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Your unrequested Firepower update

11 July 2008 — dan

I've managed to go almost a month without saying anything about 2008's uncontested See What Happens When You Don't Pay Attention In Science Lessons, You Idiots gold medal winners, Firepower.

So here's an update.

The Independent in the UK has a pretty good overview of the whole debacle, in "A miracle pill, a sports team and the most wanted man in Australia". The New Zealand Herald has "Hunted fuel-pill peddler made same claim in NZ 16 years ago" - which wasn't exactly a secret, but still the hopeful investors came thick and fast. For, I remind you, the chance to own their own little slice of a product that was not just different in no way at all from Firepower head Tim Johnston's own previous scam in New Zealand, which was also different in no way at all from hundreds of previous products from other scam artists.

Meanwhile, making-a-career-out-of-Firepower Gerard Ryle co-authored the Sydney Morning Herald's most recent piece, "Firepower's Phileas Fogg steals away". In which Tim Johnston manages to add a couple more creditors to the list by, for instance, skipping out on his flat in Hampstead with a month of rent still owing.

Also at the Herald, there's "Western rugby joins the ruckus", in which whoever at Western Australian Rugby Union drew the short straw glumly joins the hunt for Tim, because he owes them money too. Oh, and one Ross Graham, which the Firepower Web site is still happy to inform us is "the founder of Executive Traders and the owner of various private mining related companies", is apparently personally owed nine point seven six million dollars.

I really hope Graham never gets a penny back. Look at him in that press release, saying "I sent members of my team to check out Firepower's operations in Russia and Asia. They were impressed with what they saw, and realized these great products would enable Firepower to grow into a very successful business".

I know that "quotes" like that in press releases are always written by the press guy and just initialed by the person who's supposed to be "saying" it. But Graham nonetheless did approve the quote, took an active role in the Firepower scam, and never actually did do any due diligence despite saying that he had. No sane person could actually think the Firepower products worked if they really did "check out" Firepower's essentially nonexistent Russian and Asian "operations".

So, you know, screw that guy.

Moving on, the Herald also has "Firepower creditors home in on wife's $5m property" and "Firepower boss rejected plan to restructure" (...possibly because part of that plan involved Tim Johnston turning himself in).

And, more juicily, "Firepower used fake tests to woo Russians". Apparently after the faked tests were discovered and the Russian Railways network immediately cancelled their upcoming deal, Firepower had new tests done... and apparently correctly, too, because the new tests showed no effect. Oddly, these new tests weren't added to Firepower's motley collection of promotional literature.

Earlier, there was another Gerard Ryle piece, "Firepower offers pill franchise", in which my friend Stephen Moss attempts to unload Firepower International, the company he used to be so proud of and which still, against all reason, has that picture of Stephen putting a pill in that bloody million-dollar Rolls-Royce on its front page.

Stephen says he's owed money too - oh, poor baby! - and denies any involvement, blah blah blah.

Amazingly enough, Firepower franchises currently seem to be about as salable as Enron stock. Oh, and I couldn't put it better than Ryle: "By coincidence, Bill Moss [Stephen's dad...] was part of a Macquarie Bank consortium that sold the Sydney Kings to Johnston for $2 million last year. The deal gave the consortium a 500 per cent profit on the $400,000 it spent buying the Kings in 2002. The Firepower parent owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid endorsements to the Western Force and some of its players."

So once again, Steve - if you're short of a buck or two, try hitting up your dad for a loan!

Let's see, what else have we got?

Magnate's bid for Firepower fails (A mining zillionaire is one of the Firepower creditors and for some reason wanted to buy a controlling interest, but Tim Johnston popped up from his Undisclosed Location for long enough to say no.)

Owner of Sydney Kings faces arrest (Yep, that's Tim again. It's Firepower's liquidator who wants Johnston arrested.)

There were two attempts to revive the Sydney Kings basketball team (the previous jewel in Firepower's sports-sponsorship crown); they both failed, and there's squabbling over the remnants.

Meanwhile, have you heard about the amazing Moletech Fuel Saver?

This time, for sure!

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

The spam-scammers aren't even TRYING any more.

11 July 2008 — dan

From: Sharon Williams <sharon_williams29@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:56:31 -0700 (PDT)
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: LCDs Purchase

Hello Sales,

I hold LCDS Store,So I will like to purchasing your Items Product,which is:

LCDS........................................5Pieces

So kindly e-mail me back with the Total Cost and plus the Shipping Cost together to London,E16 4SP ,So as to have you paid with my Credit Card# for you to charge for the Order from you there on your behalf.
Hope to hear from you back today.
Thank you..

