AOL Four Software Hoax Warning

     Since last December, I had been one of the many people assigned to
     design AOL 4.0 for Windows  (AOL 4.0 beta, codenamed Casablanca).
     In the beginning, I was very proud of this task, until I found out
     the true cost of it.  Things were going fine until about
     mid-February, when me and 2 of my colleagues
 Note, the extremely bad grammar above. ("I had been", "when me and 2..."). This type of bad grammar is consistent throughout the hoax. This combined with the choice of vocabulary indicates that the writer is most likely a someone who has not successfully completed a basic education.

     Unlike all previous versions of America Online, version 4.0 puts
     something in your hard drive called a 'cookie'.  (AOL members click
     (a href="aol://4344:1047.g334.8411481.532897009")here(/a) for a
     definition).  However, the cookie we found on Version 4.0 was far
     more treacherous than the simple internet cookie.  How would you
     like somebody looking at your entire hard drive, snooping through
     any (yes, any) piece of information on your hard drive.
 This betrays the writer's total lack of understanding of how this type of software works.  Since the AOL software runs your PC, there would be no reason for it to use a "cookie" ; since it has full control of your PC, it can simply do whatever it pleases.  Cookies cannot accomplish what the writer implies above.     with the new version, anytime you are signed on to AOL, any top aol
     executive, any aol worker, who has been sworn to secrecy regarding this
     feature, can go into your hard drive and retrieve any piece of
     information that they so desire.  Billing, download records, e-mail,
     directories, personal documents, programs, financial information,
     scanned images, etc ... Better start keeping all those pictures on a
     floppy disk!
 So AOL is planning to snoop around everyone's PC, eh?  And it's pictures (pornographic?) that they want?   We heard a similar story (also untrue) regarding the Prodigy online service. When people examined the cache files allocated by the Prodigy software, they sometimes found contents of files from their disk.  They were concerned that Prodigy was snooping around their PCs.  What actually was happening was that Prodigy was simply allocating a large piece of unused disk space and wasn't immediately clearing its contents; as a result, this file often contained the contents of deleted files from the user's PC)     This is a totally disgusting violation of our rights, and your right to
     know as well.  Since this is undoubtably 'Top Secret' information that I
     am revealing, my life at AOL is pretty much over.
 Since the author says he was fired prior to this, I think his (supposed) "life at AOL" was already over!

     Please do the following, to help us expose
     AOL for who they really are, and to help us and yourself receive
     personal gratification for taking a stand for our freedom:

     1.  Forward this letter to as many people as you can (not just friends
     and family, as many as you can!)
 This "tell everyone you know" exhortation should be a classic tip-off that you are reading a hoax.