Quote:
Originally Posted by iggypop
-Fudging Reality - Hoaxes and Digital Un-truths
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I don't really have any stories about viruses, but as far as hoaxes and such... I was working for a large multinational corporation, and one morning, this email about 'free trips to disneyland, send to everyone you know' starts making the rounds. This was back in the mid 90's, when everyone had email but there wasn't a high degree of computer literacy. But people start sending this to everyone in their departments, and I personally received it from about 30 different people that morning. Of course, there were some people who realized that this was a hoax, and starting emailing everyone in their department to tell them not to forward the message. I received about another 10 emails to that effect. By mid-afternoon, the entire company-wide email system had been overloaded and ground to a halt. A few years later I was talking to an IT guy about this, and he said that the volume of emails sent per-capita that day was far beyond any other single day the company has experienced. Just completely overwhelmed their system. And it had nothing to do with a virus, just a lot of gullible people.