[PLA_UPL] a chain letter reply
Colonel Panic
Phonelosers@wearehope.com
Sun, 16 Jun 2002 16:17:04 -0700 (PDT)
I recently got a chain-letter in my email, and I did a lil research on chain-letters.
During that research, I found an anti-chain-letter , that was intended to be sent to the
perpetrators of chain-emails. So I did a lil modification on this letter, and sent it
back to everyone in the header of the chain-email I'd received.
Here's my modified letter:
--------------------------------------
To Whom it may concern:
This letter is being sent to you because recently, you received a chain letter,
which you may or may not have passed on.
This is an ‘anti-chain letter.’ It originated at Portland State University, and
was augmented by TeknoPuck. Its purpose is to educate the online public about the harm
caused by chain letters, and to put a stop to all of the silliness of this type of hoax
and the chain letters’ complete lack of connection with luck, fortune or anything else.
In fact, these mailings are not only stupid and annoying but destructive as well.
Did you know that chain letters are illegal? That the composing, sending or even
resending of such mailings constitutes a crime?
And did you also know that whenever you send on a chain email, your email address is
embedded in the headers of the email, along with the addresses of everyone who sent the
message on before and after you?
In fact, the header of an electronic chain letter I received is where I got your email
address in order to send you this message.
And did you know that even the forwarding of such emails is also harmful to the working
of the internet?
The damage caused by these mailings is primarily due to what the network security
community calls ‘denial of service,’ by which they mean the hogging of bandwidth, disk
space, processing power and other network resources through the propagation of
meaningless ‘garbage.’ You may not think that by simply sending on an email could cause
such trouble, but remember that the whole purpose of these emails is to entice people to
resend them on to multiple recipients, who each resend them on to more recipients, and so
on until a flood of instances of the message are being exchanged throughout the network.
This type of damage should not be underestimated, as it forms the entirety of the threat
of certain types of no-payload email-based viruses, such as the ‘melissa’ and ‘I love
you’ worms. This has the potential to place an enormous tax upon networks, especially
ones with limited resources like those of many small businesses (In fact, an examination
of the headers of any email chain letter will usually reveal many addresses from the same
.com (commercial) domain, indicating the message was disseminated around a business
office net). Such a deluge of emails has the potential to drastically slow down or even
crash a network, causing great loss of time and money.
If you don’t believe me, look at the magazine article pasted into the body of this
email, below, and take note of the exponential nature of the propagation of these
mailings, and imagine the effects of such traffic on your company or neighborhood
network.
If you receive this anti-chain letter, keep it until you receive another chain letter.
Then, instead of spreading the chain letter, send this letter back to those emails in the
chain-email’s headers, including whomever sent that obnoxious piece of junk mail to you.
If you cooperated with a chain-email and sent or forwarded one recently, send this along
to the same people.
Perhaps this letter will spread all over the world and eventually get back to those
moronic losers who have nothing better to do than write meaningless letters that prey on
people's superstitions and/or greed.
Thank you,
--TeknoPuck
PS:
Please take the time to read the following two articles, especially if you are guilty of
forwarding chain emails. The time it takes to read these articles is miniscule compared
to the enormous waste of time it causes for those who participate in the chain letter.
==========================================
If you wish to read this article in its entirety, including the many links to other sites
and resources related to chain letters, visit this link:
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/chain-letters.html
Here is the main body of the article, abbreviated for this email:
__________________________________________
Chain letters
Chain letters are illegal. Chain letters are a waste of time. Net sites which do not
discourage electronic chain letters risk losing their net connections, as they have the
potential for wasting great amounts of bandwidth and disk space.
What are chain letters?
Chain letters are letters which promise a phenomenal return on a small effort. The
simplest form of a chain letter contains a list of x people. You are supposed to send
something to the top person on the list. Then you remove the top person on the list,
sliding the second person into the top position, add yourself in the bottom position,
make y copies of the letter, and mail them to your friends. The promise is that you will
eventually receive y**x somethings in return.
