Somewhere, somehow, on the Internet today, #RIPSouljaBoy began trending. People were obviously concerned for the rapper’s well being. Well, some people were concerned. Some users took this opportunity to make fun of the thought to be dead rapper. I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief though when the news came that the famous rapper was nowhere near dead. In fact, he is still alive and kicking.

The Twitter reactions to this latest hoax were priceless. When the news came out that he was not dead, the hashtag took off as a means to poke fun at the rapper.

So is this one. The hoax sounds something like this:

“ANYONE WHO DISAGREE’S WITH ANY KIND OF RAPE COPY ‘N’ PASTE THIS
MESSAGE + GET YOUR FRIEND’S TO DO THE SAME
ATTENTION ALL GIRLS AND LADIES: if you walk from home, school, office or anywhere and you are alone and you come across a little boy crying holding a piece of paper with an address on it, DO NOT TAKE HIM THERE! Take him straight to the police station for this is the new ‘gang’ way of rape. The incident is getting worse. Warn your families and friends. Repost this so this message can get across…”

Some versions of this start with lines like “Sheriff’s Department Warning!” or “Published by CNN and FOX News“.

However, there is no evidence anywhere that this is actually happening. It has been refuted by Snopes and other sites as far back as 2005.

These things get a life of their own. Maybe they are well-meaning messages put out by someone who misheard a conversation around the water cooler that was really about last night’s episode of “Criminal Minds”. Who knows? They lie dormant for a long time and then resurface.

When I was a kid, teachers used to have copies of warnings about cartoon-character blotter acid taped to their filing cabinets. Never happened.

From time to time – usually in churches – I still see Xeroxed copies of warnings about the atheist “conversion” efforts of Madalyn Murray O’Hair. O’Hair was murdered in 1995.

This particular rumor got started by a self proclaimed “Rihanna look-a-like” with the handle, “@Lorraine_Star”. She reportedly set it up to have it come across as, “RT @CNN: American recording artist Cher dies at 65 years old. Found dead in Malibu home.” Which led people to believe it was a Tweet from an official CNN account.

The list of stars who have been killed off in hoax’s in 2011 includes Jackie Chan, Justin Bieber, Will Smith, and Jim Carrey.

Best answer for “Is Cher dead” on Yahoo answers in UK and Ireland:

“The amount of plastic surgery that she has had actually prevents her from dying. I think that she is probably about 200 years old, her insides are rotted, but her outside still looks picture perfect.”

So don’t get upset if you find out that you yourself have died on Twitter, check another source, it may not even be true.

Last week, eyebrows were raised at the return of infamous glam rocker Gary Glitter. He used the twitter handle #OfficialGlitter to announce a comeback tour and autobiography. It turned out to be a hoax, but not just any hoax. It was a social experiment designed to study the reaction to a known sex offender joining Twitter.

In a tumblr that has since been cleared of all its content, the person claiming responsibility for the account detailed the reasons behind the fake account. The intrepid Glitter impersonator wanted to “highlight the dangers and safety of children using the social networking sites and to discover and question public morality,” according to the Mirror who got to the tumblr before it went down.

The impersonator detailed the responses they received while running the Twitter account and said that they were “deeply disturbed” by the amount of “positive, encouraging and supportive comments” directed to, in his words, a “convicted child rapist.”

The impersonator was hoping that the experiment would highlight the dangers facing children on social networking sites like Twitter. They point out the fact that Twitter has no age requirement and parents are letting their children join Facebook even when the site’s rules state that no one under 13 can join.

They also appealed to the UK government to limit Internet access for registered sex offenders.

“If sex offenders are so limited in the ‘real world’, why are there no laws prohibiting what they can and can’t do on in the ‘digital’ world. Something must be done,” the impersonator wrote.

The @OfficialGlitter account still seems to be active with the last post coming four hours ago. The account has deleted all mentions of the experiment and is back to business as usual. Let’s just chalk this up as another case of the Internet and those on it do weird things.

In my write-up, I walked through this character string, eliminated the extraneous characters, and posited a theory about what it might be.

In short, this has nothing to do with your phone. The numbers reference individual Facebook accounts and this string returns the name of the person associated with that account. And, they go far beyond 3 digits.

For example, my Facebook account number is: 722324163. Let’s plug that number into the character string as a status and see what happens: @[722324163:0]

Hit “Post”. And we get this:

Simple enough. You get a persons name. And since it is my own account, I get it as a clickable link. If it is not your own, or someone you are Facebook friends with. You get a name, but not linked.

