Potato I have

I missed Mailfrontier’s first phish quiz, but I took the second one. I consider myself a sophisticated internet user and I still missed 2 of 10: I falsely identified one legitimate email as phish, and one phish as legitimate.

Knowing what is legitimate and what is not must be awfully difficult for most people out there. Fortunately a lot of this can be short-circuited with a few simple rules: don’t follow the links in the emails, go to the known web site to do anything the message inspires you to do, or in the worst case get on the phone using a number you have received separately (e.g. a bank statement).

Laurie Goodstein reports that religiosity is on the rise worldwide, but distinguishes between fundamentalism and pentecostalism: “in the United States today, most of the Protestants who make up what some call the Christian right are not fundamentalists, who are more prone to create separatist enclaves, but evangelicals, who engage the culture and share their faith.” Furthermore, she reports that the rise is on the pentecostal side, and that there is perhaps even a backlash against fundamentalism.

R. Scott Appleby, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and an author of a book on fundamentalism, says:

There is some evidence, some literature that says fundamentalism is on the decline, that it has peaked or is peaking precisely because it has a tendency toward violence and intolerance, and those ultimately don’t work. They lead to bloodshed, loss of life, and no recognizable economic upturn, and there is an exhaustion with it.

Appleby is also an editor, with Martin E. Marty, of the University of Chicago Press’ decade-long Fundamentalism Project.