Useful Internet Websites part one
Jan. 20th, 2011 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressDisclaimer: This entry sounds a lot more cruel and passive aggressive than I meant it to. I am sorry, friend who started me on this rant. You are a cool and generally sensible person. But when you forward me chain texts that I can disprove in thirty seconds flat on Snopes, I become unimpressed with your ability to discern what threats are truly important enough to pass along. I still adore you and am not at all angry at you, just reminded that not everyone has heard of all useful internet tools. I shall try and fix that.
So, my dear citizens of the internet, let's have a quick talk about a little thing called Snopes dot com. I was shocked and disheartened to-day to learn that not everyone in the world is readily familiar with this website, and the sort of specialized service it provides.
(Now, Snopes.com may well be evil, but that is neither here nor there. We are focusing on the good it does for this entry. That being said, they do have a fuckton of pop-ups, which is annoying as shit to those of us too lazy or non-computer-savvy to fix such a beast.)
Let us say you receive a panicked e-mail forwarded upteen times from a friend of a friend of a friend. Babies have gone missing, women are raped, and Microsoft will donate five cents for every time this message gets passed along. The message sounds Highly Urgent, and as such, you make sure to pass it on to every single person in your message book, so that they too can know the importance of this Highly Urgent thing.
But wait! Someone sends you a message back! "Totally a hoax." Why, however did they know? Children aren't being kidnapped by the thousand by having their hair re-dyed in shopping mall bathrooms? Women aren't being raped by politely driving hitchhikers home? Microsoft doesn't give a shit about curing this one child's cancer? How could this be!
Well, see, there's a lot of fear and panic on the internet. The internet is specially designed for spreading such, and the advent of the e-mail forward made that even easier. Sometimes the best way to get a message spread out to as many people as possible is to urge each recipient to pass it on to their entire address book1 --once this has been done by five or six people, it's possible the message has been read by a thousand or more people.
However, and this is crucial, there is also a lot of lying on the internet. People make things up for their own amusement, or to specifically cause shit. Maybe they are half-remembering something told by a neighbor's friend at that office party, and wanted to share it with a few close friends, one who took the message too far. Whatever the case, untrue information shows up a hell of a lot in these sorts of messages. And spreading fear and panic of things that simply aren't true is immature and makes you look foolish as soon as you're called out upon it.
But what do you do if you earnestly want to spread the truthful information, but just can't tell? Well, the first thing to do is to go to Snopes.com in a spare browser window. Do you see the big blank bar marked "search" right near the top? Enter a few keywords from your Highly Urgent forward into that bar, and see if any results pop up. Go ahead and take a closer look.
Once you've found a page that looks pretty close to what you were planning to forward, you should look at the top of that page, where Snopes will say "Status". If the word next to status is "false", then you have been misled. This Highly Urgent message is nothing but so much well-crafted bullshit, and by passing it along, you have made yourself look like the sort of fool who panics without thinking2. Reading the rest of the page provides details as to why this appears false. Snopes does the research so you don't have to.
If you spend enough time on Snopes, there is a side effect that will help as well. Reading through old legends and horrific tales will give you a sense for what sorts of things to look for to ensure your message is not bullshit. Specific dates and locations are a good start --anything that starts with "several women" without providing a place is almost certainly false, as there is no country-wide gang of malicious malcontents.
So please, use Snopes. Check out the rumours before you pass them along --no one wants to be responsible for false gossip.
And for gods sakes, if you know I don't drive, please don't give me warnings about not picking up hitchhikers. It'd be just as useful to inform me not to surface too quickly when I scuba dive3, lest I be attacked by a gang of manta rays.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: As a completely separate problem, nothing you ever e-mail should ever be sent to your entire address book, especially if it is meant to be forwarded. When you forward such an e-mail, every recipient receives every e-mail address included, going back forward after forward after forward. This is an excellent way to let total strangers know and have your e-mail address.
For the love of sanity, please use the BCC button. It means "Blind Carbon Copy", but that's largely unimportant. What it does, is: When you use BCC, no recipient of the e-mail gets the e-mail address of any other recipient of the e-mail. You can use this to keep names secret, which will make everyone happier with you, and perhaps provide interesting adventures.
2: *leans up to Alys and whispers in her ear the appropriate line here* (In-jokes, not mocking)
3: I don't scuba dive. But I hear Eric in Elevators does!
So, my dear citizens of the internet, let's have a quick talk about a little thing called Snopes dot com. I was shocked and disheartened to-day to learn that not everyone in the world is readily familiar with this website, and the sort of specialized service it provides.
(Now, Snopes.com may well be evil, but that is neither here nor there. We are focusing on the good it does for this entry. That being said, they do have a fuckton of pop-ups, which is annoying as shit to those of us too lazy or non-computer-savvy to fix such a beast.)
