From bobrankin@MHV.NET Fri Feb 27 22:40:04 1998 Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 09:03:42 -0500 From: Bob RankinTo: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Subject: TOURBUS -- 12 FEB 1998 -- EVEN MORE URBAN LEGENDS This post contains inline ASCII graphics that look best in a monospace font like Courier. Text-to-speech readers should turn off punctuation now. _________ ____________ ________ __________ _____________ ___ _ / | / | | / | \ | 5,000 PAGES OF FREE STUFF ON THIRDAGE.COM! / | \ |__________|__________/__________|__________|___________/ | \ / /______|----\ | PLUS: Chat 24 Hours a Day * Discussions * Polls * |//////| | | Contests * Free Personal Home Pages * Horoscopes * |//////| | | Celebrities * Web Reviews * Daily News * Bargain |//////| | | Shopping * Tech Tips * Expert Advice * More! |//////| | | |//////| | | Check out ThirdAge.com - The Web...for GrownUps! |//////| | | http://www.thirdage.com/rd/emtb5/ |//////| | \________________________________________________________|______|____| / \ / \ / \ \___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/ TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP: EVEN MORE URBAN LEGENDS TODAY'S ADDRESSES: http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blgates.htm http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/98/jan/bwm70.html http://www.neoworx.com/neotrace/download.asp Back on 11 December 1997, we talked about an urban legend floating around the Net that said Hello everybody, My name is Bill Gates. I have just written up an e-mail tracing program that traces everyone to whom this message is forwarded to. I am experimenting with this and I need your help. Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1000 people everyone on the list will receive $1000 at my expense. Enjoy. Your friend, Bill Gates You will also remember that I called Microsoft back in December to verify this story, and George Shaw, a spokesperson for Microsoft, told me that the story is "officially not true." More on that after this word from our sponsor... ><><><><><><><><> SimpleNet CMS - Commerce Made Simple <><><><><><>< All the tools needed for fast and easy setup of your online business: Domain Web Account, Unlimited Storage, Unlimited Traffic, 5 POP email Accounts, KoolCat Shopping Cart, VeriSign Secure Server Key. SPECIAL: $649 setup and only $50/month. http://www.simplenet.com/commerce/cmspackage12.html ><><><><><><><><> SimpleNet CMS - Commerce Made Simple <><><><><><>< Well, it seems that the "Bill Gates' $1000 email tracing program" hoax recently morphed ... twice. The first new story floating around the Net is that in addition to $1000, Mr. Bill "custard face" Gates is also going to send the first thousand people who respond to his email a free copy of Windows 98 (a.k.a. "Macintosh 87"). The second "morphization" congratulates you for being one of the first thousand people to respond to Bill's email, and tells you that all that you need to do to claim your prize is reply with your credit card number and expiration date so that Bill can credit your account. [If you are dumb enough to fall for that last one, please remove yourself from the gene pool.] For the record, _ALL_ of the "Bill Gates' $1000 email tracing program" stories are 100% untrue. You can find out more about this hoax on the Web at http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blgates.htm --------------------------- VALENTINES DAY E-CARD SCAMS --------------------------- After a particularly heart-wrenching experience with a young woman who repeatedly showed her disdain for the Ninth Commandment, you fearless bus driver will once again be celebrating Valentines Day by himself (actually, I'll probably spend it with my parents because they always have free food). That's cool, though. :) What is _UNCOOL_ is that there are a couple spammers out there that are trying to lure people into their Web sites by bulk emailing a message that says something like Someone has sent you a Valentines Day Card or Message. If you will go to http://www.blahblah.com/blah/valentine.htm [I just made this address up, by the way] you can receive your Valentine. Enter your name and the password below. Your password = love How can you tell the legitimate online Valentines Day cards from the spams? Well, here are a few tips: 1. Look at the TO: line in the email letter. If you don't see your name or your e-mail address, or if you see a whole mess of email addresses, chances are the letter is a spam. Most legitimate online card companies will send a notification letter to only one email address: yours. 2. Look at the password required to retrieve your card. Most legitimate online card sites send you a password that is unique, usually consisting of both numbers and letters (like "pc2678h65s785sa90fl225"). If it the password doesn't look like something that Adobe would require you to type in to register a copy of Photoshop, chances are the "card" is a scam. 3. Any online card Web site that requires you to give them any personal information (with possibly the exception of your e- mail address) is a scam (and I would be leery of sites that asked for your e-mail address too). Special thanks to Paul Collins at One Click Systems for alerting me to this scam. ------------------------------- THE NINETY POUND TELEPHONE SCAM ------------------------------- According to our next urban legend On Saturday, 24 January 1998, Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base, New Orleans' Quarterdeck received a telephone call from an individual identifying himself as an AT&T Service Technician that was running a test on our telephone lines. He stated that to complete the test the QMOW should touch nine (9), zero (0), pound sign (#) and hang up. Luckily, the QMOW was suspicious and refused. Upon contacting the telephone company we were informed that by using 90# you end up giving the individual that called you access to your telephone line and allows them to place a long distance telephone call, with the charge appearing on your telephone [bill]. We were further informed that this scam has been originating from many of the local jails/prisons. Please 'pass the word.'" Well, you fearless bus driver spent most of Tuesday on the phone with folks from both Force 3 (the company that originally reported this story) and AT&T (the long distance telephone company whose logo looks an awful lot like Darth Vader's Death Star). As shocking as this may sound, the "nine-zero-pound" story is true ... sort of. What the warning letter floating around the Net doesn't say