Regard,

Oh, you'd like five LCDs, would you? Any preference? Five seven-segment calculator displays, five thirty-inch Dells... all the same to you, eh?

Every day for these scammers must be a new adventure. They've literally got no idea at all what might be turning up from the sort of ultra-gullible schmuck that'd fall for their "orders".

The last shreds of my faith in humanity depend on nobody at all falling for this one, though.

Despite the mention of a London address, I think this is probably yet another Nigerian, or perhaps Romanian, scammer. They get a sucker at the stated address to send everything on to them, then the sucker ends up carrying the can when the goods vanish into Africa or wherever and no money comes back.

I don't think any actual forwarding company will fall for this any more (this piece is almost six years old), but there's still a pretty good supply of individual suckers who'll believe what a brother in Christ has to say.

Posted in Scams, Spam, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

The Capital Letters mean it's Really from the CIA

5 July 2008 — dan

In a similar vein to the death-threat spam, I just received this:

From: "PaulAllison@cia.com" <paulallison @cia.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 22:49:21 +0200
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: CIA - Case ID: 528-84223 - WARNING

Hello,

Your IP address has been logged on more than 20 illegal Websites.
This does not necessary means that You browsed all of this illegal content.
Theres possibility someone else has access to your PC, physically or someone else gained remote access to your PC machine.
As a matter of that, we kindly ask You to answer all our questions regarding this case in reasonable amount of time.
List of all our questions is available for download at http://www.cia-intl.com.ba/ID528-84223.zip
If you do not answer these questions until 10.07.2008 we will start investigation and make final decision on our own. In that case, You'll get the charge in writing soon after.
Please note that browsing illegal content online is serious violation of laws in many countries.
We expect your co-operation and prompt response.

Sincerely,
Paul Allison
Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW , Room 3220
Washington , DC 20535
Phone: (202) 324-30000
Case ID: 528-84223

Apparently this is some kind of July 4th special offer.

They even went to the trouble of making http://www.cia-intl.com.ba/ by itself redirect to cia.gov. I like to see that kind of attention to detail in a threat-scammer.

(CIA-dot-com, used for the probably-not-connected reply address, is actually just an ISP.)

Interestingly, this spam actually did come from a .ba (Bosnia and Herzegovina) source, bhtelecom.ba. And http://www.cia-intl.com.ba/ID528-84223.zip is still live, as I write this - it's 476 kilobytes, and actually is a zip file, containing the 562-kilobyte ID528-84223.exe.

The jotti.org online malware scanner I've mentioned before, which submits uploaded files to umpteen anti-virus programs, got only one hit, from BitDefender. It reckoned the file behaved like the uninventively-named Win32.Malware. The Sunbelt Sandbox scanner generated reams of conclusions - basically, every bit of information you can get by running the program in a virtual machine and tracking everything it does for a little while - but as far as actual identification went, just dropped it in the VIPRE.Suspicious "miscellaneous" bin.

I then deleted the file and sprinkled quicklime over the part of the hard drive where it had been. I've learned my lesson.

Posted in Scams, Spam. 4 Comments »

Another day, another rip-off

3 July 2008 — dan

Remember that doofus who was selling USB endoscopes on eBay using a bunch of the pictures from my review of it?

This happens all the time, to me and to other review sites. Unless the people responsible are really stupid and hotlink the images, we usually never even know it's happening. I only find out about it when a reader tells me.

And that's how I know about the further unlicensed commercial popularity of my eTime endoscope pics. Two different sellers ("calalily899" and "ukelectronic-zone"), one just using some of my pics, the other using some of my pics plus a little of the text of the review, just to rub it in.

I know why this happens. It's because the pictures I take of things, especially of things that aren't often photographed by other people, look too good. If my pics looked like drunken happy-snaps, nobody'd rip 'em off. But when my picture of a product is pretty much indistinguishable from a manufacturers' hand-out press-release shot, there it'll be at the top of a Google Images search - though the copy of it Google finds won't necessarily even be the one I put on my own server.

(If you'd like to read about what I would, if I were something of a tosser, call my "photographic workflow", I've got a tutorial about it here.)

