Legends Title

Urban legends have been of interest to me for many years!

You would never yell "fire" in a crowded theater but with an internet connection and an e-mail account you might not hesitate to select "all users" and hit the forward button, unknowingly spreading bogus computer virus warnings, chain letters and the groundless fear of urban legends to the world.

Urban Legends


We've all heard these stories. I heard the vanishing hitchhiker stories in my teen years, and believed the story about a fisherman falling into a nest of mating water moccasins. As a young parent, I was told and believed stories of a gang abducting children from "Toys R Us" stores. These are compelling stories but in the end they only serve to spread groundless fear.


Jan Harold Brunvand

Brunvand is a noted folklorist who has traced the history, development and distribution of urban legends. Much of his work is included in the widely available

Being Responsible

How do you find out if a good story is just an urban legend before broadcasting it to the world?
Visit:


Virus Warnings

The Internet is constantly being flooded with information about computer viruses. However, interspersed among real warnings are computer virus hoaxes. While virus hoaxes will not infect your computer, they are time consuming to handle and spread fear of technology needlessly. The Computer Incident Advisory Committee reports spending much more time de-bunking hoaxes than handling real virus incidents.
There are two known factors that make a successful virus hoax, they are:

Thanks to my son, Kris I've learned that a virus (Trojan Horse) cannot infect a computer from the simple act of opening an e-mail message. Attachments, however are another matter.

If a warning urges you to pass it on to all your friends, this should raise a red flag that the warning may be a hoax.

Chain Letters

We all know chain letters from their real world counterparts. They generally insist that you send them to a certain number of other people in order to reap some benefit or avoid a disaster. What makes e-mail chain letters so bad is the ease of forwarding and the Net's exponential multiplier effect. Doing the math, you'll see that if you send a message to ten people and each of them send it to ten people and so on, by the time of the sixth re-sending there are a billion copies of your message circulating the Net!
Chain letters waste network resources. Do not send them to your friends and relatives because you will be clogging up the network. Hit the delete button instead and put that message where it belongs.

In addition to The CIAC the following are good sources of information.