As you may have gathered already, I am not too shy about expressing my views. And things that I believe are just down right stupid always get me riled up.
Ever since I started on the internet, many millions of byes ago, I've seen the increasing presence of hoaxes. They come in all shapes and forms and obviously originate with someone two sandwiches short of a picnic!

By this I mean the posts you find on Facebook etc like : " Facebook will give $1 for every person who posts his message ... " blah blah. Or " Studies show that drinking 3 cans of Coke and eating a bunch of grapes will cause abortions" or "Virus alert, you must delete THESE files on your computer ...." etc etc. Let me add 'chain letters' no matter how 'nice' they are " You will have a beautiful day and may even find your dream date BUT you MUST send this on to 25 of your friends within the next hour". grrrrr

Apart from the obvious distress it would give some people who are not very computer literate, these things usually change as they get passed along and in the end there are 25 viruses all eating away at your computer after you watch the latest Sherlock episode!

My frustration is two fold.

1. At the idiots who start this nonsense. Except for the extremely nasty ones, do they even stop to think how upsetting it would be to anyone who just wasn't in the right frame of mind & starting panicking and deleting files all over the place?

2. At the people who forward them on, post them on sites etc without even considering whether they should verify anything that has been claimed. Anyone who sends me that stuff will get ONE reply asking them to never forward that garage to me again. If they do it again, they are blocked. "Not my division!"

All that stuff does, esp the email ones is collect a giant list of email addresses that any one of the thousands of bots floating around can pick up and add to their spam lists. Not to mention how much they clog up the email accounts of 'friends'.

If people find things that warn of viruses, etc why don't they check them with Norton or MacPhee or any of the other RELIABLE sites before panicking???

Thanks. rant over.