I don't really care about people using my pics on their MySpace page or school report or something. I'll give pretty much anybody permission to use my pics for non-profit purposes for free, if they ask. And if they don't, I still don't really mind - but I'll send the full-resolution originals to people who ask for permission, while people who just pinch 'em without asking have to settle for the versions I put on the Web.

Commercial image-pinching is different, though. If you're making money with stuff I made, I'd like to get paid my share.

A couple of days ago, a reader spotted yet another eBay image-pincher, this time selling tiny R/C cars with some images and text taken from my old review of one.

So I whipped up a complaint letter for eBay's VeRO system, and within a day all of the listings had been zapped. The VeRO system takes a bit of effort to get into, but it works really well once you're signed up.

And now, just a couple of days later, here are more pic-copying endoscope sellers.

I have, however, had a thought.

Sending a VeRO complaint takes at least a few minutes, and all I get in return is the cruel satisfaction of having stuck a rather small spanner in the works of someone's business. The only entity that really gains anything from VeRO complaints is eBay, who I think keep the listing fees for just about every possible kind of cancelled auction.

So here's what I said to these latest sellers (with slight variations for their particular offences), instead of just VeROing them right away:

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

I note that in your several auctions for the eTime Home Endoscope, you use a few images from my review of that product here:
www.dansdata.com/pencamera.htm

I did not give you permission to do this, and now require payment. Please forward $US250 to my PayPal account at dan@dansdata.com immediately. This sum purchases you the right to use any of the images from www.dansdata.com/pencamera.htm, for eBay sales purposes only, for the next 12 months.

If you do not make this payment within 24 hours, I will use the eBay VeRO system to cancel all of your auctions which infringe my copyright.

I've actually tried this before. Back in the day, all I could threaten commercial copyright infringers with (besides never-gonna-happen legal action, which is always the first stop for Internet kooks but is actually almost always pointless) was exposure before my Army of Goons. And I told 'em to send me a cheque rather than PayPal me. But it did actually work a couple of times, out of the several times I tried it.

Let's roll the dice again!

Posted in Photography, Scams, Shop talk. 23 Comments »

The Nothing Card

24 June 2008 — dan

The above-pictured object is an HIS iClear Card. And I don't know what it does. It was brought to my attention by a reader who suspects it has no function at all. I think he may be right.

According to the iClear Card's product page on the HIS site, it, and I quote verbatim, "is HIS latest solution to video card noise reduction. It has an excellent implement of state-of-the-art design and technology and give you a better gaming experience by reducing the distortion and noise generated from graphic card. It reduces the noise distortion generated from high-end graphic card (from both Radeon and GeForce) or TV tuner card, which provide up to 10% increase performance on Signal-to-Noise Ratio."

And they go on. Apparently it has "State-of-the-art design". But if you look at its specifications page, the only spec it seems to have is a name.

I suppose the "state of the art" part is because it plugs into a PCIe x1 socket, not boring old PCI. It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but I think it also has contacts for all of the PCIe x1 pins, too. But all it seems to have to connect to any of those pins are six capacitors and a few tiny surface-mount components, all sitting in the corner of an otherwise empty rectangle of fibreglass.

So I suppose it's meant to be a power supply smoother, or something. It's within the bounds of possibility that noisy DC input could have some sort of effect on the performance of a video card, if only making it less overclockable; putting a few more caps across the input rails would help with that. But many modern video cards get most of their power directly from the system PSU; hanging some caps across the PCIe power rails won't make any difference to that.

And I'm entirely at a loss regarding how this has anything to do with "noise reduction". Most PCs these days have a 100 per cent digital data path for the video subsystem, so there's no need for noise reduction at all. Software tells the graphics card what to do, it figures out what colour all of the pixels should be, and then it communicates that information to a monitor via a digital link. "Noise" doesn't enter into it, here; if there's enough noise to actually affect even one pixel of the signal, the result will probably be a completely blank screen or a hideous mess. The effect of noise in digital systems is either zero or catastrophic; there's nothing in between.

Perhaps the iClear Card is s supposed to make analogue "VGA" video less noisy. But I've never seen even VGA video that actually was noisy. I've seen distortion from cheap VGA extension cables and blurriness from the inescapable failure of CRT screens to display square pixels on their non-square phosphor, but not noise.

Alexey Samsonov at Digit-Life spoiled the fun by actually reviewing the iClear, testing it in the one application where it'd have the best chance of doing something - when a low-quality analogue TV tuner card is trying to tune a weak signal, but a video card a couple of slots over is emitting RF noise and making it difficult.

