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Then I realised that there's no need for me to do this, there's more than enough April-fools material on the Net anyway. The problem is that this material is there all year round.

Over the years I've done my best to highlight much of this, and a fair amount of it appears in the Lighten Up section of this column.

Which raises the issue: why do people believe stuff they read on the Web?

If you see something in a newspaper or on TV then you tend to assign it a certain degree of credibility and veracity because you expect that a team of highly skilled journalists and editors have pawed over it and checked all the facts.

When it comes to the Net however, there are no such checks and balances.

Any fool with a copy of Front Page can pay $5 a month and set up a website through which all manner of claims and falsehoods can be published.

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Yet some people tend to believe *everything* they read or see, even when it's on the Net.

Is it any wonder that the internet has become a happy hunting ground for fraudsters and scammers?

The stupidity and gullibility of the public is regularly demonstrated by the fact that the 419 scammers are still at it, and still doing quite nicely by all reports -- having recently made a sucker out of a Harvard professor.

Hell, if anyone should be credited with sufficient intelligence to be aware of such widely publicised schemes, and recognise a rat when they see one, surely a professor at one of the world's most highly regarded universities should be that person.

Of course its this level of gullibility and stupidity that allows spammers to continue to prosper in the way they do -- but it appears that Net-related foolishness is also alive and well in the halls of parliament.

Skip to the bottom of this story and check out how Maurice Williamson (National's IT spokesman) believes we should deal with the vexing issue of spam.

I don't think I need to reiterate my comments on this man's suitability for the role of IT-anything in parliament do I?

Last night I also spent some time talking to one of the country's more accomplished criminal lawyers. He was very blunt in his assertion that we now live in what amounts to a police state and that the freedoms we once enjoyed have been very much eroded.

It was chilling to hear about the power that government now has over citizens and just how much *injustice* is being dealt out to innocent people in the name of "expediency".

When I asked how on earth governments and bureaucrats could get away with this he was similarly blunt in his condemnation of the average citizen. So long as they've got food on the table and a warm fire in the winter, they really don't care about such things as justice and the abuse of power it seems.

So I guess the biggest April Fool's joke of all time is us -- the people who keep falling for internet scams and who are to disinterested to stand up for our rights and the injustices perpetrated against us by a bunch of equally foolish (but far more cunning) powermongers and bureaucrats.

New Forums!
Yes folks, good news. The grotty ezboard forums have been replaced with a new phpBBS-based system that won't assault you with a myriad of pop-ups and other flotsam.

A big thanks to Managed Internet Solutions for offering to provide this service.

You can access the new forums over at aardvarkforums.co.nz

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