So today I heard about these poor beagles that a lab in San Jose is getting rid of, can you find homes for them, etc. Sounded plausible till Becka finally showed me the E-mail. Oh no it's one of those damn chain letters.

The website Break the Chain will tell you about all these things in great detail, but it's pretty simple:

Chain E-mails about a real issue, unless they're originated by an idiot,
- will have some kind of source info & date, so you know it's not something that's been making the rounds for 10 years;
- will give you some way to check the story or find out more, other than sending an E-mail to some person you've never heard of.

Whoever put out this beagle story is either (a) a well-meaning idiot (but if it's a real story, I'm sure you'll be hearing about it from some non-idiot too), or (b) harvesting addresses for spam, or (c) pranking you, or (d) pranking the poor schmuck they're telling you to write to.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't keep sending these things around, or other things that look exactly like them with different stories. Read that website. There's a lot of bullshit out there, and no it's not "worth it just in case".

(dammit now we can't have a beagle. waa.)

Edited to add: Several people have sent links to a page that they think supports the beagle story. It doesn't; it's just another copy of the same forwarded E-mail saying it "hasn't been verified", plus another person's address with no clue as to how they're involved. And yes, there is a drug research facility being closed in Mountain View - it's all over the business news, it's a natural detail for someone to add to a hoax; most of these chain letters include something like that. Other times, it's something someone misheard, or something that happened somewhere else years ago.

So why does this kind of thing piss me off more than some other things? Because I don't like it when people take advantage of other people's good intentions for a laugh; and because it'd be good if we didn't get into habits that make it so easy to manipulate large groups of people. As long as everyone thinks "I'd better forward this just in case it might be true, think of the puppies, besides it's so easy to forward it"... well now we have a great tool for anyone who might want to make your life difficult, say, by getting 10,000 people to make your phone or E-mail unusable, with pretty much no effort at all.

It's not about being cynical, it's just using the same standards on the Internet that you'd use if someone dropped an anonymous flyer through your mail slot.