Saturday, January 19, 2008

Stop these chain mails

Damn, how I hate chain mails!
All of us have received tons of them. All those messages with shaman like prophecies:
"If you send this message to 'enter number of' friends you would get a 'enter time span' of 'enter a reward', if you send to 'enter a larger number of' friends you would get a 'greater time span' of 'the same reward', if you 'close/delete/ignore' this message you get a 'very long time span' of 'some cruel misfortune'."
Fill the italic fields with correct values.

Message like this, work on your feeling while bypassing all logic and sense. This is a marvelous display of the technique called social engineering and is often abused by various cyber criminal groups.

Therefore, I come to propose this set of rules to all of us:
If you get such a message by email, IM or SMS, you should be doing the following:
  1. Reply the person or his whole distribution list and explain to him/her the error of his/her way. Perhaps even send him to a link to a resource that will do it better and save your time, while be more successful in delivering the message.
  2. Delete this message permanently, even if it means fighting the urge to sending it to someone else.
I hope that some day we would convince all of our naive friends that forwarding all of these "I love you, my friend" messages is stupid and even dangerous.

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