Thursday, February 14, 2008

Snopes is Your Friend.

I mentioned Snopes earlier this week, and figured it needed some explanation.

Snopes has been around for at least ten years, and is a repository of urban legends run by Barbara and David Mikkelson. Every day (sometimes more often), the investigate reports of rumors and stories and try to determine their truthfulness. This isn't just an Internet search; they try to track down the people involved and interview them about the legend. The result is a definitive answer as to the truth of legends like "David Rice Atchinson was president of the US for one day"(he wasn't) or "Walt Disney's body was put into cryogenic storage" (of course not).

How does this fit in with computers? Well, there are many computing urban legends, about Computer Viruses, the Internet, and messages forwarded to your inbox. It's worthwhile checking out Snopes whenever you get any warning about computing issues that doesn't come from I&TS or directly from some other computer experts.