Halleynet Headspace

The concept of the chain letter has moved I notice these days from annoying emails that insist you pass them on or suffer your head falling off, your family dying horribly or spending the rest of your life in a gutter, to spam posts on Facebook that the gullible blindly repost. Two minutes to check a story is all it takes and you don’t need a degree in computer science to do this!

Subjects are legion and quite what the motivation is to launch these things I am not always sure but God do they do the rounds and people blindly repost. “DON’T CHANGE THIS SETTING IN FACEBOOK IT WILL STEAL ALL YOUR INFORMATION AND INFECT YOUR PC!”, “John suffered horrific injuries in a bike accident, in this his hour of need pray for him and repost on your facebook status”. And you know people blindly do, accepting the word because a “friend” told them. And so they propogate the garbage….

The one about the bike accident, and the wording here is not correct but the idea is, had been going round for 6 years in various ways ( not solely in facebook as far as I can tell). Its so old there is no one who can tell you if it ever started as a genuine post or was ever simply contrived. But in short the rule is- unless you 100% know for yourself that something is genuine and factual, you would do better to simply delete the request to repost as a waste of bandwidth.

In truth its too late there are too many of the gullible out there and these things have gained traction.

How to spot this stuff:

• Always mistrust anything thats asks to be reposted!
• Anything that says you will catch a virus from changing a setting on a Social Networking site- why worry- you have Anti Virus right?
• you won’t catch a virus- more like someone wants you to retain some setting thats actually benefitting them by way of seeing what your up to on fB than locking it down
• If you are worried, set all your settings in fB to the most Private and then undo the ones you decide are safe.
• If you are worried about your posts being seen on the wider web, DO NOT POST THEM ON FACEBOOK!!!!! There are no secrets on the web.
• When you get a repost request, take some of the key text- no more than 10 words, but something key to the post and paste it into Google. You will be surprised how much has been written on many of these posts.
• Subscribe to the HOAX-SLAYER list on Facebook. This guy really knows his stuff, I beleive he is a fB employee and posts on all the crap going round.
• This list is not definitive.
• and remember just because you got it from a friend does not mean its true!

Be safe.