Shooting for the stars

24 October 2007 — dan

From: mrlarry gates <mrlarryg@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:41:19 -0700 (PDT)
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Regarding To Order 1999 flatbed,

Hello Costomer Service,

This Is mr Larry Gates With Mark & company.And I Am Sending Email Regarding To Order 1999 flatbed, And Pls If You Do Also Carry the 1999 flatbed, And I Will Also Like You To Provide Me With The Prices For The 1999 flatbed, And Also I Will Like This 1999 flatbed To Be Ship To One Of My Company In West Africa And It Will Be Pick Up From Your Location And Also I Will Like To Know If You Do Accept Credit Card Payment And I Want Your Contact Office Number And Your Cell Phone Number So That I can Call You And Proceed With The Order / Payment And Pick Up? And I Am Looking forward To Hear Back From You Soon.

Thank You.
Best Regards.
Rev mr larry gates.
Owner Of Company.
Phone Number 360-846-4894.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

OK, this guy is actually presumably trying to get me to mail him some flatbed scanners in return for his stolen credit card number.

But when I first read this spam, I couldn't help but think he was actually asking me to mail him a flatbed truck.

Larry's presentation reminds me of HIRAM FROM PUERTO RICO, immortalised at the end of my first Dan's Data letters column.

Posted in Humour, Scams, Spam. 5 Comments »

More spam highlights

22 October 2007 — dan

It's been a while since I last favoured you all with fascinating details of the roughly 500 unwanted messages that daily make it through to my last line of defense.

Herewith, a summary of recent developments.

I, like some other people, have been enjoying the emissions of the (I presume) single pharmacy spammer who has hit upon a way to send messages which appeal to every possible consumer. Half of his spams have the subject line "This is not for idiots". The other half, magnificently, have "Not for oversmart people".

I've also had a lot of those weird "...goes bra-less" spams, promoting some ad-laden "news" site that just copies content from other sites. Entertainingly, the spammers' list of names of nubile starlets to put at the start of the "...goes bra-less" subject line includes Barbra Streisand.

I've also been pleased to receive a dodgy link scheme e-mail from someone who may be headed for fame in the Expert Sex Change/Penis Land/The Rapist Finder stakes; he's got a "very authentic directory" which "generates a high volume of qualified traffic" (even though most of its categories are empty...), and he decided to call it beontopranking-google.com.

It took me a while to figure out that he meant that to read Be On Top Ranking Google, rather than Be Onto Pranking Google, which I admit doesn't scan very well, but is singularly appropriate for someone who's sending link-to-me spam.

(This "domain name confusion" subject even has a Leo Stoller connection. It's a small world, isn't it?)

I'm not actually particularly annoyed by the typical "link request" e-mail. It's simple, to the point, and hopeless, but I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for links, however worthless such schemes may be.

But I got five copies of a link request from one Philip Gahan of the internationally unrenowned OrBay Online Auctions, who've confidently decided that the only thing on Dan's Data is my review of the Aeropress coffee maker, and thereby included a link to dansdata.com on one of their numerous, and tiny, "Home and Garden" directory pages.

(One of the other links on that page at the moment is helpfully titled "Dantechnology DE ANTONI:macchine per smerigliatura e pulitura. Linishing and polishing machine. - pulitura, smerigliatura, brillantatura, carteggiatura,lucidatura pulire, smerigliare, carteggiare, brillantare, cromatura,cromare, rubinetto, rubinetti, maniglia, maniglie, pentole, cucchiaio, posate, posata,robot, robotica, automazione, automatismo, tavola, macchina, campana, campane,polish,polishing,grind,grinding,bell,buffing,finishing,taps,handle , lavorazioni , meccanica, subfornitura ,linishing, pots,pans,lids,fiera,faucets, fiere,exhibition".)

Honourable mention: Whoever it was who thought that because this letters column has a letter with the title "Drive saunas", my site must therefore be an ideal candidate for a link swap with a company that makes hot tubs.

And while I'm at it: Hello to the gibbering nitwits at SalesUniversal (dot com), who think I'm in the market for their "Business List of 88,000+ business contacts across Arizona state", and to the drooling lackwits at SlipStreamVideo (dot com), who've sent me a number of messages saying "We're interested in representing your product in the marketplace", without revealing to me what product they believe I am selling.

I mean, you can kind of understand the endless flow of Chinese commercial spam; lots of people seem to think I'm one of the world's major LED, LCD and magnet retailers, thanks to my high PageRanks for those search terms.

