Technology of deception

So Beijing's Olympic fireworks weren't real. But, as E&T reveals, deception is all around us, entertaining us, tricking our enemies and even making the sun shine. The paper presents the technology of deceptions that today's world, we are immersed in a sea of deception, not least within the virtual world we increasingly inhabit. The technology of the Internet has permitted the relatively benign deception inherent in social networking constructs such as Facebook and MySpace, and in online gameworlds such as RuneScape and Second Life. Sadly, it has also provided a new avenue for fraudulent deception, from banking fraud and investment scams to outright identity theft. We even have the online version of the Trojan horse myth, though, unfortunately, the virus version is more real than we'd like. We are surrounded by technologies of deception, some benign and some malicious. There may come a point which some may already have reached where the technological deception is so sophisticated and complete that we don't know what is real and what is not.