Found in Email

I'm cleaning my email and I found this gem:

The only downside to that is that people *want* to believe this stuff
so badly that they'll just stop sending it to you instead of listening
to reality. So, you'll stop getting useless bullshit, but the other
people involved won't stop believing it.

That's been my experience.

It's in reference to my wife debunking one of those worthless chain mailings. It couldn't be more true.

Google Reverse Phone Search

I recently received a forwarded message at work containing some sly misinformation on one of Google's features. You can search for a phone number on Google and if that number is listed it will show you whatever information it can find on it. Pretty neat, eh? Apparently there are privacy concerns, as the email described:

The email went on to give a set of verifiable instructions to check if your phone number nets results. It's legit. If your number is listed this really works.

Google has implemented a new feature which enables you to type a telephone number into the search bar and hit enter and you will be given the person's name and address. If you then hit the Map link, you will get a map to the person's house. Everyone should be aware of this! It's a nationwide reverse telephone book and mapping system
If a child gives out his/her phone number, someone can now look it up to find out where he/she lives. The safety issues are obvious and alarming.

What isn't legit are the "safety issues." They should be obvious, but not alarming. I say this because this information has been easily accessible for years. If your number is listed then all of this is easily obtainable. In fact, that's how Google was able to get the information: someone else has this information in a publicly available, search-able, index-able format. Google hasn't introduced anything new, they've just made it a little bit easier.

To demonstrate how little this changes, I did a search for my boss's phone number on whitepages.com. It returned her home address, both her and her husband's names (including middle initial) and their approximate ages. Not only was this just as easy as the Google search, it also supplied me with more information in the results. I'm quite positive that with a little more time and effort I could obtain far more information about her than Google provides alone.

The problem is even less profound when you consider the full scenario. If someone has access to your child enough to obtain their phone number then we can assume a few other things:

1. They could probably harm your child right then, or at a later time in the same place.
2. They would be able to follow your child home, or follow them until they are alone.
3. It is likely that they could obtain other information, such as where the child lives, directly from the child.

If we take that into consideration we're left with a dramatically limited scope in which Google's feature makes any noticeable difference. In any of those instances the predator has no use for Google or any reverse directory. Plus, scenario 1 and 2 decrease the likelihood that you can do anything to change the situation. At least if someone is stalking your child at your home you have some control over whether that child is alone and some chance to take notice of unusual strangers.


I believe that predators who would rely on this feature are less dangerous, on average, than those who would use another method to obtain this information. That is because the more skilled stalker would be using other tools that return more information and are more likely to find a match. There are pay sites that offer huge amounts of aggregate public information, and with a little leg work you can find out plenty from public records offline. The less skilled predator is more likely to attack the child without ever bothering to search for additional information. Somewhere in between you have a stalker that needs easy to use tools like Google search, and is happy with the paltry amount of information it provides, yet they are willing to step back and research their victims. These people are more likely to exist in Lifetime made for TV movies than they are in the real world.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I have the same belief about most technologies that make information more accessible. You should be more worried about the entities that had access to the information before. You should be most worried about the people who actively sought the information when it was difficult to obtain, not the ones who will only look when it's easy.

Free Trade: Why Don't You Get a Job?

A coworker sent my department one of those junk emails with crappy jokes today. This one was about a guy looking for a job. It went down a list and mentioned all of the things he was wearing and using and where they were supposedly "made." The punchline was that everything was foreign and he wondered why he couldn't find work.

Welcome to global economics with free, but not fair, trade.

The problem I have with sentiments like those insinuated in the email is that they blame the wrong thing. They blame everyone else, but especially the foreign workers for having the audacity to import their goods.

There is a distinct failure to blame the politicians for opening up free trade without ever imposing the slightest bit of human rights, workers rights, or environmental regulation. More importantly, there is the failure of our mindless consumerism to ever think of the consequence of blind shopping for the lowest price in a category with little actual understanding of how that price is achieved. In short, the reason we don't have manufacturing is because we exported it willingly and then refused to buy local.

So, if its the jobless man's fault that he can't find a manufacturing job, or his father's or his neighbor's, where's the joke? I'll rewrite it for you: All he needs to do is wait for the economy to collapse to the point where he can't afford any of those things and the capitalists will gladly pay him $0.12 per hour to make them instead.

More Chain Mail Lunacy

In retrospect, I should have posted this one as-is back in November...

Last time, I was complaining because a coworker used me as a source rather than doing a simple two second search to verify the validity of a piece of chain mail, and I commented on how the email actually linked to the snopes.com article that invalidates it. This time it's far worse. This time the CIO actually forwarded one of these messages, claiming a new computer virus is spreading, to the IT Department.

It Is Not WWIII, Yet

I'm looking forward to debunking the World War III rumors that are currently being spread by spam. Just in case you see this and you get an email that you're tempted to open, don't do it. These spammers are using this as a way to spread malware so that they can recruit more computers to do their spamming. We haven't invaded Iran yet, and you probably still have a chance to vote against more war this fall.

Mistaken Identity, Mistaken Outrage

As I've said before, I have an old email account that is fairly simple to type and remember. Unfortunately, that means that a few people through the years have mistakenly attributed my email address to someone else. As of right now someone thinks that they are emailing Jeff "Rusty" Rouston and someone else thinks that I'm a sheriff's deputy in Indiana.

The deputy mistake is mildly entertaining. If nothing else, I get an interesting insight into public event security planning. The Rusty mistake has been annoying more often than not, usually it's chain mail forwards that I would debunk for any friend. Last night, my Rusty persona received an email from Janet, who is apparently outraged by Obama's policies on defense spending, specifically one YouTube video posted with an anti-Obama slant and a blog post (linked from the email) that reinforces the same opinion.

