50 people will be given unprotected Laptops, new email addressees and 250 UK sterling on a credit card to claim the goodies on offer. During week one they will sign up for everything offered free, week two will be for downloading free music and week three will be for the get rich schemes on offer. The idea is called “Super Spam me” and celebrates the sending of the first Spam email 30 years ago by a Californian electronics company.

This sounds a great way of showing what accepting Spam will do to you or your computer although I wonder what will happen if one of the so called scams is actually genuine, if you can earn millions in a few week doing nothing or if you can get free laptops for just clicking here. Its highly unlikely but you never know. Wether they try the numerous viagra offering websites and lose 10 stone in a month sites isn’t made clear.

Personally, I’d think twice before opening Microsoft-Word attachments let alone the ones that aren’t even in English half the time. I tend to leave the dodgy ones in junk or just delete them, I could be throwing away thousands of course but its probably the safest bet. With so many crooks trying to nick your personal details and so many viruses around the experiment will almost certainly tell us what most of us knew all ready, don’t accept or even open anything you aren’t sure of and keep all online protection up to date and running. This is of course why McAfee are doing this as well as it being a good idea to show what is out there at the careless click of a mouse. I will post what happens if it gets published but if I find that one of the make a million scams is for real I may be on a beech somewhere when I send it in.

Photo from Anonymous

Computer Generated GirlWell, even the girl in this picture is not real!

To almost quote the great philosopher Forrest gump, “Mama always said on line dating was like a box a chocolates, never know what you’re gonna get.” This can be true even if you have a persons picture in front of you and a detailed profile, as believe it or not people tell lies. Hard to believe I know but it happens. Pictures are either years out of date or of someone else, profiles are faked or even stolen and you may get a massive surprise if you meet up.

In the modern world of do-it-now-if-not-sooner ‘online-dating’ has taken off world wide, profiles are available from every corner of the world. The only problem is of course you have no idea to the truth until at least a first meeting if not later. If the person has lied about height, weight or looks you may find the truth first time, if they have lied on their profile it may take longer. This is something very serious with cases of adults trying to get accesses to children by pretending to be kids in chat groups because until they meet the lies will stick. Although chat room are different from dating groups where it should be adults-looking-for-adults the risk could be lurking anywhere.

The wall street journal stated in a post-valentine February article that around 125 million Americans use online-dating and chat sites. It also quotes writer, Hugh Gallagher, who has seen over 50 profiles on Match.com featuring copied parts of his college entry exam. Other people are quoted concerning stolen sections of Facebook profiles and copy and paste from other site. There were examples on one site the paper accessed where the same opening line was used word-for-word 90 times, there were cases of men stealing women’s profiles and simply making it male based.

Another place where online-dating carries risks is the adult-end, where supposedly bored-wives advertise to ‘having affairs’, men advertise for the same and many other variations. On that point I would say if you took a phone number off a phone box wall for an advertised woman what would be the chance you would meet that woman.

In the UK and probably many other countries there is something called estate-agent-speak. They are well known in some cases for bending the descriptions in order to sell their product to you. If they say 5 minutes walk to the shops pack some running shoes, if they say in need of some modernization then bring a builder, therefore if your online-date says cuddly and appears and weighs 35 stone have they lied or just bent the truth. Obviously there is lying and there is bending the truth. Like the estate agents they are people trying to sell something, in this case themselves.

There are sites (e.g. CopyScape) you can feed work into to see if its copy-and-pasted or if its original, I don’t know though if there is one you can use for online-dating. If you are unsure I presume you could cut apiece out and see what the site says. You could also make sure you look at a few people to see what other people are saying.

Online-dating is basically a step up from newspaper and magazine ads that have been used for years, equally these were just as open to abuse as online ads.

Taken from broo waha website (yes this is a cut and paste);

I immediately got responses to my profile and a few stood out right away. One woman sounded really nice and her picture was incredible. A really hot looking 30-something blonde with a killer body in a little bikini, she immediately caught my eye. Two weeks later, after a series of e-mails back and forth, we met at a restaurant on Union Street in San Francisco. When I got there, I had problems finding the place. She was blocking it, along with the sun. The last bikini this gal wore had to have been the size of the Bikini Islands. I am so grateful that the place where we met was a buffet; otherwise I would have had to take out a small business loan to cover the bill.

This is one example of the things that could happen but won’t be every time. People who got to this places are in the most case brave people opening themselves up to people who tell lies, in most cases though theses places could lead to love but folks, be careful out there.

Inspired by an article from WSJ - The Cut-and-Paste Personality via TechDirt.