Tag: hoax

History of Online Life [en]

[fr] J'ai beau dire dans mes conférences que ce que l'on met sur le web est hors de notre contrôle, et risque de devenir permanent, je suis de plus en plus confrontée à  la disparition de l'histoire numérique. Quelques réflexions sur l'histoire de Kaycee Nicole Swenson, l'adolescente fictionnelle qui mourut de leucémie en mai 2001.

I’m having a chat with [Kevin](http://epeus.blogspot.com/) (who should blog more!) about some past things, and he’s hunting around in [the Internet Archive](http://archive.org) for photos and stuff. A lot of it (2003, 2004) is already gone. Can’t be found.

During my talks to teenagers, I always stress that something you put on the web is out of your control, and that you cannot “remove” it. In some cases you might, but you can’t be sure there isn’t a copy lying around somewhere.

Another thing I tell the kids I talk to is the [Kaycee Nicole Swenson story](/writing/kaycee) — the young leukemia patient who died; she blogged for two years, was active in online communities, exchanged phone calls and presents with other bloggers and chatters, and was even interviewed for the New York Times — but never existed. Her original blog has been taken down, and a lot of stuff I referred to at the time when I wrote about the story. I [googled for her](http://www.google.com/search?q=kaycee+nicole+swenson) to see what came up. Amongst various results came [this blog entry from 2004](http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ChristopherUlicne/coursework/006005.html). It ends like this:

Debbie Swenson did something that few writers have done before: she brought a character into the world of the living, gave her a working heart and soul, and affected real people’s lives with her work.

In my opinion, that should be the purpose of all writing: to make a real difference. So in this case, my hat is off to Debbie for her skill and wisdom.

Pardon me? Duping people is “wisdom”? Please allow me to disagree strongly. I wanted to post this comment and although it [appears in coCo](http://www.cocomment.com/article/7130), it didn’t get posted to the original blog because of some MovableType templat problem. Here it is:

Well, maybe we (because I was one of Kaycee’s readers) can cherish the memory of many cancer patients, but we can also cherish the memory of having been duped.

If I’m going to put energy in a relationship, I want it to match reality, somewhat. Otherwise it makes no sense.

Have you seen The Matrix? Maybe we should all eat little pills that make us happy — if we don’t know we’re not living in reality, where’s the damage?

Some of my thoughts on the topic, in French:

And in English:

All this happened in [May 2001](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2001/05/ “See my blog archives at the time.”). It makes me feel like such an old-timer. Was anybody else around? Who remembers Kaycee Nicole?

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Paypal Scam Nearly Got Me [en]

How I almost got scammed by people masquerading as PayPal. Remember to always type https://paypal.com in your browser, and never to click links!

I consider myself pretty web-savvy and spam/hoax-aware. Today I very nearly got fooled into giving my PayPal information to some shady characters.

This morning I got an e-mail from PayPal — or so I thought. It looked nice and branded, no spelling or grammar mistakes, security warnings telling me not to give my password or anything to anybody, and even a link inviting me to go and see PayPal’s Security Tips page. It was just asking me to login on the site and check my data there (that’s what I understood then, re-reading it now, it says they will verify the information I have entered, which is much more fishy).

I had already made a mental note of one of the PayPal warnings, which is to not trust any other site than https://www.paypal.com/ (I’m not linking it so as not to encourage you to click on links which seem to point there — you’ll understand why in a minute). Now, remember this was early morning for me (don’t you also check your e-mail in the morning?). I clicked on the login link, and noticed the browser was sending me to a website identified by an IP address (194.183.4.23 in this case). I stopped everything, and clicked the nice blue link that said https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/cmd=profile-update. The login page looked furiously like the real PayPal login page, and I was about to login with no second thoughts when I noticed the name in the browser bar was http://www.ssl2-paypal.com/support/update.html — not the link I had clicked on!

I had seen this address before, in another “PayPal” e-mail I had got a couple of weeks back. Already then they had managed to fool me, even though the e-mail was less well crafted than this time. I smelled a rat, so finally typed https://paypal.com/ in my browser and logged in there. Nothing special happened.

I dug out the previous e-mail, slightly worried now. You see, although I had been suspicious about this first e-mail, I do remember that I had logged in somewhere. But to this moment I’m not sure if I logged into the fake website or if I had the sense to point my browser to the real PayPal website myself before logging in. I think I did, I hope I did, and in any case I just checked my account for fraudulous activity and changed my password. The first e-mail was really bad, but I was convinced enough that it came from PayPal to forget about it, just making a mental note that their copywriting was really really poor.

This made the second scam e-mail seem all the more real: when I got it, I thought “oh, so that last e-mail must really have been a fake, this is what a real one looks like.” Poor unsuspecting me.

At this point, I still thought the second e-mail was a “real” one, but that the ssl2-paypal people had someway managed to hack a redirect on the official PayPal site. I hadn’t looked at the e-mail source yet, see?

Anyway, I decided to report the first e-mail I had received.

Coming back home at the end of the day, I had an automated response from PayPal regarding my complaint. It again stated all the security measures to take, in particular the one about always typing https://paypal.com in your browser. And I thought: “you doofuses, you had better stop putting clickable links in your e-mails if you want people to get used to typing the address!”

I was going to respond to them with a more politically correct comment in that direction when I went to have a second look at the e-mail (which, I remind you, I still thought legitimate) I had got in the morning. And that is when I realised that the beautiful blue link was in fact a fake link, disguised as a real one. You can put anything in the href attribute of an achor tag — the catch here is that their link looks a lot like the blue links e-mail reading programs create when they encounter plain-text URL’s.

So, there we go. I was nearly caught by those not-that-dumb spammers. Remember the golden rule:

Always TYPE the address in your browser, don’t CLICK on links in PayPal or other e-mails.

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