Let us say you receive a panicked e-mail forwarded upteen times from a friend of a friend of a friend. Babies have gone missing, women are raped, and Microsoft will donate five cents for every time this message gets passed along. The message sounds Highly Urgent, and as such, you make sure to pass it on to every single person in your message book, so that they too can know the importance of this Highly Urgent thing.
But wait! Someone sends you a message back! "Totally a hoax." Why, however did they know? Children aren't being kidnapped by the thousand by having their hair re-dyed in shopping mall bathrooms? Women aren't being raped by politely driving hitchhikers home? Microsoft doesn't give a shit about curing this one child's cancer? How could this be!
Well, see, there's a lot of fear and panic on the internet. The internet is specially designed for spreading such, and the advent of the e-mail forward made that even easier. Sometimes the best way to get a message spread out to as many people as possible is to urge each recipient to pass it on to their entire address book1 --once this has been done by five or six people, it's possible the message has been read by a thousand or more people.
However, and this is crucial, there is also a lot of lying on the internet. People make things up for their own amusement, or to specifically cause shit. Maybe they are half-remembering something told by a neighbor's friend at that office party, and wanted to share it with a few close friends, one who took the message too far. Whatever the case, untrue information shows up a hell of a lot in these sorts of messages. And spreading fear and panic of things that simply aren't true is immature and makes you look foolish as soon as you're called out upon it.
But what do you do if you earnestly want to spread the truthful information, but just can't tell? Well, the first thing to do is to go to Snopes.com in a spare browser window. Do you see the big blank bar marked "search" right near the top? Enter a few keywords from your Highly Urgent forward into that bar, and see if any results pop up. Go ahead and take a closer look.
Once you've found a page that looks pretty close to what you were planning to forward, you should look at the top of that page, where Snopes will say "Status". If the word next to status is "false", then you have been misled. This Highly Urgent message is nothing but so much well-crafted bullshit, and by passing it along, you have made yourself look like the sort of fool who panics without thinking2. Reading the rest of the page provides details as to why this appears false. Snopes does the research so you don't have to.
If you spend enough time on Snopes, there is a side effect that will help as well. Reading through old legends and horrific tales will give you a sense for what sorts of things to look for to ensure your message is not bullshit. Specific dates and locations are a good start --anything that starts with "several women" without providing a place is almost certainly false, as there is no country-wide gang of malicious malcontents.
So please, use Snopes. Check out the rumours before you pass them along --no one wants to be responsible for false gossip.
And for gods sakes, if you know I don't drive, please don't give me warnings about not picking up hitchhikers. It'd be just as useful to inform me not to surface too quickly when I scuba dive3, lest I be attacked by a gang of manta rays.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: As a completely separate problem, nothing you ever e-mail should ever be sent to your entire address book, especially if it is meant to be forwarded. When you forward such an e-mail, every recipient receives every e-mail address included, going back forward after forward after forward. This is an excellent way to let total strangers know and have your e-mail address.
For the love of sanity, please use the BCC button. It means "Blind Carbon Copy", but that's largely unimportant. What it does, is: When you use BCC, no recipient of the e-mail gets the e-mail address of any other recipient of the e-mail. You can use this to keep names secret, which will make everyone happier with you, and perhaps provide interesting adventures.
2: *leans up to Alys and whispers in her ear the appropriate line here* (In-jokes, not mocking)
3: I don't scuba dive. But I hear Eric in Elevators does!
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no subject
on 2011-01-21 11:27 am (UTC)Oh, gods, yes Yes YES. i love you so much Sor ♥
...to inform me not to surface too quickly when I scuba dive, lest I be attacked by a gang of manta rays.
You probably already knew this, but the Real Reason to not surface too quickly when scuba diving is 'cause you'll get the Bends (aka oxygen bubbles in your blood) otherwise.
. o O (oooh, but manta rays)
no subject
on 2011-01-21 01:52 pm (UTC)But for the most part, having your email address known to individual strangers who mostly don't care about it, isn't a huge problem. The really big reason why you should us BCC when sending something to a large number of people who have little connection to each other is not that.
It's that by doing so, you're effectively creating a new mailing list that nobody can unsubscribe from, and the larger the number of people, the greater the chance that *someone* will reply to all, and the greater the chance that someone else will eventually reply to all asking to be removed from the list, and those threads are hard to end.
no subject
on 2011-01-21 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-01-21 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-01-21 06:54 pm (UTC)my second cousin once removed, or however she is in fact actually related to me (our grandparents were siblings?) does this all the time - sending stuff to her entire address book. Because it was easier, I just set up a gmail filter to automatically delete anything that comes from her address that includes "fwd" in the subject line. :/
With my mom, I actually did yell at her a couple of times about it, and pointed her to Snopes, and even if she forgot about the website, she at least does not forward things to me anymore.