Why do people think chain letters could work?
The reason people are even tempted by these schemes is that the human mind does not have
an intuitive view of geometrical progressions. Suppose we presume the chain letter to
have a list of five people. You are asked to send one postcard to the person on top of
the list, and remail the letter to five friends. You are promised thousands of postcards
from all over the world if everyone participates. Your cost: a postcard, five photocopies
and envelopes, and six stamps. Not much to risk to see what comes back...
Why can't chain letters work?
Now let's assume that everyone on the list is honest and just perpetuating the "chain."
(After all, these letters do emhpasize being HONEST.) Then if everyone on the list has
made five copies, you are one of 5**5 or 3,125 people receiving copies in your
"generation" of the letter. So far, the numbers don't seem outlandish. And looking the
other way, you stand to get postcards from 3125 people. That doesn't seem impossible
either. But view it as the "chain" you're in the middle of, and there will be 5**11 or
48,828,125 people receiving copies in that generation of the letter. If distribution were
confined to the United States, there wouldn't be enough people left who hadn't already
received a copy for the next generation.
A brief analysis of the Dave Rhodes chain letter
The Dave Rhodes chain letter is a famous example of electronic chain letter, which has
appeared several times on the Internet. It has a list of 10 people and suggests you
forward the letter to to bulletin boards (not people)! A twist with this letter is that
you start to receive money when you get to position 5 on the list. Just assume for this
analysis that only the person who posted the message you read was honest (that is, just
making copies and passing it along - not in on the beginning). Let's see how the
generations go until you could see some results:
Copies in Your
generation postion
10 --
100 10
1,000 9
10,000 8
100,000 7
1,000,000 6
10,000,000 5
So by the time you could get any money out of this, the message would have appeared on
over 11 milion bulletin boards! Do you think there are that many? Even if we were only
talking people, that would be a healthy number. There aren't enough people in the US (let
alone bulletin boards) to maintain two more generations.
Do chain letters take other forms?
The idea of each participant needing to bring in several more to perpetuate a program,
sometimes also called a pyramid or Ponzi Scheme, is not confined to letters. In the
1980's, there were Pyramid Clubs, some costing $1000 to join. I just recently saw a
pyramid phone calling scheme. And multi-level marketing (eg, Amway) also has elements of
the pyramid, in that more money is to be made by bringing in other sales people than by
selling the product yourself.
==========================================
This article was originally published on the Web by the internet magazine Salon:
http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/09/22feature.html
Here is the main body of the article:
__________________________________________
Anatomy of an e-mail chain letter ;
Why did so many people forward an obviously bogus message about a Bill Gates giveaway?
BY AMY VIRSHUP | Like anyone with an e-mail account, I get forwards all the time -- dirty
limericks about Monica Lewinsky, pleas from cancer children who want to set the world
record for most business cards received (who knew there was a world record for most
business cards received?), incessant warnings against opening up anything headed "Good
Times." Most of these die an untimely death on my hard drive. (OK, the limericks I pass
along.) But the other morning, I got a forward I just couldn't resist. It came from a
colleague at the magazine where I work and, after the usual seemingly endless list of
headers, read like this:
"Hello Disney fans, and thank you for signing up for Bill Gates' Beta Email Tracking. My
name is Walt Disney Jr. Here at Disney we are working with Microsoft which has just
compiled an e-mail tracing program that tracks everyone to whom this message is forwarded
to. It does this through an unique IP (Internet Protocol) address log book database. We
are experimenting with this and need your help. Forward this to everyone you know and if
it reaches 13,000 people, 1,300 of the people on the list will receive $5,000, and the
rest will receive a free trip for two to Disney World for one week during the summer of
1999 at our expense. Enjoy."
It was signed, "Your friends, Walt Disney Jr., Disney, Bill Gates, & The Microsoft
Development Team" (wow, Bambi and Bill together!). My friend, who has asked, nay, begged
to remain anonymous, had appended a note of his own -- "... who knows?" -- and zipped the
thing along to me and 19 other people, many of them fellow journalists.
