By Gary Kirchherr
The Internet experience is more than checking stock quotes, sending e-mail to Mom and answering AOL users' "age/sex checks." It's also a great medium for telling tall tales - and seeing how many people out there will lap it up. So-called urban legends usually are passed along via e-mail, and for reasons I can't quite fathom, often are blindly accepted as fact.
I got a two-part refresher course in urban legends within the past month when two friends whom I wouldn't consider sucker-bait e-mailed me separate urban legends. The first was an oldie but goodie, and the second was a newer one, purportedly based on historical events, that would be a great anecdote if it weren't pure fiction.
The first was one most Net veterans have heard by now - the dreaded Nieman-Marcus cookie recipe story, formerly the Mrs. Fields cookie-recipe story. In a nutshell, the alleged originator of this e-mail-recycled tale was so impressed with the chocolate-chip cookie she had at a Nieman-Marcus cafe, she offered to buy the recipe. The waitress told her it was "two-fifty," and the patron agreed, thinking the waitress meant $2.50. When the patron got her credit-card statement and found out it was $250, she raised a stink but couldn't get a refund. So the patron's revenge was to start a chain letter with this $250 recipe, now free to everyone "lucky" enough to get a copy.
A cute tale. But it was fiction when the cookie-seller was Mrs. Fields, and it's fiction now. The Mining Co.'s Urban Legends Web site notes that the cookie recipe is itself real, at least in the sense that it does make cookies. Ironically, according to the site, Nieman-Marcus didn't even have a chocolate-chip cookie - until it created one in response to the legend!
The second urban legend actually inspired me to use Alta Vista to search the Web for corroboration one way or the other. I admit being a little disappointed to discover it was another fabrication.
This story has it that Neil Armstrong said more than "One small step," etc., when he was walking around the moon. Before he re-entered the lander, he said, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky." No one had any idea what this meant until recently, when Armstrong himself explained it. Seems that Gorsky was the name of neighbors in his youth, and that once when retrieving a baseball in their yard he'd heard a loudly indignant Mrs. Gorsky objecting to her husband's request to perform a certain, er, favor. Mrs. Gorsky supposedly said she'd oblige her husband with the favor "when the kid next door walks on the moon!"
Hilarious story. Totally false, though. Another Web site on urban legends, the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's, says Armstrong himself first heard it in 1995 as a Buddy Hackett joke.
Finding a reputable source to debunk the story proved tough because the Alta Vista search turned up almost entirely unchallenged copies of this tale, preceded or followed with the insistence that "This is a true story!" I still haven't figured out why reading those five words instantly brainwashes so many into believing it. Perhaps because they want to? Hey, reality check, everyone! Just because a Web-recycled story is humorous doesn't make it true!
Speaking of rumors, one circulating late last month was that America Online was on the verge of buying out Mirabilis, the software company behind the wildly popular ICQ instant-messaging software. Several portal companies have put forth their own versions of software that lets one detect when a friend is on the Net and then send messages back and forth, but ICQ and AOL's own Instant Messenger were far and away the giants in this relatively new field.
Hearing that AOL would buy out Mirabilis was unsettling for several reasons. For one thing, one company's absorbing its only real competition does the end user no favors in the long run. Then there's the fact that Instant Messenger, like much of the rest of the AOL universe, has omnipresent ads; ICQ has none. And of course there's the less-than-stellar reputation of AOL itself, a favorite subject of this columnist. As an ICQ user, I didn't relish the prospect of being reassimilated into AOL's sphere of poor customer service, advertisements, phishers and lousy software.
Also unnerving were comments from Jupiter Communications' Patrick Keane, who told C|Net in May that the then-still-rumored deal "could lead to more advertising revenue and a stronger marketing base." In other words, I and the rest of the ICQ'ers would join AOL'ers as sheep ready for fleecing. Particularly galling was this quote from the article: "'It's an extra 11 million people to send ads to,' he said. 'There's a lot of value to owning those people.'" Excuse me? I don't want ads, and I sure as hell don't want to be "owned" by AOL!
Having said that, I haven't had a reason to panic - yet. ICQ still doesn't sport ads. And despite wild rumors to the contrary circulating among ICQ users, AOL is not going to start charging for ICQ. (Although I would have liked to see AOL trying to get credit-card numbers from 11 million ICQ'ers.) In fact, Mirabilis said in a post-sale letter to ICQ users that nothing will change. "Because AOL has asked us to continue to run the service exactly as before, we don't intend to make any changes in our policies," the letter said. "We will continue to offer the software and the service exactly under the same terms and conditions as before (time limited free beta)."
The last four words are crucial too. Does this mean ICQ is about to come out of "beta," and what will happen then? For now, though, I'll keep ICQ on my hard drive.
Micro$oft continued to get play in the major media, mostly for its U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in its favor. As ZDNet AnchorDesk Editorial Director pointed out in his June 23 column, Micro$oft is free to resume bundling Micro$oft Internet Explorer with Windows 95 on computers, regardless of whether the computer makers want the Web browser. Berst says, in not so many words, that the ruling is a warning to the Department of Justice that it has to do a better job of proving that Micro$oft is using its monopoly to ram another product down computer makers' and customers' throats, and not simply "integrating" Web-browser functions into Windows 95. Foes of monopoly power can only hope this ruling will prove to be a blessing in disguise.
Meanwhile, some less-publicized developments are giving Micro$oft headaches. The Software Publishers Association, best noted for fighting software piracy, urged the Justice Department to expand its suit against Micro$oft to include charges of monopolization in the market for high-powered servers. ZDNN has the details in a June 19 article. Also worth checking out is a June 26 article, in which U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate's Judiciary, accused Micro$oft of being less than forthright in committee hearings about exclusivity contracts with ISPs. He further charged that Micro$oft was lobbying to cut funding for the Justice Department's antitrust division - a shocking revelation, if it indeed it proves true (Micro$oft denies it). Hatch wants more hearings. A flaky for a Micro$oft-friendly senator responded with this gem: "Any and all government intervention, investigations or committee hearings are just other attempts to stifle the creativity of this company." Riiiiight. I need to read stuff like that once in a while to remind me why I didn't sell out my brains and/or conscience and get into public relations. Oh, and did you hear about the bankrupt ISP that's suing Micro$oft for ripping off the "Internet Explorer" name? Check it out.
And of course, Windows 98 came out, and what a contrast it was to the megahype and accolades, deserved or not, that surrounded the release of Windows 95. In fact, the software's getting decidedly tepid reviews, including one I saw from a columnist who's otherwise a slavish Micro$oft bootlicker. Most complaints say the $90 gets minor upgrades; Berst points out in his June 25 column that the steep price for such a minor upgrade doesn't exactly help the argument by Micro$oft and others that the company doesn't have monopolistic pricing. And that's not just his view; The Wall Street Journal and Business Week say the same thing. And then there are all the Windows 98 bugs and incompatibilities, as outlined in a ZDNN June 25 article. But that didn't stop half a million Windows loyalists from rushing out and buying it. Well, America Online already has proved that no one went broke underestimating the gullibility of American computer users.
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