The Claire Swire email of 2000 was a very personal email from Claire Swire to Bradley Chait, who worked at Norton Rose, a law firm in London, England. She described his semen as "yum." [1] He forwarded it to six friends, one of whom in turn forwarded it further with the subject line of "Do you know Claire Swire" until it spread worldwide within days, and received wide coverage in newspapers and television. The author of the original email is in doubt, as Chait later said that the email was a hoax perpetrated by colleagues, as he "was the new boy". [2]
Those at Norton Rose who forwarded the email were suspended, but kept their jobs. [3]
Because of its wide coverage, the incident is often cited as an example of the problems that staff can cause to the reputation of their employer (and the risk of embarrassment and disciplinary measures) by forwarding personal or questionable material. [4]
The Goodtimes virus, also styled as Good Times virus, was a computer virus hoax that spread during the early years of the Internet's popularity. Warnings about a computer virus named "Good Times" began being passed around among Internet users in 1994. The Goodtimes virus was supposedly transmitted via an email bearing the subject header "Good Times" or "Goodtimes", hence the virus's name, and the warning recommended deleting any such email unread. The virus described in the warnings did not exist, but the warnings themselves were, in effect, virus-like. In 1997 the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective announced that they had been responsible for the perpetration of the "Good Times" virus hoax as an exercise to "prove the gullibility of self-proclaimed 'experts' on the Internet".
Urban legends is a genre of folklore concerning stories about an unusual or humorous event that many people believe to be true but largely are not.
A chain letter is a message that attempts to convince the recipient to make a number of copies and pass them on to a certain number of recipients. The "chain" is an exponentially growing pyramid that cannot be sustained indefinitely.
A hoax is a widely publicised falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax.
Stile Project is a website founded by a writer and webmaster known by the pseudonym Jay Stile. Stile started the site in 1999 when he was in high school, and ran it for 12 years. Stile Project grew into a large network of counter-culture, amateur adult entertainment and current-events sites, forums, collectively called stileNET. On December 2, 2010, Stile announced that he had sold Stile Project. According to Stile, after selling the website, he went on to study computer science and received his postgraduate academic degree in 2013.
Faxlore is a sort of folklore: humorous texts, folk poetry, folk art, and urban legends that are circulated, not by word of mouth, but by fax machine. Xeroxlore or photocopylore is similar material circulated by photocopying.
A Joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early Joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
Alan Irwin Abel was an American hoaxer, writer, and mockumentary filmmaker famous for several hoaxes that became media circuses.
Bonsai Kitten was a hoax website that claimed to instruct readers how to raise a kitten in a jar, so as to mold the bones of the kitten into the shape of the jar as the cat grows in the same way as a bonsai plant. It was made by an MIT student going by the alias of Dr. Michael Wong Chang. The website generated fury with many people taking it as serious and complaining to animal rights organizations. The Michigan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) stated that "while the site's content may be faked, the issue it is campaigning for may create violence towards animals". Although the website is now shut down, petitions are still circulated to shut down the site or complain to its ISP. The website has been debunked by several organizations including Snopes.com and the Humane Society of the United States.
Carnivore, later renamed DCS1000, was a system implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that was designed to monitor email and electronic communications. It used a customizable packet sniffer that could monitor all of a target user's Internet traffic. Carnivore was implemented in October 1997. By 2005 it had been replaced with improved commercial software.
Email fraud is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual using email as the vehicle. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to defraud people, just as telephony and paper mail were used by previous generations.
Progesterex is a fictitious date rape drug that would purportedly cause sterilization. It is part of a hoax that began to circulate in 1999 via e-mail on the internet. No actual drug by this name or even with these properties exists, and no such incident has ever been documented or confirmed. The most high profile person falling for the hoax was British MP Lynne Featherstone, who asked a question about the fake drug in Parliament.
An online petition is a form of petition which is signed online, usually through a form on a website. Visitors to the online petition sign the petition by adding their details such as name and email address. Typically, after there are enough signatories, the resulting letter may be delivered to the subject of the petition, usually via e-mail. The online petition may also deliver an email to the target of the petition each time the petition is signed.
Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed, but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.
A computer virus hoax is a message warning the recipients of a non-existent computer virus threat. The message is usually a chain e-mail that tells the recipients to forward it to everyone they know, but it can also be in the form of a pop-up window.
The Amstrad E-mailer is a Personal Communication Centre that is a landline phone device, launched in March 2000.
FreakingNews was a news-oriented Photoshop contest website that came online August 2, 2002 and officially opened on October 23, 2003, as a sister site of Worth1000. The virtual community of 17,000+ digital artists and members featured free daily Photoshop contests that were fueled by global news and events. FreakingNews was featured on television shows, magazines and newspapers, including Comedy Central, MTV, Weekly World News, Glenn Beck Show, Stern Magazine, The Guardian, The Daily News, The Dallas Morning News, and the Los Angeles Times. The site closed in 2020.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
The Chive is a website owned and operated by Resignation, LLC. Images appearing on thechive.com are selected by staff from searches of both international and domestic websites as well as daily submissions to help promote OnlyFan users.
The Jessica Mydek hoax was a popular chain letter, circulated by hoaxsters, to play on the sympathy of credulous readers, and get them to respond, so as to build a sucker list. The letter was first observed in 1997.