And lo and behold - the iClear actually did something!

For almost the entirety of almost every signal-to-noise-ratio graph in the review, the "without iClear" and "with iClear" lines are right slap bang on top of each other. But here and there, at certain frequencies, the without-iClear line actually does dip below the other one. In a couple of places, by as much as three decibels. And it never goes above the other line, which suggests that the differences aren't just experimental error.

I'd be interested to see what happened if you just plugged a completely blank card into the slot between the video card and the tuner, though. As long as the card has a ground plane and one lousy contact hooking that sheet of featureless copper up to the system ground, I suspect you'd see a similar reduction of noise at certain frequencies. You'd think that if the capacitors were really doing something, there'd be at least a small signal-to-noise improvement across the whole spectrum graph. That's what HIS is claiming, after all, insofar as their claims are comprehensible at all.

Apparently Newegg have been giving iClears away for free with purchase of a video card, which implies that the card has not been a major commercial success.

At least they're not claiming it makes your hi-fi sound better.

[UPDATE: Boing Boing Gadgets presents X-Maple pixel-flutter reduction block for PCIe!]

Posted in Electricity, Nerdery, Scams, Strange Tales. 29 Comments »

Lazy thief seeks obliging victim; click OK to continue

8 June 2008 — dan

Because I solicit donations via PayPal, I receive a certain amount of PayPal-related... noise.

Usually, it's someone who wants to join what they believe to be the Internet-panhandling jet-set, and wants to know my secrets. My advice in this area often causes disappointment, as it boils down to "spend ten years making a well-liked Web site with a thousand or so pages".

Some people, though, have hit upon a refreshingly direct alternative to asking the Internet in general to send them money. They, instead, very specifically ask a particular person to send them a particular amount of money, by sending a PayPal Money Request to someone who's never even heard of them.

PayPal lets you do this very easily. Just click the Request Money tab, enter a target e-mail address (preferably someone who's already got a PayPal account), and the amount you're asking for. The size of that amount is only limited by your audacity.

I just got such a request, from one "Nadz bali", nadz_1234@hotmail.co.uk, for fifty British pounds. So "Nadz" is fairly audacious.

There've been several others. "Max swan", nadhusy1234@hotmail.co.uk (hmmm...) tried it on for thirty quid on the 20th of April, and for three hundred pounds on the nineteenth. Someone I won't name because there's a 0.01% chance he might actually have been sincere asked for $US75 on the 16th of December last year, adding a Note that said "I need to get food for my family for christmas. Please help. God Bless". "Alon Gubkin", alon@100play.net, asked for a mere five bucks at the end of October 2007. And on and on it goes. The US-currency record was "rea", Raceme117@aim.com, who tried for $US500 on the seventh of May last year.

These attempts aren't frequent - they've only been happening to me at all since the start of 2007, and there've been only nine attempts to date. And it's very easy to just click the "Cancel" button and go about your day. So this is definitely one of the more inoffensive Internet scams. It's hardly a scam at all, really; it doesn't even rise to the level of walking up to someone in the street and saying "Could I have fifty quid, please?", because the PayPal version does not suggest that a mugging may be about to take place.

At base, this scheme is just an extension of the old scam where you send businesses invoices for things you never supplied to them, and hope they're unorganised enough that they pay up. The PayPal version would actually be conceptually exactly the same as that scam - except the people who try it, at least in my experience, almost never put anything in the "Subject" line of their money request.

Nope; they almost always just send me a bald, naked request for cash, and I click the "no" button, and then we both go about our days.

If only all human bad behaviour could be reduced to such simplicity.

Posted in Scams, Strange Tales. 6 Comments »

Your daily dose of psychoceramicity

7 June 2008 — dan

From: ja4@optusnet.com.au
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:57:29 +1000
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: [blank]

Dear Dan

I have been watching your newsletter for "news on Adams Platform and I have something for you - well thats the biggest understatement you will have heard when you go to adamsplatform.com.au which now populates a web page not your newsletter which it formerly did! ON THE WEB PAGE IS THE MISSING ALGORITHM all there in its GLORY with ORIGINAL WORKINGS FROM ADAM CLARK HIMSELF---- Now before you start crying fraud and liar like the Melbourne Club has for the past four years I say this - download the pdf and tell me that I am wrong. Alternatively email me and I will SPAM you a PDF of the form content and Behaviour of MATTER!!!! All complete and all together perfect just like he represented to Mediaworld before it was "controlled" by the United States Government and the Australian Government in a joint project called OPERATION PLATFORM!!!!

