I spy with my little eye, another hoax

For those of you who know me, there are certain things about my nature that you either love or hate. While I try to believe in all the wonderful things in the world, it doesn't take much for me to see something "hinky" where others wouldn't. Once that happens, I get to digging.

Which brings me to today. A close friend of mine said "hey, take a look at this site http://www.felonspy.com/search.html". And so, I did.

I proceeded to type in my street name, city, and state, then, I hit the search button.

Hmm, wow, 5 felons on my street out of 7 houses? Not to mention the 2 people that live in the invisible house behind the cemetery, which has no houses anywhere near it.

Of course, I wouldn't be blogging about this if that was all there was to it.

So, I took a few steps to check this out. I took note of the names that appeared in this search, and did a google search for their [name], [city] just to see if anything turned up. I mean, one would think that at least 1 or 2 of these folks would have committed the felony in the town in which they live, and it would be in the paper or something. No joy.

Then, the icing on the cake.

Using the Firefox add-on Firebug, I was able to see that, clicking the search button makes a call to a page called get_random_text.php. Hmmm, random text! That's assuring. I was also able to see that, the information regarding location was only sent to a javascript which spoke to google to get the map. The only item passed to the felony site itself is a randomly generated number. Try it, hit the search button several times and you will see the number of pins change each time.

Of course, they have a disclaimer about how, the first time you search, the information you get is correct, but, all the other times it is random, to prevent hackers. Um, yeah, want to sell me a piece of land on the moon too?

Ok, so, my name didn't appear on the list and, no, I'm not a felon. My problem has nothing to do with sites that actually might give you real data meant to protect you in some way. My problem is a little deeper than that.

There are far too many people who are still waiting on that check from Bill Gates for forwarding that email to 10 people, or who believe that somehow, they forwarded the hand of God to people, and they are blessed in return, among countless other scammy items. These are the types of people who would look at sites like this, believing that all of the dangerous people live right next door to them. They might use it as a tool when they are researching real estate, or even vacation spots. Their decisions could be effected by a search like this, when in reality, the information presented is nothing more than random data, spat out by a some script based on a random number spat out by another.

Anyway, another hoax out there, great.
Til next time folks.