Introduction
The Web

The last decade has seen an explosion of information that is available on the Internet. Everything from the latest news and sports to the minutes of town hall meetings to the diaries of wayward teens can be found with a click of a button. However, because of the unregulated nature of the medium, a great deal of the information has never been checked for authenticity. Anyone, anywhere that has access to a web server can deliver information to billions of people worldwide without a single fact having been checked for correctness. This lack of authenticity has led many people to discount everything that they find on the Internet.

Urban Legends

This lack of verification, though, has not kept some stories from spreading throughout the Internet and taking on a life of their own. A subclass of these stories is called "urban legends". In the pre-WWW days, these were exciting, unbelievable tales that usually started something like, "Some guy told me about...". Today, these stories have their own websites, with analyses as to the veracity of the stories. Just like in "the old days", these stores share the common trait that they lack the verifiable specificity that one would expect to see in a truthful story. Phrases like "a young guy in upstate New York" or "a German tourist visiting the U.S." are examples of the level of detail that these stories have. There is enough data to make the story sound real without enough specifics to allow one to easily verify it.

The sites below provide a wide range of stories that exhibit these characteristics. They span from the purposely false (The Onion) to the purposely deceptive or malicious (virus hoaxes). The use of logic and critical thinking is usually all that one needs to discern between those stories that are false, and those that are true. However, the use of good Internet investigation skills and access to newspaper and magazine databases does not hurt. Read through these sites and see if you can spot the fake stories.

Urban Legends

AFU and Urban Legends
Snopes
alt.folklore.urban
Darwin Awards

Hoax Sites

ICSA Virus Hoaxes
The Onion

After reading through these and any other sites that you might find, answer the following questions

• One of the favorite pastimes of Internet users is to read about the latest Darwin Awards winners and to send them to their friends via e-mail. Did you find that most or all of the Darwin Award winner stories seemed to be true? Were there any that you found to be false?
• Another seemingly favorite pastime of people is to pass on e-mail virus warnings to their friends to alert them to possible dangers. Did the e-mail hoaxes that you read about seem to have a common trait? If so, how could you use this to protect yourself against this type of hoax?