The promise of a free visit to Orlando wasn't what intrigued me, since it was clearly a
hoax. (Walt Disney and his wife, Lillian, had two daughters but no male progeny.) But why
were so many people so willing to believe the letter? Their happy faith in the corporate
beneficence of Microsoft and Disney shone through in the exclamation-point-heavy notes
they'd added at each iteration of the message: "Maybe we could all pick the same week and
have ourselves a big party in Disney World!!!" "Mickey, here we come!!!!!!!" "See below
and see you in Disney." (In the past, hoax e-mails about Microsoft have been decidedly
more sinister -- like the one about the company's hostile takeover of the Catholic
Church.)
As it turned out, we were all getting in on the chain fairly late in the game. A version
of the message had circulated on the West Coast weeks before (it left out Disney, only
required the e-mail to make it through 1,000 people and promised a payoff of $1,000 and a
free copy of Windows 98). And when I called Microsoft to find out when I could expect my
check, spokeswoman Kimberly Kuresman directed me to the archive of Bill Gates' syndicated
columns, in which he'd written about the message back in March.
It seems someone had sent Gates a copy of the e-mail, which he'd officially declared to
be "hooey" and "rude" to boot. (Though not to worry, said Bill -- none of this meant that
"the Internet isn't wonderful, [or] that it won't change the world.") Not only was there
no payday in my future, Kuresman assured me, there was no beta test of any e-mail
tracking program going on: "Microsoft takes security and privacy very seriously," she
said. "There's no such program." Disney spokeswoman Claudia Peters was even more
succinct: "Basically, it's a hoax," she said, adding, "There is no Walt Disney Jr." So
much for the forwarder who'd added, "Folks, I called Disney myself. It's no lie. GET IT
DONE! You all owe me."
And yet, hundreds if not thousands of people had felt compelled to go through their
e-mail address books and fire the thing along to long lists of acquaintances -- blithely
ignoring that they were being asked to test a program that claimed to trace each station
in a train of forwards, meaning that each person who passed it along was, in essence,
informing on himself. Now, you don't have to be a militia member or a big believer in
black helicopters to think that technology enabling anyone -- from a corporation like
Microsoft to the FBI to, say, your manager at work -- to track just where an e-mail
message has gone might be a bad idea.
As Barry Steinhardt, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, points out, "The
reality of surveillance of e-mail is a significant issue in many countries" -- from
Russia, where the state security service has proposed that all Internet service providers
be required to send it a copy of every piece of electronic mail, to the Netherlands,
where the government wants a "trap door" for access to all e-mail. And these were people
who clearly should have known better: Journalists, employees of telecommunications
companies like MCI, money managers dealing in foreign exchange trading, even the director
of something called the Sacred Science Institute, "an Internet organization [without]
regular telephone hours," as its voice mail says, who single-handedly passed the message
along to 107 of his friends and neighbors.
What were these people thinking? To try to find out, I sent off a couple dozen e-mails to
folks in the chain. Unfortunately, most of them proved less willing to respond to a query
from a journalist than they'd been to pass along the chance to shake Mickey's hand. But
though my sample is admittedly small, I did hear from some forwarders -- none of whom
actually believed they'd get anything free from Bill and/or Walt Jr., of course. Take
Scott Robinson, a futures trader from Colorado, who got the West Coast version. He says
he "did some quick calculations and realized just how much they would be paying out and
it didn't make sense. I maybe would have believed it if it was JUST a copy of Windows
'98, but the $1,000 was a bit much." Nevertheless, he forwarded the message to "a couple
of family members and a couple of friends. All with a little smiley face :) and a message
not to take it too seriously."
Robinson was sanguine about the privacy implications, too: "I don't now and NEVER have or
will use e-mail for a form of communication that contains anything that I don't care if
the world sees. Therefore, this threat of tracking ability doesn't bother me. Besides, if
you are saying something or doing something you would be ashamed of if everyone knew
about it, maybe you ought to ask yourself if you ought to be saying or doing it in the
first place." That policy probably works well for him, but it leaves people who really
are using the Internet to "change the world" -- as my friend Bill says -- out in the
cold. I'm thinking here of the Chinese dissident who was recently arrested for sending
tens of thousands of e-mail addresses to an ally outside that country.
