How One Change Can Travel The World

General Privacy & Security
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This is just about one person forcing changes that no one cares about - anyway! Just a example of how, like a STD, gets around.

You have probably done a search and went from one Google hit to checking for the same thing on any of the other sites with the same keywords… And you found that one site’s info was wrong, by typo, or naming. Later, to discover the same error is on many more sites - it’s called plagiarism.

This one sort-of error, in a sense funny, I alwasy found funny and useful.

A friend joined Facebook(Meta) as a test.
While registering and since FB wanted her location, she hunted down the most remote, uninhabited, No visits permitted country.

At the time, if one’s country wasn’t listed, they could enter that country name.

The country she typed in was “Bouvet Island” which wasn’t on any other country drop down lists we checked.

bouvet_island

A while later, it started showing up in a lot of drop downs in updated country list drop down web site plugins. There was nothing illegal in that. Bouvet Island does exist.

I wonder, how many people use it instead of their or country any other country to use anonymously.

Just thought I’d pass it along as a way some things show up too often. Millions of sites now have Bouvet Island in their forms data base.

By the way. After leaving FB, deleting cache, cookies everything, and reloading it (Chrome was used) Google was now displaying using results in Norwegian language. Don’t know which dialect but it doesn’t matter.

Amusing?
~s

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I’ve used Outer Mongoiia in the past, only because there were no sanity checks in place.

But now I’m thinking of using Savo Island, in the burb of Pago Pago.

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Outer Mongolia is simply the country now known as “Mongolia.” So the “Outer” is redundant, at least from the standpoint of lists of countries. (Inner Mongolia is the Mongolian area of the People’s Republic of China.)

One of my personal favorite obscure places is South Georgia Island. To get even more obscure, pick others in that chain. There are some that are almost impossible to land a boat on because their entire coast is cliffs.

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FYI. Your post is not too different from the origin of the word “meme” or “meme-scape” which was introduced by Dawkins in 1972 where he was discussing the transmission and storage of thoughts/ideas/culture. Meme - Wikipedia ( and, later, Internet meme - Wikipedia). He also made the Darwinistic analogy with the viral propagation (but didn’t specify the generally negative subcategory of STD viruses). And this was long before the start of the internet (or even Facebook).

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I’m confused. Who’s post are you referring to?

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I had intended to reply to you, but it looks like I didn’t.

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