BELLAMYBUDIMAN

So my reply has not been answered yet, and the question remains:

“APAKAH BAPAK GEORGE BAKER INI SEORANG PEMANGGANG ROTI?”

Signing up to the UPH Alumni mailing list has been a hilariously comedic experience for me. Today, I stumbled upon a story that is supposed to be an alert from NASA because several planets in our solar system is lining up, and it will cost gravitational alterations that would cost humans many lives (I’m serious, the post stated that and I’m not making shit up).

Ready for the NASA alert that started it all? Here it is:

Menurut NASA tepat pukul 5:00 pm waktu Greenwich atau pukul 12:00 tengah malam ini (tgl. 6 Jul 2010) planet Merkurius, Bumi, Venus, Uranus dan Neptunus berada tepat satu garis dgn Matahari. Hal ini terjadi 20.000 ribu tahun sekali. Akibatnya gaya gravitasi menjadi bertambah 6 kali lipat, pd saat itu akan terjadi fenomena luar biasa : 1. Laut akan mengalami pasang naik, kemungkinan laut akan meluap, 2. Berat benda akan meningkat 6 kali lipat (jika kita menimbang benda 1 kg akan jd 6 kg, jika berat badan 50 kg akan jadi 300 kg), 3. Semua benda akan tertarik ke permukaan bumi. Jika kita melempar sesuatu, maka benda tdk akan bergerak ke atas namun kebawah. Burung, kelelawar, dll yg terbang dlm jarak 1 km dr permukaan bumi akan lsg tertarik dan jatuh. NASA sdh memperingatkan semua persh penerbangan agar tdk take off pd jam tsb diatas. Fenomena ini akan berlangsung sekitar 10 menit. Silahkan broadcast berita rahasia ini, alami fenomena 20.000 thn sekali dan cegah musibah jgn sampai terjadi.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Photo from Moses Kurniawan.

Here’s what happened:

1. Give an idiot a smartphone.
2. Bait him/her with a classic old trick.
3. Wait.
4. Immense hoax delivery within minutes.

So, so-called smart and sophisticated smartphone user, if you are practically dumber than the least intelligent mammal on Earth, try not to buy phones that are potentially smarter than yourself. Here’s why:

1. You will give nothing but trouble to others.
2. You will only inflict rage to a massive crowd when this thing happens. Most of them would probably just wanted to kill you or decapitate you on site.
3. For the love of God, why can’t you at least ask first if things like this are true? Or just fucking Google it, dammit.
4. You are seriously dumber than a monkey. And this reason will just confirm itself when you got mad reading this because you don’t understand the reason why I think you’re seriously dumber than a monkey.

Now, give everyone a favor, sell your BlackBerry and trade it with this:

At least you will get ONLY yourself into trouble. Capiche?

Hoaxes have been around for probably centuries in scale of internet time. We’ve seen the never-ending Send-This-to-XX-People chain mail, the infamous Nigerian scam letter, and the recent “Uskup Agung” letter, although I’ve never seen it myself. But recently, Facebook users have been forwarding this:

PERHATIAN!! FACEBOOK BARU -BARU INI TELAH MENJADI SANGAT OVERPOPULATED. TIDAK SEDIKIT ANGGOTA YANG MENGELUH BAHWA FACEBOOK MENJADI SANGAT LAMBAT. CATATAN MENUNJUKAN BAHWA ALASAN YANG ADA DIKARENAKAN BANYAK NON-AKTIF ANGGOTA FACEBOOK. KAMI AKAN MENGIRIMKAN PESAN KESEKITAR UNTUK MELIHAT APAKAH ANGGOTA AKTIF ATAU TIDAK. JIKA ANDA PENGGUNA FACEBOOK YANG AKTIF, SILAKAN MENGIRIMKAN PESAN INI KE 15 PENGGUNA FACEBOOK LAIN

Well, if you’re one of those people who actually believed in this shit, I’m just going to say DON’T YOU KNOW THAT IT IS A FUCKING HOAX? Seriously, since the dawn of the internet I’ve seen this in Friendster, I’ve seen this in Yahoo! Messenger, and hell, I’ve seen this on MSN, which is probably three of the most famous social networks or messengers joined by internet newbies. Don’t you even realize the pattern by now that NONE OF THOSE NETWORKS ACTUALLY CLOSED or THAT YOUR ACCOUNT (AND IN FACT EVERYONE’S ACCOUNT) IS NOT EVEN CLOSED OR SHUT DOWN AS WELL?!?! The reason why hoaxes like this are so popular is because people doesn’t even want to spend a tiny bit of their brain power to analyze that this is entirely a hoax.

