There is an active Hacker News contributor currently making plans to phish Hacker News and reddit because "there is this 'smug' attitude on HN about HN'ers being 'better' than your average computer user in this respect".
Please be careful when filling out forms that contain any personal information or passwords. There are people out there who are looking to shame & ridicule you (and worse).
There's no need to mention any names, because it doesn't really matter who the threat comes from.
To the user hatching this plan: Consider this an antibody to your plan. If your theory is true, then this posting won't make a difference anyways and you'll have the chance to shame all the people you want.
[Edit: I had genuinely hoped to avoid turning this into yet another cult of personality thread on HN, and unfortunately that's failed. I don't think there was an intention to cause financial harm; but I do believe there was the possibility of harm to reputation given the information I had available.
There was an email that was evidently sent out to many HN users today discussing this plan; but I have not been privy to that email.]
The evil part in me could not help but wonder about how everybody seems to be so psyched about receiving a chrome notebook that they throw caution to the wind and enter anything and everything in to a form on some server somewhere allowing the google marketing department to significantly update their profiles with all that data they supply, and all that for the chance of getting a laptop.
This sort of action is a very common marketing tactic, but I was actually quite surprised to see how popular it was on HN. Also, the fact that google was happy to collect your information even when you can't receive the notebook was an interesting detail, and lots of people only realized that after filling out the form.
Then the other day a second thing happened, someone solved the contest that was embedded in the video that was used for the launch of the product.
The evil part of me again thought wow, what a large amount of work that was done here, I wonder how people would respond to a second contest, with a much larger number of notebooks to be won?
So, within a few minutes a plan was hatched, a simple idea to see how susceptible a security conscious community is to stuff like this. The domain is plainly in my name and just about all the tell tale signs of a phishing scam are present. Over the course of the last couple of days the text was polished to make it more clear what the intent is.
The url of the site is http://www.freechromelaptop.com/ , the url of the payoff page is http://www.freechromelaptop.com/process.html
Since I'm the main 'driver' behind this little prank I take full responsibility for it and for the fall-out if any, the other co-conspirators would have never done this without me asking for it.
I hope you'll forgive me for having a devious side to me, but I intended for nothing but good to come out of this, and I hope that even if the project never got underway that you will take these words to heart, please be very careful with what you fill out in online forms, even if the page looks genuine and it is google that is giving you a chance to win some laptop you have to wonder if the collective value of the information given up does not exceed greatly the value of the goods they are shipping.