What is a spoof?

Answer 1

In entertainment, a spoof is a light parody of something, which is usually not meant to insult anyone or anything, nor their work. The Family Guy television show, for example, features many spoofs from many movies, books, and celebrities, to include the Brady Bunch, Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher, and such.

Spoofing includes the following:

• Parody - imitating something precisely while making it humorous (the Star Wars episode of Family Guy is a parody)
• Satire - making fun of something (The Colbert Report on television satirizes other commentators on news shows).

In programming (and the internet in general), a spoof is a piece of software, a website, or an application meant to appear as another piece of software, website, or application. Generally, spoofs are created to fool a user into giving away their password, personally identifiable information, or other important knowledge.

Internet spoofs include the following:

• Phishing or Webpage Spoofing: A website that looks like another one in order to obtain your user ID, password, and other information which is then used by the thieves to gain access to your account.
• E-mail address spoofing: faking an email address in order to disguise the real one when you are sending spam (if you have ever gotten email from what looks like your own email address, that's what is happening)
• IP Spoofing: Changing your Internet Protocol Address to get passed a block or ban on a website.