling stuff. You'll find a page exploding this myth and tracing its possible origin at www.winternet.com/~radams/chall.