Sunday, December 16, 2007

Can You Trust Snopes???

I don't believe anything I read on the internet. That includes the stuff I grind out, much of which is baloney and bullpuckey. Let the reader beware. When I get one of those virus warnings that I should send to everybody I know or their comptuers will blow up in their faces, I immediately go to Snopes. Snopes does a great job of exposing those crazy myths, hoaxes and phony stories that have been around so long that they have become legends. Many are years, even decades old. They are changed just enough to make them look contemporary. The e-mail that makes me most suspicious comes from genuinely concerned forwarders that include a quote from Snopes to prove that the warning is the real thing. That can be a classic case of a half truth that's worse than a lie. It circulates the very hoaxes that Snopes is trying to expose. You gotta go into Snoopes and read the whole, often lengthy story, not just the part that's copied in the forward. There's one going around now that warns about a virus that will wipe out your hard drive, reported on CNN. There's a scary Snopes quote right at the top. Read the whole Snopes article and down at the bottom it tells you no such virus exists and there was no report on CNN. So if you and/or your computer croak because I failed to let you know about some terrible evil that was waiting to do you in, sue me.

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