If you’re unsure whether a site that collects personal information (and displays even more personal information in response) is legitimate, just enter some fictitious but properly-formatted input and see what happens. To this dilemma we offer a handy solution: You can lie to a computer! Simply visiting one of these sites and attempting to look up a “record” is sufficient to dispel the concern that they might be real (if for no other reason than that they don’t ask for nearly enough information to uniquely identify a person), but many viewers are hesitant to try for fear that the information they enter will be collected by someone who might use it for illegitimate (or even illegal) purposes.
Perhaps more amusing than this old joke (I had a circus clown take my “photograph” with a prop camera when I was six years old, and that one turned out to be a picture of a monkey too!) is the amount of mail forwarded to us by alarmed readers who have received similar messages and are worried that they’re genuine but are afraid to check for themselves.
The punchline is always the same: after the user is led on a merry chase, the site displays a photograph from his “official” government record, and it’s a picture of a chimp, an orangutan, or some other type of monkey or ape. In this case the joke comes courtesy of a site similar to several other hoax web sites bearing names such as “National Driver’s License Records Bureau” or the “ FBI Criminal Records Search,” sites that purport to show users’ information taken from state driver’s license or law enforcement databases. The above-quoted examples are not real warnings from concerned and outraged citizens they’re invitations that solicit “victims” for yet another Internet prank.
0 kommentar(er)