I'm going to highlight some aspects of the video and Janet's reaction. It really is interesting, because I don't think I personally know anyone who would be so outraged by so little. First, here is Janet's reaction, which was originally in a 20 point bold red font:

Whether you are democrate or republican..........This should scare you!!! It scares me!!! I want to continue feeling safe in my counrty. -janet

Now the video she's responding to:




So, let's look at what Obama is saying: He will end a war that has become completely indefensible. He will cut unnecessary and unproven defense spending. He will try to slow other defense spending by limiting research into future weapons. Also, he will increase oversight of spending. Lastly, he will attempt diplomacy with other nations so that we don't need to spend so much because we won't have so many staunch and powerful enemies.

Uh, why is this scary? Notice that what he's said is that he'll get rid of unnecessary, unproven, and failed things. He's not saying that we won't have guns and missiles, or that we'll start defending our country with flower power. He also isn't promising any huge cuts in existing successful programs. No where did he claim that he would cut the military's size in half like George H. W. Bush started and Bill Clinton finished. He doesn't even promise to rid us of nuclear weapons, just to take them off of constant alert status. These aren't huge changes, unless you're a defense contractor or a warmonger.

Now, let's dig into what Janet said. Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican you should be scared by Obama's stance is a ludicrous statement. He's repeating the same stance that many Democrats, and a few radical Republicans (I hate to mention the name, but Ron Paul springs to mind), have held for decades. More importantly, she unknowingly reveals the real problem she has: she wants to feel safe, she's far less concerned with being safe.

What she wants is the current security theater where we spend trillions to fight an attack that will never happen while we are in the middle of an economic crisis. To her, and people like her, we must pump money into a system where we seem imposing, instead of putting effort into a system where others recognize that we are not a threat. She's scared because Obama might provide real security, but it isn't security she can touch, it's security she simply must have faith in.

She, like so many others, has lost faith in people. When we have no faith in each other then we build barriers that look omnious, are dubiously effective, and serve to destroy others' faith in us. She didn't even have faith in me when I replied to her email last year and said that I'm not Jeff "Rusty" Rouston.

Chain Mail Lunacy

Earlier today I received a forwarded piece of chain mail with a simple request, "Is this real?" That didn't surprise me, I've made myself known for my intolerance of chain mail misinformation. What surprised me is that the very link that I used to verify the legitimacy of the email was included in the email itself.

The email, if you must know, was one about crystal meth being distributed at grade schools as Halloween candy. I barely read any of it; all I needed was enough to search for a key phrase. I was using much the same procedure I always do. After I found a good phrase and searched, the first hit was a Snopes article.

It wasn't until I went to reply that I noticed the word Snopes in the original email. Then I realized that it was the same link I was going to send. I did my duty and replied with the most accurate synopsis that I could, but I was still bothered by something: Why should I have even taken the time to answer someone who would even think of believing that the serious subject matter of the email is true without even reading it?

It's really sad. Not only does false information get passed around so easily, but it's so openly accepted that people don't feel the need to bother reading it. At least my coworker was skeptical enough to ask me, I suppose. Unfortunately, there were probably a hundred other email addresses included in the forward. At least 5 people had forwarded this email, who knows where they got it and how many others have passed it on. All without bothering to read all of the information included in the email.

I do think that it's mildly clever to use the most widely known chain mail debunking site as a resource to make your claims seem more valid. I wonder if the person who started that incarnation of the email going actually thought that so many people wouldn't bother to check. It's a sort of audacity that you'd only expect from someone who's telling the truth. Think again.

Sweetly Poisoned Information

Recently a coworker asked me about an email forward that she received. The email, entitled "Sweet Poison (A MUST READ)," was little different than most junk that's forwarded around. In my response I included the process I use to discredit, and very occasionally verify, the factuality of chain mail. It's pretty simple and I suggest everyone who's confronted with these things adopt a similar solution.

As I'm fond of saying, the best way to fight misinformation is with truth. My reply is as follows:

http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/aspartame.html

In this case it appears that the information contained is disputed at best. Also, this appears to be a grassroots marketing campaign. If you search for “Sweet Poison” you’ll find that it’s a book written about “exposing aspartame dangers.”

As for debunking, there’s a process I use:

1. Anything, and I mean anything, written in 20 point green fonts, interspersed with varying paragraphs of other font colors, faces, and sizes, is likely junk. 99.999% of the time this holds up to be true. I’ve never found any reliable information contained within an email like this.
2. The mere fact that several AOL users have forwarded this around is a sign that the content isn’t worth reading.
3. Once we’ve established that it’s likely worthless we can take two courses of action:
1. Delete the email
2. Reply with information proving it worthless:
1. Pick a phrase from the email or subject and paste it into the google search input. Usually the subject itself or the first sentence or two works, just make sure it’s somewhat unique.
2. Search for it. Look through the first page or two of results. If you see snopes.com, breakthechain.org, etc. then click on the link.
3. Unless you already know what the link says, read it. It’s best to be informed.
4. Send an email back to the sender. Ask them to forward the truth around to everyone who they sent the original email to, as well as the person who sent it to them.
5. Be prepared for an argument. Forwarded emails are often successful because it’s easier to accept the lie than it is to swallow the truth. People confronted with the truth will often get defensive of the falsity that they propagated and will resort to tactics such as attacking you for wanting to be right.