The net is the greatest source of misinformation the world has ever known: if you receive unfettered access to all understanding, bonkers or no, then you become ill-informed rather than uninformed. We all crib "facts" from the Web without checking them. When the abolition of the Lord Chancellor's office was announced, newspapers were quick to declare the imminent death of a "1,400-year-old institution". There is absolutely no historical evidence for this claim, but all the journalists had clicked their way to the Lord Chancellor's website and found a page copied from a wholly inaccurate nineteenth-century history book. This was harmless enough, but the plagiarism of an outdated online thesis by the authors of the British Government's intelligence dossier on Iraq had somewhat more sinister ramifications.

The Web already contains a database of DNA collected by police over ten years of investigation and, if you have ever been close to a crime scene, the chances are that yours is in it. Gradually, they are matching genes to names and addresses, and although the website is restricted, it's reasonably easy to hack into it. This is not true: I've written it to prove that most people instinctively believe what they read regardless of where they read it.