Internet Rumors and Lies

Yesterday I had a full day of work and didn't have much time to do anything else. In fact, I didn't get back to my boat until 8pm and then I had a bunch of boat chores before heading to bed. So I was a little annoyed that I had to respond to an e-mail from my mother-in-law where she continued to propagate Internet rumors and lies.

My mother-in-law is one of those people that receives an e-mail with a funny story or cute picture and broadcasts it to everyone in her electronic address book. Mostly I just skim over her messages and get on with my day. However sometimes she will forward stuff that is just wrong. Once she forwarded a message saying not to open any e-mails with a particular heading. Doing so would wipe out my hard drive and destroy my computer. I had to explain to her that what she suggested was impossible, especially since I read e-mail on a Linux computer. However even Windows users were safe as the recipient would have to run an attachment sent with the e-mail to cause damage. Merely looking at an e-mail would have no effect.

Yesterday's e-mail was supposedly a reprint of an article from the Wall Street Journal about what an incompetent moron our current president is. While many in the country may agree with that idea, it is not something you are going to openly read about in the Wall Street Journal. So I did a bit of searching on the Internet. Thirty seconds later I discovered that the article was not written by the alleged author and it only appeared in an online forum of the Wall Street Journal's readers' comments. In other words, in a place where anyone could have posted the message. That doesn't exactly make it a newsworthy story. If the author and place of publication are both lies, how much stock can one put in the content of the article? My guess is that any fact quoted is also a lie and shouldn't be trusted. Yet people do.

As you are reading e-mail from friends and family, please be careful about what you believe. Not everything you read on the Internet is true. If it were, there about a hundred Nigerians I need to get back to about helping them transfer money into my bank account.