Which one of these sites is genuine?

one of them has to be real though

@College_girl Why? None of them appear to be, based on the content and references.

because its for some online thing for english. I’ve been looking them up and trying to verify credentials but I cant for any of them. it says one of them is real though

By the way this is not a graded assignment. we do get extra credit however if we get all answers correct

What about the times UK news? Seems sort of real eh?

The Sunday Times site is the only legit one.

you mean the times uk?

Out of curiosity, if this is for an assignment, are you expected to base your judgment on specific criteria? That is, how are you supposed to know for sure whether a site is genuine or not, outside of personal experience or word-of-mouth? What goes into the spidey sense that tells us that a site is a hoax?

Let’s do some process of elimination, I’ll give some hints. You drink Di(2)Hydrogen-Mono(1)oxide=H20

And the Times UK is fake. Just click the sports tab, there isn’t any sports under the “sport” tab.

Okay I did my own research and I’ll help do your assignment.

http://www.wto.org/ <<<that’s the real world trade organization your professor probably wanted you to be skeptical about why the name wouldn’t be in the link

plus it’s lack of packaging

So there’s three down. You can do this college girl! :D

The trick is, all of them are real sites. But none of them have substance (boilerplate is a real book!). Must be a tough assignment though. All I simply do is look for sources though. Some are harder than others. You have to research World Trade Organization separately from the websites you were given. You have to have known the WTO’s role in the world and whether it’s a huge deal or not, then judging from the website given to you (the phony) you should be able to question, “wait a minute the WTO is a pretty big organization why does this website look so shitty.” This English exercise is to train you in becoming a skeptic and not just believing anything you see on the internet as a truth, but to make sure it’s backed up from a source. In the case for the book,

Dihydrogen-Monoxide hoax.
The Yes Men and the WTO.
You can verify that the others are genuine by using tools such as whois.

The Sunday Times is genuine, it’s a very old and well-known newspaper in the UK (even if it is full of Tory propaganda). If you check at the bottom, all the Youtube and Twitter links are genuine and clearly actively used. A hoax site wouldn’t be able to maintain that degree of social networking. You just can’t access the sport and other sections if you’re not subscribed.

But you can correlate the headlines with a subscriptrion-free newspaper like The Guardian For example the headline about Cisse scoring twice for Newcastle: is here

And here’s the Guardian’s take on the Times’s headline about charging £250,000 to access a meeting with the Prime Minister If you do a little digging you will probably find all the Times’ stories in the Guardian too. Just… without the conservative bias. ;)

Plus, you can probably buy this newspaper on news-stands even in the US, in major cities and airports.

@whitecarnations I’m afraid that really is the Snday Times real actual website. Piece of shit isn’t it.

@downtide also the other nice thing about the Guardian website is the lack of a pay wall.

@Lightlyseared it says a lot about the state of the Times that people can’t tell the difference between that and a spoof website.

The scary thing is, the Daily Mail is worse.

Actually… the Boilerplate book is genuine too, but it appears to be a fiction/steampunk type novel dressed up as a documentary. Amazon has it in stock “You say you’ve never heard of Boilerplate before? That’s because this book is the fanciful creation of a husbandand-wife team who have richly imagined these characters and inserted them into accurate retellings of history.”

@downtide at least the Daily Mail don’t charge you to read their bile laiden website.

bigredhair.com is not a hoax site. It’s a crappy site, stuck in the 90’s, but it’s a real website.

gatt.org appears to be fake, with the registrar of that site using adsense (not typical for dot-orgs), and owning 34 other sites (none of which are .orgs), with the same ID. There’s other tell-tale signs such as the ‘gatt.org’ URL being displayed no matter what page you’re on, plus a few broken links. I’ll let you figure out the rest.

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/?CMP=INTstp2 – nothing wrong with this one, it’s legit. That parent URL is the website for The Sunday Times UK, so there you go.

http://www.dhmo.org/ – It’s a real website, but a hoax nonetheless. It’s obviously advertising nothing more than ordinary water, so it’s a funny hoax. This is actually a rather old one, and was started by a junior high student in Idaho Falls way back in 1997, winning a science fair with the idea, and captioning the project with the title “How Gullible Are We?”

How gullible indeed….

i got 17 out of 20 on the quiz….no extra credit for me :(