You can have fun playing with other numbers before the colon. One of the more fun names we found was with the single-digit number “4″. Entered as: @[4:0]

Hit “Post”. And we get this:

The lower numbers have consistently returned names of people who attended Harvard in 2004, the earliest Facebook accounts.

Apparently, this thing is still rolling. Mashable reported on it this afternoon.

Stick with me, this gets better.

The message reads like this:

Type the last three digits of your number in the comment box below as follows:

@*[123:0]

Then, REMOVE THE STAR and then press enter. You will see your phone’s “name”.

And, whaddaya know, it works. Well, it spits out a name. Mine, for instance was “Daniel Koh”. Let’s think this through a minute.

For starters, the asterisk thing is a complete bunk complication, making the whole thing seem somewhat magical. Type it in, then take it out? Pish. Leave that out entirely.

Also, in the three-digit character string that becomes your phone number’s last three digits, there are only 1000 number possibilities (000-999). So, no way this is about phone numbers.

And, that whole character string shows nothing at all on Google search. Until later today, that is.

So, what is this?

The best theory is this: The three digits in the character string are Facebook account numbers, likely from early account holders (the first 1000) at Harvard, where Facebook launched. The character string in question returns the name associated with that account number.

Let’s check out the name I got: “Daniel Koh”. There is a Daniel Koh on FB. He did attend Harvard. And, thanks to the new Timeline, I can easily see that he joined FB on February 8, 2004 – the month Facebook launched.

And, looking at his profile picture URL tells me his account number (as opposed to his account nickname in the URL). And, indeed, it ends in my phone number’s last three digits.

Bingo. Mystery solved.

So, that character string is not any magical SIM card or phone identifier. Your phone does not have a name.

But, I’ve got a bad feeling that 1000 former Harvard students are about to get popular.

Addition: Reader David Miller points out this string: @[4:0] which nets “Mark Zuckerberg” himself. We also tried numbers 1 through 3, which returned only zeroes. Which leads us to wonder: Did accounts numbered 1 and 2 belong to the Winklevoss Twins?

It turns out that the person behind the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog is actually an aspiring fiction writer from Georgia. And by Georgia I mean the state. And the ‘gay girl” is also a married guy.

Last week, a story was picked up about a pretty young girl living in Syria who had been kidnapped by state forces in the country and taken to an unknown location. The girl, named Amina, was the author of a popular blog entitled “Gay Girl In Damascus.” On June 6th, her readers were shocked to see a post from Amina’s cousin, who said that the girl had been kidnapped by “security services of the Baath party militia.”

The blog has nearly one million page views and provides followers with poetry, political statements and autobiographical content – all purportedly written by Amina, an out lesbian in Syria. The blog had even contained posts detailing encounters with anti-gay Syrians, most notably one where Amina’s father supposedly shamed two armed men out of kidnapping her in the middle of the night. Everything on the blog was reported as fact.

As the post about the kidnapping went live, it didn’t take long for the #freeAmina hashtag to trend on Twitter and a Facebook page declaring the same garnered thousands of likes in hours. When the story became national news many began to question not only the kidnapping account, but the identity of the blogger as well. Did Amina really exist?

Many on the internet, especially on Twitter, began to doubt the validity of Amina’s story. NPR’s Andy Carvin was one of the first to ask his followers if anyone had actually ever seen Amina? The answer was a resounding no. Her only interviews had been given via email and nobody could say with certitude what she looked like.

The many supposed photographs of Amina that began popping up on Facebook turned out to be unauthentic, as the Wall Street Journal broke the true identity of the girl in the photos. A London woman named Jelena Lecic came forward when her ex-husband notified her that her picture was all over various news sites.

Over the weekend, more information came out that linked the “Gay Girl in Damascus” to a man named Tom MacMaster, an American living abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland. After confronted with questions from various journalists regarding his role in the blog, he finally came clean.

The Gay Girl in Damascus blog is now entitled “A Hoax.” Yesterday, MacMaster issued this apology on the blog (still posted as Amina A.)

If you read that the way that I read that, it’s pretty far from an apology. MacMaster instead sticks by his actions, saying that he has created awareness and that he hasn’t harmed anyone.

But when you carry out interviews with the likes of CNN as Amina, you make people care about your story. And if you carry on a months-long online relationship with another woman who thinks you are real, I’m pretty sure that qualifies as harming someone. Whether MacMaster had a change of heart or just saw all the criticism he was taking on the internet, he sure changed his tune today.