is that this scam only works on telephones where you have to dial 9 to get an outside line. Unless you have to dial 9 to get an outside line at home, this scam does not affect residential telephone users. Dialing "nine-zero-pound" on a residential phone will only give you a busy signal. That's it. On some business phones, however, dialing "nine-zero-pound" may transfer a call to an outside operator and give the caller the opportunity to call anywhere in the world and charge it to your business' phone bill ... maybe. It all depends on how your business' telephone system is set up. If your company doesn't require you to dial 9 to get an outside line (for example, if you have a direct outside telephone line on your desk or if your company's phone system requires you to dial a number other than 9 to get an outside line) the "nine-zero-pound" scam does not affect you. Also, if your company's phone system is set up so that you cannot make a long distance call once you have accessed an outside line (a lot of companies now limit all outside lines to local calls only), the "nine-zero-pound" scam does not affect you either. The "nine-zero-pound" story only affects those businesses that require you to dial 9 to get an outside line and then place no restrictions on who or where you can call once you get that outside line. And, just to be anal-retentive, let me say one more time that, unless you have to dial 9 to get an outside line at home, this scam does _not_ affect residential telephone users. [It also probably doesn't affect non-US telephone users. This is especially true for British telephone users whose telephone system is so complex that NO ONE in the UK knows how to use BT's phones (although I am sure that BT users are currently dealing with some sort of "dial q-seven-pi-cromwell-eleventeen-tomato" scam)]. ---------------- SOME EXTRA STUFF ---------------- The rest of today's post doesn't have anything to do with urban legends, but I thought I'd share it with you anyway. First, in last Saturday's TOURBUS Plus! post I said that one of the most over-hyped things on the Internet is Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). I've been online since 1992, and I know of only one person who is competent in VRML: my dad. The technical community has been trying for years to take VRML into the mainstream, but no one seems to care. First off, I want to congratulate my father for his recent election to the eight-member International VRML Review Board. With that said, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that my father wasn't all that pleased with my comments about VRML. In fact, he put his response up on the Web (in VRML, of course) at http://hiwaay.net/~crispen/worlds/test/heart.wrl You'll need a VRML 2.0 browser (like Cosmo player from SGI -- http://cosmo.sgi.com/ -- to be able to view this file). With that said, let me explain why I believe that VRML is currently a solution in search of a problem. Right now, to be able to view VRML worlds, you need to download a separate VRML browser (Cosmo is 3.1MB) and the latest version of DirectX (3.49MB) ... and maybe even a copy of AMovie (1.1MB). I'm not sure about AMovie, though. My point is this: you need to download a minimum 6 and a half MB of stuff just to be able to view VRML worlds. And, to put it bluntly, the VRML worlds that I have seen recently really haven't knocked my socks off. While stuff like Floops (http://vrml.sgi.com/floops/) is neat at first, I still don't think VRML has what it takes to attract the new breed of users who are hopping on the Net looking for the latest information about Michael Jordan or Monica Lewinsky (or, for that matter, Miss October). That may change when VRML ships built-in to Windows 98, though. :) Oh, talking about knocking my socks off, if you are a techno wonk who uses traceroute from time to time (and who uses Windows 95 or NT), you have _GOT_ to check out a $15 shareware program called NeoTrace. NeoTrace is a blazingly fast traceroute program that also automatically does reverse DNS and Whois lookups (just do an onmouseover over any of the displayed nodes to see that node's Whois record). Jack Rickard wrote a great review of NeoTrace (and a _wonderful_ introduction to traceroute) which can be found on the Web at http://www.boardwatch.com/mag/98/jan/bwm70.html You can find a complete, international list of NeoTrace download sites at http://www.neoworx.com/neotrace/download.asp By the way, in the two and half years that I have been driving our little bus of Internet happiness, I have never given a public recommendation for a particular piece of software (or at least I don't remember ever doing so). NeoTrace so impressed me that I had to break that tradition. If you use traceroute more than once a month, you really owe it to yourself to check out NeoTrace. That's it for this week! Have a safe and happy Valentines Day! :) -------------------------------- TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY -------------------------------- RUM (noun). An enclosed place. Usage: "Go to your rum!" (Special thanks to me for today's wurd) YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTHERN WORD HOMEPAGE AT http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/word.html =--------------------------------------------------------------------= For info on my book "Atlas for the Information Superhighway" Visit http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/atlas.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- =====================[ TOURBUS Rider Information ]=================== The Internet TOURBUS - U.S. Library of Congress ISSN #1094-2238 Copyright 1995-98, Rankin & Crispen - All rights reserved Archives on the Web at http://www.TOURBUS.com Join: Send SUBSCRIBE TOURBUS Your Name to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Leave: Send SIGNOFF TOURBUS to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM PROMOTE your business on the Internet TOURBUS. Reach over 80,000 people in a Net-friendly way. Our sponsors say "It works!" Make it work for you - contact BobRankin@MHV.net for details. Editors: Reprint TOURBUS in your publication for free - Ask me how. Send this copy to 3 friends and tell them to hop on the Bus! ===================================================================== .~~~. )) (\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen /o o \/ .~ {o_, \ { **NEW** crispen@netsquirrel.com **NEW** / , , ) \ http://www.netsquirrel.com/ `~ '-' \ } )) _( ( )_.' Warning: squirrels. '---..{____}
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