That still doesn't really excuse the spammer who sent me two copies of their "Lighting Fixture Chandeliers Hotels Projects" message, though. At least they broke up the stream of identical messages "FROM MR GABRIEL NWAKEZE22".

MR NWAKEZE22's intriguing financial proposition was, to be fair, more appealing than the one from one David de Hilster, whose somewhat novel theory that Einstein Was Wrong (and that E actually equals MC cubed...) has, apparently, spawned a documentary pithily titled "Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year".

The documentary is "about a suburban house wife who takes on the icon of 20th century physics to see if in fact relativity is wrong", it's shot and in the can, it "has two Oscar-winning distributors interested in the project"... but it's still in search of an Executive Producer.

(By which they mean, someone willing to give them a lot of money.)

Other points of light in the river of mud have included:

One message with the subject line "hey [Unknown Tag *$rname* Please Fix]!".

A fake-watches spam which not only informed me that "Celebrities wear Rolex's" and "Millionaires wear Rolex's" but also that "Jesus would wear a Rolex".

Colon-cleanse spam which alleged "The longer your body is exposed to rotting food in your intestines, the greater the risk of toxic build up!" That text is apparently plagiarised from this patent application, of all things.

And, in conclusion, I'm also the proud recipient of an endless stream of bounce messages from stupidly configured mail servers, which assume that spam whose "From" line is "VIAGRA ™ Official Site <dan@dansdata.com>" must actually be from me.

These servers usually seem to be in the funny little two-character-TLD areas of the Internet - .ua, .fm, that kind of thing. And the addresses that're bouncing are usually more glimpses of the uncleaned grease-trap that is the average spammer's address list.

Just the other day I received three very helpful Delivery Status Notification (Failure) messages telling me that the messages "I" had sent to anal-sex@aluar.yu-yake.com, anal@inet.ua and anal@ua.fm had failed.

The icing on this particularly delectable cake was that the bounces - regarding addresses at domains registered in Japan, the Ukraine and the USA, respectively - all came "from" postmaster@adstechinc.com. That's a company that makes electronic medical records software, and your guess is as good as mine about why its name's being tacked onto farflung spam errors.

Posted in Humour, Scams, Spam. 2 Comments »

New frontiers in pseudoscience

8 October 2007 — dan

High-tech dowsing rods have a storied history.

Their reason for being is simple enough. You can't really make a lot of money by selling the regular kind of dowsing rod or divining pendulum, you see, since anybody can make their own from coat-hanger wire, a stick, or any old thing on the end of a string.

(Pendulum enthusiasts often seem to believe that their pendulum needs a bob made from some exotic mineral or other, but there's not a lot of money to be made there, either.)

But you sure can make a lot of money if you make a special technomalogical box with some lights on it and an antenna sticking out which does, in essence, the same thing as a dowsing rod.

Which is nothing, of course. But plenty of people believe in dowsing, despite the repeated failure of dowsers to actually detect any darn thing in controlled tests.

But people insist on continuing to believe in dowsing, especially if it's dressed up with modern trappings. So other people are pleased to make decorated dowsing rods and sell them, or just their special expertise, for enormous prices.

There've been a few high-tech dowsing doodads over the years. The Quadro Tracker, the DKL LifeGuard, various and sundry other "Locator" devices; the list goes on. Several of these devices have been purchased - or, at least, the their promotors hired at great expense - by business and governmental entities. Not once have these things actually managed to find human life signs under rubble (in the case of the LifeGuard) or... well, just about anything (in the case of the Quadro Tracker), but hope springs eternal.

South African ex-cop Danie Krugel's incredible human-locator, though, is a significant step forward in the modern scam artists' constant struggle to further improve their money-to-effort ratio.

You just give him anything from the body of a lost person - a bit of hair, say, with or without the roots that contain the actual DNA - and his magic box will locate said person, by means of super-scientific quantum GPS DNA resonance. Apparently his box can also find oil or, um, bacteria.

Many dowsers and pendulumists believe they can do their thing over a mere map, without having to actually go to the place where people are trying to find oil or water or the Lost Treasure of the Aztecs or whatever. Danie Krugel is running the same sort of operation; he's not leaving the house if you don't provide a camera crew (and, I suspect, a substantial fee...).

And, apparently, the money rolls in!