ITS NOW PUBLIC AND YOUR THE SECOND WEB SITE TO RECEIVE IT SO ENJOY AND PASS THE WORD FOR THE TIME HAS COME FOR THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE OF COMPUTING AND ITS CALLED ------ AP TECHNOLOGY POWERED BY ADAM CLARK. Ps The web site will be populated with lots more detail in the coming weeks so no exclusives I am afraid unless I am wrong then you can print this email and post it to Adam as yet another fraud - see his cc --- that was a joke - the decision to go freeware was not an easy one and ALL will be explained in TIME!!!!

Yours Faithfully

Mr. John Anderson

Former Director Mediaworld Communications Limited
Member of MWC Creditors Committee
Company Director
MWB, MWC Bachelor of Business and Law
Ballarat University

For the benefit of anyone that's only recently joined us, the "Adams Platform" was an Australian-made ultra-revolutionary video compression scheme.

Which, like every other system that was meant to send high-quality video down a phone line in the pre-broadband days when that was a very marketable sort of product, did not work at all.

There've been many such systems before and after the Adams Platform - I wrote about a few of them, and the Adams Platform, here.

The Adams Platform, however, put its inventor, one Adam Clark, on the Business Review Weekly Young Rich List for 2004 - but with the proviso that "a pack of angry investors is chasing him for answers". The only answer they got was the complete collapse of Media World Communications. And if the above message is to be believed, the "pack" of creditors coalesced into a "Committee", which suggests that they still haven't got their money back.

A John Anderson was indeed involved with Media World Communications back then, and I suppose my correspondent may be that same John Anderson. If this is the case, then it would appear that the last four years have taken something of a toll.

Never mind video compression - adamsplatform.com.au does indeed still exist, and today its only purpose is to provide the world with what my correspondent above most accurately describes as "a PDF of the form content and Behaviour of MATTER!!!!"

I'm sure all of those exclamation marks are entirely justified, though I can't make head or tail of the bloomin' thing myself.

Perhaps you'll do better. Do please post a comment if you figure out how this stunning insight - ascribed by Mr Anderson to Adam Clark, who is I presume now working in an undisclosed offshore location - may be applied to the transmission of full-bandwidth video down a dial-up modem connection, or to the negation of gravity, or to teleportation, or indeed to anything at all.

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 12 Comments »

The next post will be about Lego or something, I promise

7 June 2008 — dan

I'm sorry about this Firepower Fest, but a Who Da Bitch Now? opportunity like this doesn't come along every day.

Remember, gentle reader, how Firepower got hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from Austrade, the Australian Trade Commission?

(...and then hired as their new CEO one John Finnin, the Austrade guy who made the grants possible, among other even dodgier activities - and then fired him shortly afterward, when he was arrested as part of a child sex investigation, of all things...)

Well, now it turns out that the bright sparks at Austrade hired out consultants to Firepower at $190 an hour - one of whom also later joined the Firepower team... no, no conflicts of interest here, how dare you suggest such a thing!

But Austrade accidentally signed that consultancy deal with a Firepower "subsidiary" which didn't actually exist.

(This seems to be a common problem for Firepower-associated business entities. I noticed yesterday that Stephen Moss's "Global Fuel Technologies" does not seem to appear anywhere on the Australian Business Register.)

So now Austrade have joined the creditor chorus, as they try to get the $173,000 they're owed back from any part of Firepower that retains a shred of reality.

Mind you, the Austrade contract said that Firepower had lots of hugely lucrative deals in the pipeline, and also that Firepower's products had been "comprehensively tested by several world leading/independent testing institutes". Which they, of course, hadn't. So if you ask me, the whole contract was nothing but toilet paper from the moment it was printed and it serves Austrade right that they got completely screwed.

Since the money they were busy shovelling into Firepower's pockets came from the Australian taxpayer, though, I still think it'd be rather nice if they managed to screw some of it back out of Firepower.

Perhaps Firepower could sell that million-dollar Rolls-Royce which Stephen Moss so proudly insisted was absolutely 100% Firepower property?

Hey, the picture of Stephen and "his" Roller is back up on the front page of buyfirepowerpill.com!