I remember visiting my future wife in her Manhattan office back in the pre-Y2K dark ages, when style guides instructed us to capitalize the words Internet and Website. Working for a tech startup that recruited programmers for other tech startups that were busy adding two more spaces to all dates online in preparation for the year 2000, she was riding the wave of the 1990s boom, with an office high above Times Square and a salary some degrees above mine. As a reporter for Catholic New York newspaper, I knew something about the Internet, but preferred using the newsroom’s extensive hard-copy files and reference books to research and fact check my stories.

It was after hours so she decided she would give me an illustration of the wonders of the World Wide Web, offering to look up any topic I chose. I decided to make it easy for her and said, “Cardinal O’Connor.” She put the words into the search field and, this being before Google, after many seconds a selection of websites appeared on the screen. Some dealt with the bird “cardinal,” others with the genealogy of “O’Connor.” Finally, one put the title and the name together and produced something related to the then-Archbishop of New York. I was not impressed. “This Internet thing isn’t going anywhere,” I proclaimed. “I could get more info from my files at work or even walk a few blocks to the library.” But that wasn’t all. “How do you know,” I went on, “that what you get on the Internet is even true? It’s not the encyclopedia.”

She married me anyway, and we used to laugh at my naivety. That is, until recently, because today the last part of my statement looks rather prescient. Charges of misinformation and disinformation are hurled across ideological lines, and online fact-checkers are checked and check-mated; my simple skepticism of 30 years ago would be at home in an online chatroom or learned media critique. Log in and listen up and you’ll find that the web and the airwaves are obsessed with questions about deep fakes, AI imitations, the veracity of viral tweets. Calls for censorship of the other side resound. In short, it’s the age-old problem of epistemology. How do we know what we think we know is true?

What brought all this to mind was a little online mischief I encountered when I tried to renew my driver’s license. The hard-copy DMV letter, mailed to my home, informed me that I could easily renew on the Connecticut government website and provided a URL address. Always careful with personal information online, I typed in the URL— exactly as printed in the DMV letter—and got an error page. The site was “under construction.” Hmm. Maybe it had been hacked, or someone had set up a false DMV site. Who knows what bad actors are recording your every key strike online?

So, as a well-trained internet user, I went to the website of the governor’s office, only to see that his homepage is not connected to the state government site. He has his own online domain. Of course, I didn’t check Wikipedia for the Connecticut DMV site since the same or different people who hacked the original site could also put the false URL on Wiki. So, I did what all right-minded persons in Connecticut do when they face intractable problems with their government—I texted conservative watchdog Peter Wolfgang, president of Family Institute of Connecticut, and asked for the URL of the official state site. He texted me back the address. I figured the hackers had not messed with Peter’s texts, but I did give the possibility a second of thought.

What’s the upshot? The Connecticut DMV provided the wrong URL in its own official communication. In fact, that same letter had both the old URL and the updated one, which was launched after the site was hacked in 2021, as I later learned from web stories I trusted. Could it be that this form letter has been going out for years and no one has noticed, or no recipient has bothered to report it? Well, of course. Most people receiving the letter would start to renew simply by googling “Connecticut DMV” and immediately get the correct site. Only suspicious characters like me—knowing that every site from the Pentagon to the local bakery has been hacked—perform online due diligence and get caught in a web of unknowns. Of course, we suspicious web surfers would never report the mistyped URL to the DMV for fear that we would be labeled web-phobic or URL-deniers and be placed on an insurrection watch list.

Don’t laugh. I predicted as much some 30 years ago. Happy Y2.25K!