More prosaically, it doesn't do much for your average corporate wage slave -- someone
like Janet, an employee at a Canadian pharmaceuticals company (she asked not to be
further identified), who also passed the e-mail along. Why? She "just got swept up, I
guess. I just happened to receive it while I was at my desk and impulsively decided to
forward it to a few friends." Once I'd asked, though, Janet looked into her company's
corporate code of conduct and discovered she'd just violated it: The policy, like that at
many companies, prohibits the redistribution of chain letters and required her to hang on
to the message and notify the IT support staff. If there really had been e-mail tracking,
she'd have been nailed (actually, she could be nailed anyway, but she would have made it
even easier). "It's beginning to make me a bit nervous to have forwarded the letter on,"
she conceded in our e-mail exchange.
As for my co-worker, it turned out he'd gotten the message from his sister-in-law (who of
course didn't believe it, but forwarded it along because she thought my colleague would
be amused), who'd gotten it from someone in her office, who'd gotten it from someone else
in her office, who'd gotten it from the head of the company's Paris branch, at which
point its origins disappear into the ether.
By the time I called my friend to break the bad news, another colleague had already let
him down, and not gently: "I received this chain e-mail two weeks ago and I believe it is
a hoax," this second co-worker had e-mailed. "I checked the home pages of both Disney and
Microsoft. After using their own search engines to look up 'free trips,' 'email
tracking,' etc., I came up empty. I've seen a lot of these lately and you can usually
spot them because they drop big names like Walt and Bill, but don't ever back them up
with reference. They often use poor grammar and have misspellings. Also, how are you
supposed to 'sign up?' ... just by forwarding this letter? IT WILL NOT WORK ... IF YOU
EVER SEE ANYTHING LIKE THIS AGAIN THROW IT AWAY. AT LEAST DO NOT MAIL IT TO ME."
Pass it along.
SALON | Sept. 22, 1998
==========================================
This is the body of the email I received, that had your email address in its headers. If
you cooperated with the chain-email and forwarded it along, then send this along to the
same people.
__________________________________________
> > > Subject: Fwd: THIS IS FOR REAL. IT WAS ON THE NEWS
> > > LAST NIGHT.
> > > In a message dated 5/15/02 2:14:20 PM Eastern
> > > Daylight Time, BLHIA writes:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Dear Friends,
> > > > Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill
> > > Gates is sharing his
> > > > fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later.
> > > Microsoft and AOL
> > > > are now the largest Internet companies and in an
> > > effort to make sure
> > > > that Internet Explorer remains the most widely
> > > used program, Microsoft
> > > > and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you
> > > forward this e-mail
> > > > to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if
> > > you are a Microsoft
> > > > Windows user) for a two week time period.
> > > > For every person that you forward this e-mail to,
> > > Microsoft will pay
> > > > you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to
> > > that forwards it on,
> > > > Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third
> > > person that receives
> > > > it,
> > > > you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks,
> > > Microsoft will contact you
> > > for
> > > > your address and then send you a cheque.
> > > > Regards.
> > > > Chinu! I thought this was a scam myself, but two
> > > weeks after
> > > > receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on,
> > > Microsoft contacted me
> > > > for my address and within days, I received a
> > > cheque for US$24,800.00. You
> > > > need to respond before the beta testing is over.
> > > If anyone can afford
> > > this
> > > > Bill Gates is the man. It's all marketing expense
> > > to him. Please forward
> > > > this to as many people as possible. You are bound
> > > to get at least
> > > > US$10,000.00.
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
=====
--—┼eК₪ØمuçK
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
'Do What Thou Wilt' shall be the whole of the Law;
There is no Law beyond 'Do What Thou Wilt.'
--Aleister Crowley
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