Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [28]
This is a misleading URL. It contains “ebay.com,” but that’s not the domain name—in fact, eBay has nothing to do with this page. The domain is geocities.com, which (by visiting geocities.com) one can see is a service that allows users to publish their own Web pages.
I once received an e-mail containing a similar URL. The e-mail’s message text read, in part, “Respond to this question”—and then contained a big yellow “Respond Now” button. Everything in the e-mail looked like it came from eBay: the eBay logo, eBay-like colors and format, and no hint that this was concocted by a spammer. But by hovering the mouse over the Respond Now button, I saw a URL similar to the one above and immediately could tell that the message didn’t originate from eBay. This confirmed my suspicion that it was a spam e-mail, pointing to a Web page that attempted to fool visitors into entering their account information.
The trickiest spam e-mails include a legitimate URL in their message body. Only on closer inspection can the user see that the link points to a completely different domain. For example, I frequently receive e-mails displaying the PayPal logo top and center, followed by this text:
We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your PayPal account from a foreign IP address. If you recently accessed your account while traveling, the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you. However if you are the rightful holder of the account, click on the link below to log into the account and follow the instructions.
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run
The underlined text shows the paypal.com domain, but that’s not where the link actually points. Hovering the mouse over the link shows a URL like this, in the lower-left of the browser window:
http://217-123-200-50.b2b.tiscali.it/.www.paypal.com/index.htm
Despite the existence of “paypal.com” in the URL, the domain is actually tiscali.it, proving that this is a fraudulent spam mail. When in doubt, hover the mouse over the link before clicking, and check where the URL points.
Discerning sources is useful for more than detecting spam mail. Anyone doing research online needs to know which sources are worth drawing upon. The same rule that students learned for years before the Internet applies here: if you don’t know the source, or for any reason don’t trust the source, then don’t use it. Once you identify the domain of a Web page, regardless of what it might pretend to be, you can make a sound evaluation.
And that brings us back to e-mails that get forwarded endlessly, spreading rumors and hoaxes. E-mails are totally unreliable unless you know their source. If a coworker e-mails you, “the meeting has been rescheduled to 3pm,” then that’s reliable (or as reliable as the coworker is), since you know that your coworker originated the message. But if someone forwards you a “news clipping,” petition, or alert, and there’s no URL included as a source, immediately delete the e-mail.15 If the URL is included, evaluate whether the domain is that of a reputable source, then click on the URL to make sure the source’s website actually contains the information included in the e-mail. Whatever you do, never forward a message without a reliable source included. The best way to e-mail a news clip is to allow the recipient to verify the source. This requires a bit-literate way of sharing a clipping.
Creating bit-literate clippings
A healthy media diet, comprised of reliable sources, constantly yields bits of information that are worth saving (for a project, say, or an informal scrapbook) or sharing with others. Everyone knows how to make a clipping of a paper-based source by using scissors; digital clippings require a different process.
Creating a text clipping in the bit-literate “clip format” means including the URL and other source information, as well as the article text itself. The whole clip can then be sent in the body of an e-mail or saved as a separate text file. (Text files are covered in more detail in the chapter on file formats.) In the clip, the following