Chainletter Information Version 3.2, 1st June 2006 copied from original at . please check http://bksys.at/bernhard/chainletter for updates if you receive a copy more than 3 months old. Summary: Do not forward chainletters. Good ways to spread important information include making up a web page and spread its URL via TV, radio, newspaper, webnews, appropriate newsgroups and mailinglists, or, in rare circumstances via a chain letter (see below). 1) What's the problem with chain letter? ======================================== A CL is a letter that is forwarded by their recipients to a number of people either by direct request or because it appears so important or interesting. This way the letter might circulate until everybody has forwarded his first copy to e.g. an avarage of 10 people. Let's assume the involved network has 100.000.000 people and 50 CLs are started per day then a total of 10*50*100.000.000=50.000.000.000 CLs would be sent per day. Everybody would receive 50.000.000.000/100.000.000=500 CLs per day average. Provided the mail system could take this load (which it can't), imagine picking your personal mails from 500 or even 3500 if you check your mail only once a week. Totally impossible. The only solution is not to send CLs. Well, fortunately most people don't forward CLs but I still get enough so I sit here and write this text to show the newbies the problems and what can be done about it. Emails are easy and cheap to send, reasons why people send and forward CLs. CLs via snail mail (postcards, paper, envelope, stamp) require more work and money and AFAIK are forbidden in some areas. Emails can be forged or sent anonymously, so initiators of chain letters can hardly be made responsible for their deed. So with the many millions of people every now and then someone starts a CL and we forward them. This makes them similar if not equal to computer viruses. As it is, most of these people are jokers that spread made up stories just for the fun of it. Some even harm other individuals by putting in their email address or telephone number and ask to send emails there. I was fooled myself with a CL I received. The appearent initiator was urgently looking for people with a certain blood group for her leukemia death sick friend. I wanted to check the integrity of this letter and called and mailed the phone number and email address of some firm given in the footer - with no response. The next problem appeared in this example, too. There was no date given for the initial letter. Only that the sick person had only a few weeks left. CLs are OUT OF CONTROL! Once set free you can not stop them or change their contents. They may circle for years, completely out of date. Even if the story was not a hoax then the person/firm may have to change his email and phone number due to his own fault - otherwise due to a malicious attack. CL hoaxes are often quite well made up stories. The better they are made up, the more and longer they spread. Virus warning CLs are firstly mostly hoaxes and secondly useless. http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/_new.shtml lists 50 new viruses in the last few months. I just checked 4 of them and they spread over email - typical candidates for warning mails. But you don't want to receive 10 virus warnings (each warning from 10 different people) every day. Only warn people in immediate infection risk, e.g. if you got infected and the virus sent itself to everybody in your address book. There are of course not only hoaxes. I received a CL because brasilian congress wanted to legislate that 50% (?) of their rainforest would be cut down. It was true, and something had to be done about it. But that was done 6 months ago, successfully. Still a small radio station announced that subject because they also had received the letter. Fortunately I called them and they corrected their announcement, frightening their listeners for only some minute instead of making them send protest letters to the brasilian congress. Don't forward such CLs, especially if they do not contain a date or a deadline. And then there are the CLs that spread love and wisdom, riddles and jokes. Well, there are people out there who don't like CLs (guess what, I am one of them). Well, I'm a soziopath, maybe I should read some of these letters and follow their advice. But I am not superstitious and don't believe in gaining some luck by forwarding CLs. Some nice poems might do me good, but unfortunately I am not so much into poem reading so I barely read and then delete them. Please don't send me such CLs, either. 2) So what can be done about CLs? ================================= Do not forward or send CLs. Do not use phone numbers or email addresses found in CLs. This may be just what a malicious CL initiator intended. Instead: Try to verify the information using e.g. search engines like google.com or hoax sites (search google for "hoax"). Send the information to mass media such as TV, radio, newspapers, webnews (indymedia.org lets everybody post news that the mainstream media won't cover), appropriate usenet newsgroups and mailing lists. To keep information availabel for longer you need a responsible, constantly up to date source of information that is suitable for lots of people to poll it and refer to that source. So, no email address. No phone number. They may become overloaded or unresponsive. People might refrain from using them because your reference might be a malicious hoax. The best solution that comes to my mind is a WEB PAGE, maintained be a responsible, informed person. That may even be YOU. If there is an issue important enough to inform millions of people, then it is never too much work to put up and maintain a web page. Most likely someone has already done it. Find it. Or if noone has done it yet, find someone who does it or do it yourself (I will give you some hint on how to do it later). Spread the URL (unified resouce locator, e.g. http://rawa.org) of the web page actively. Announce it on webnews and appropriate newsgroups and mailinglists. If the subject is very important and urgent don't only tell people with access to the internet. Inform radio/TV stations and newspapers. That's their business. They'll be glad for it. Don't hesitate. If none of these ways seem good enough for you and you feel you must make a CL, please make a good one, that avoids the typical CL problems: Make a web page and spread it's URL in a CL with a short comment. 3000 byte CLs will clog the internet less than 15 or 30 KB CLs. The contents that you want to spread will be on the web page and you can keep it up to date, stop the activity or even tell people to spread an updated version of the CL. But keep in mind that even if a CL is the best solution it is still a bad solution - see the beginning of the text. If people would generally accept even such CLs the mail system and ourselves would be overloaded by them because there are too many important things going on in this big world. So please, if ever possible, use a different approach than a CL. It is of course ok to share some information with others via email. But the border to CLs is soft. Be conscious about what you send to who. Don't send something to everybody in your addressbook - you most likely will annoy some and trigger some to follow your example. Mails that have been forwarded several times are CLs. If someone sends you a (or many) CLs, feel free to send him this text. But realize, this makes it a CL itself. So please get an update if your version is more than 3 months old (put the current date at the top, realize: a deadline in a CL) from: http://rainbow.bksys.at (the URL to the place for updates) Ok, so I promised you some hints on how to make up a web page. Well, there are tons of ways, impossible to go much into details. A web page is a file on a computer that is connected to the internet, that returns this file to your webbrowser, when you type its URL and hit enter. So you got to write a text and place it on a webserver. If you don't have a webserver yourself, use someone elses. Most ISPs (internet service providers) give you some webspace if you sign up for internet access through them. There are also tons of web hosting services that are willing to serve your webpage. Some charge money and a huge lot of them are for free. Most of the free services add commercial ads to your webpage, to pay for their expenses and for profit. You might query google (an excellent searchengine, located at http://www.google.com) for 'free web space'. A better approach might be to check through some lists of free webhosting services. A list of such lists can be found in the google webdirectory at: http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Hosting/Free/Directories/ You can write the web page file in plain ASCII text (e.g. using notepad on a Windows machine). If you want more features like links, tables, pictures, etc. learn a little HTML (hypertext markup language). google's webdirectory points you to a number of online HTML tutorials. You can also look at the page source of webpages (Menu item View/Page Source in Netscape). Ok, that's it, I hope you enjoyed the show. If you have any comments send me an email at darsie@gmx.at. Love, Bernhard PS: I am also looking for work as linux system administrator, preferably at an ISP in Vienna/Austria/Europe or remotely over the internet. A profile of my skills can be found at the above mentioned website. Copyright: GPL