Seriously, people, you should stop forwarding scam letters, chain mails, or whatever the fuck it is. It’s STUPID. SERIOUSLY STUPID.

And I’m gonna do you a favor in case you’re just lazy enough to use a search engine and find out if hoaxes are ACTUALLY hoaxes. Knock yourselves out!

Sometime ago, I got a forwarded mail along with some posts on certain mailing lists, stated that by forwarding to 20 people or more, we might get our own iPhone 3G or 120GB iPod Classic. Here’s what the mail said:

Pelanggan yang terhormat,
Kami beritahukan kepada seluruh pelanggan bahwa perusahaan kami, Apple Corporation yang berkantor pusat di Cupertino, California US membuka kantor pemasaran di Jakarta, Indonesia
Produk yang kami pasarkan adalah Hand Phone tipe iPhone3G yang dilengkapi dengan teknologi GPS, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, video-audio, camera-photo, 16GB flash drive capacity, dll.

Details produk kami silakan kunjungi: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
Untuk peluncuran perdana di Indonesia, kami akan memberikan secara gratis produk terbaru HP iPhone3G yang dilengkapi features seperti diatas.

Dengan memberikan iPhone3G ini, kami berharap akan mendapatkan umpan balik yang berharga dari para pelanggan dan mendapatkan efek promosi berantai yang besar.
Yang harus anda lakukan adalah:

- Fowardkan pesan ini kepada 20 orang teman. Setelah 2 minggu waktu pengiriman, anda akan menerima sebuah iPhone3G. Sebelumnya kami akan mengontak anda untuk alamat detail pengiriman, atau
- Forwardkan pesan ini kepada 40 orang, anda akan menerima 2 produk: 1 bh iPhone3G + 1 bh iPod classic berkapasitas 120GB. Detail produk iPod classic kunjungi: http://www.apple.com/ipodclassic/
Harap dikirimkan sebuah copy / Cc email kepada:jkt.applecorp@asia.com agar kami mengetahui bahwa anda telah memforward pesan ini.

Hormat kami,
Julia Christvanie
Regional Sales Manager
Apple Corporation – Jakarta Office
Sudirman Square Office Tower, Tower B Lt. 23
JI. Jend Sudirman Kav. 45-46 Jakarta Selatan 12930
Email: jkt.applecorp@asia.com

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? Even for us who already owned ourselves a first-generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G is always interesting. But here’s my take. This mail or chain letter or spam or whatever you want to call it, is an idiotic hoax. Why? Here’s why:

• Apple’s official name is Apple Inc. and not Apple Corporation. For your information, the closest we can get to Apple Corporation is Apple Corps Ltd., which is a Beatles-founded multimedia company founded in January 1968.
• Apple never did refer its iPhone with the term “Hand Phone”. No, people, “Hand Phone” is just a term we often use in our community, the official jargon for that device is a cellphone, or a mobile phone. As far as I know, the “Hand Phone” term was probably created by someone in ITC Roxymas who went all the way from selling Ericsson cellphones in the past to dirt cheap Chinese cellphones that breaks apart after 3 months.
• Apple specifically branded their latest iPhone iteration as “iPhone 3G” and not “iPhone3G”, notice that it’s supposed to have a space between “iPhone” and “3G”. I believe Apple is quite a neat-freak in terms like this.
• Apple is a company with billions of cash in hand, do you think they will risk their brand consistency by using an asia.com email address? For the record, Asia.com, is owned by World Media Group. I don’t see any relations to Apple here, and I don’t even know what they’re up to with this. And who the fuck is Julia Christvanie anyway?
• And just like Yona said, I don’t think Apple would use a cheap way to give out iPhone-related promotions like this. They sold more than 10 million units, do you think they even need crappy promotions like this?

So, please, and I mean PLEASE, stop filling out other people’s mailboxes with useless junk like this hoax. I thought we’re all smarter than that? The way I see it, this is just one lame person’s attempt to collect your personal information. So would you care to give that out to a total stranger? Well, I don’t.

But if you still want to forward that mail to 40 or more people, be my guest, knock yourself dead.