Today, he has provided a much lengthier and more detailed apology, where he discusses his motivations for creating the Amina character out of thin air. According to MacMaster, the whole thing was an exercise in fiction writing –

It started innocently enough without any intention whatsoever of creating a massive hoax or duping the world. Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to write fiction but, when my first attempts met with universal rejection, I took a more serious look at my own work and I realized that I could not write conversation in a natural way nor could I convincingly write characters who weren’t me. I tried to get better and did various exercises (such as simply copying overheard conversations). Eventually, I would set up a number of profiles on dating sites with identities that were not my own as ways of interacting with real people in conversation but with a different personality than my own.

He says many times in this apology that he knows he has hurt people, and that he is sorry for that. He says that the whole situation spun out of control –

I wasn’t trying to pick fights or stir up controversy … I was instead trying to enlighten people. I posted comments on a blog; the owner asked me to contribute columns. I did so. I set up a blog to publish some of the things I’d written as Amina and, maybe, get a few comments. I did not expect anyone to read it or to care if they did.

And in the first month and more it was up, it received only a few visits. That was more than I had expected. Then, I wrote a perfect little story about the situation in Syria and the mutual affection between father and daughter … and to my shock, it went viral ….

And everything spiraled out of control. I couldn’t think of how to shut Amina down but …. It just kept on growing …

What a bizarre story this has turned out to be. Of course it’s the obvious move to put all the blame on Tom MacMaster for purposefully misleading everyone involved. He definitely shares the majority of the responsibility. But some blame has to be put on those who would believe everything they see on the internet.

Sometimes, the only way we can tell the difference between a novel and a history book is by its place on the shelf in the bookstore. On the internet, we don’t get convenient groupings, so I guess the moral of this story is to always stay vigilant. Always know that when you emotionally invest in someone’s life story online, there’s the chance that it is simply an elaborate work of fiction.

Here are some of the most poignant tweets about the story:

[Image via Picasa via NPR]

John Ordover sounds like he got a kick out of pranking so many people. He confessed that the site is a hoax to the New York Times’ Bits Blog:

Contacted through MarryOurDaughter this morning, Mr. Ordover quickly conceded the page was a parody aimed at drawing attention to inconsistencies in state marriage laws. States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission.

Ordover had planned to conduct more radio interviews this week, before revealing the site as a hoax. However, the move by the Times to find out more about Marry Our Daughter likely put an end to those, unless radio hosts really want to debate the topic of arranged marriages.

This is the question to be answered ever since the Italian blog Grooan.com (Google translated version) posted what they are calling the first look at Google’s non-confirmed operating system.

Take a look at the screenshots, courtesy of Grooan.com, and decide for yourselves:

Intro Screen OS Screen OS Screen 2

The post itself claims these pictures are of the real, perhaps remote Google OS. However, most will take these images with a grain of salt (and rightfully so). Could it be just a Linux UI someone made to look like a Google OS? Or could it be someone’s Photoshop skills at work? The person who pointed this out to me (courtesy of Gizmodo) seems to think its a Linux UI because the blog post mentions the program being embedded or capable of being run from a USB drive.

Whatever the verdict, it’s still nice to see imaginations at work while addressing one of the hotter rumors floating around the Internet. However, if this is indeed the real thing, I will alter the previous statement to say, it’s a good start Google, but your interface needs some visual work. For what it’s worth, Grooan.com offers the following description of the purported Google OS:

Based on GNU and with kernel HURD [Google OS] is available in 3 versions: Embedded , Portable and Corporate. [Each version is substantially different] for the type of support and methodology of the job.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

Netsky-P occupies the top spot in the Sophos figures for July. That worm contained Sasser, which caused problems for Windows computers worldwide.

A German court recently handed down a 21-month suspended sentence to its creator, deeming the creation of the worm while he was still 17 superceded his having turned 18 when he released the worm online.

But Mytob, which filled inboxes everywhere with German hate messages, had seven of its variants in the Sophos top 10 list. In a statement, Sophos security consultant Carole Theriault noted still another Mytob variant has been detected.

“The sheer volume and range of the Mytob worms sees them hog most positions in the virus chart. It’s not the viciousness of the worm that is the problem, but the constant onslaught of slightly differing variants,” said Ms. Theriault in a statement.

“This month’s only new entry into the chart is another family member – Mytob-CX, and despite accounting for only 3.2% of viruses in July, it shows that the Mytob threat continues to plague computer users.”

Hoaxes that play on people’s emotions end up being perpetuated in scores of forwarded emails. The Hotmail hoax showed up most frequently in the top 10 hoax list.

Also, the recent legitimate news and email campaign urging users to create an In Case of Emergency (ICE) entry in their mobile phone address books has been parroted by a hoax message.

“The (ICE) hoax, however, tries to fool people into believing that following the advice opens them up to a possible mobile virus infection, which is complete poppycock,” said Ms. Theriault.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.