Some terribly cynical people have reached the conclusion that Mr Krugel's magic box is a bit of a rip-off. Ben Goldacre just commented on it; he's less than impressed with some recent uncritical coverage of it in the UK papers. Apparently Mr Krugel has located "traces" of the missing child Madeleine McCann "on a resort beach", and in so doing catapulted himself into the same exalted category as those "psychics" who make money by stringing along grief-stricken families and annoying the police. (Sometimes they manage to parley this sort of thing into considerable celebrity.)

This South African blogger is also less than entirely impressed by Mr Krugel. Here's her post about Krugel's performance on a South African show, mentioned in glowing terms on the above-linked Canada Free Press article.

In brief, he actually achieved such amazing feats as saying that the body of a girl abducted by a now-dead paedophile was somewhere close to the paedophile's house - the location of which was public knowledge. They went there, they "narrowed it down", they dug up an old dumping ground and found 101 kinds of random junk including some little bits of bone that almost certainly had nothing to do with the missing girl, they handed those bits of bone over to the distraught parents, then they declared victory and went home.

Every now and then, a psychic says a missing person is dead (and often that the body is "near water", a claim that could mean it's just about anywhere except the middle of the Kalahari...), but that person later turns up alive and well.

Even that, though, seldom seems to dent the psychic's popularity.

The vendors of techno-dowsing gear often make more definite claims about their equipment, which can lead to problems when it clearly fails to, say, find people trapped under rubble.

Danie Krugel's playing it smart, by hybridising psychic-detective claims with techno-gibberish. People who'd never think of retaining the services of a psychic may be more kindly disposed to his "scientific" equivalent.

(A few days later, Ben Goldacre wrote a Guardian column about Krugel, who did not distinguish himself in a phone interview. And the day after that, the Observer apologised, more or less, for printing such abject bullshit.)

UPDATE: A couple of years after I wrote the above, it came to light that a different version of these idiotic electro-dowsing-rod things has been sold, at the usual outrageous prices, to the Iraqi government. They use them to detect bombs at security checkpoints. Or, you know, to not detect bombs at security checkpoints.

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 2 Comments »

Yet more on Firepower

7 October 2007 — dan

I only now got around to reading Gerard Ryle's latest Sydney Morning Herald article about "troubled" gasoline-improving-pill company Firepower, and its "colourful" directors.

The piece is pretty much just an updated recap of the sordid saga documented in previous articles, but more and more of the Firepower principals' background is coming out, and it's entertaining stuff. The nonexistent contracts, fake tests, string of previous financially questionable fuel-saving companies and guys linked to Nicolae Ceausescu and Halliburton, we already knew about. But there's more.

Kitchen renovations and standover men! Child-sex allegations! And, less excitingly, the continuing slow turning of the gears of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which may finally see these swindlers thrown in jail.

Don't count on it, though. For every "high flying" rip-off artist that actually sees the inside of a comfortable minimum security prison for a few months, there are ten who just declare bankruptcy yet again and then head off in a "borrowed" private jet to their next important meeting.

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 1 Comment »

Ecowatts: Place your bets!

17 September 2007 — dan

Ecowatts doohickey

The "Ecowatts Thermal Energy Cell", according to the entirely reliable Daily Mail, produces far more output energy (in the form of hot water) than you have to put into it in electricity.

Ecowatts, according to the Mail, have the support of one Jim Lyons of the University of York, who is a real person with real engineering qualifications and says he's tested the device and been amazed.

Ecowatts say on their site that "the technology has been verified by UK Universities and Measurement Organisations"; needless to say, they don't go on to name any of them. There's not even a mention of Mr Lyons.

Ecowatts gave the University of York fifteen thousand pounds to do the research. The person they were listed as giving it to was apparently not Jim Lyons, though. I doubt this is a plain CorporateWhore situation, but who knows.

There's a lot of room for improved efficiency in most hot water systems. The standard arrangement in which a lot of water is made hot and kept in a tank waiting for use is bad enough. The fact that people then "shandy" the hot water with cold water when they use it for bathing is even worse.

But one place where efficiency really is perfectly fine is the point where, in an electric water heater, the element heats the water.

That stage, like all other electrical heating, is as close to 100% efficient as makes no difference. (A tiny amount of the input energy to a hot water heater element is lost, for instance as sound.)

So a device which, as Ecowatts say, "converts electrical power into heat at an efficiency significantly greater than that of a conventional immersion heater", is by definition an over-unity device. Being able to get "150 to 200 per cent more energy out than we put in, without trying too hard", as Mr Lyons says in the Daily Mail piece, takes the heater straight into the realm of practical perpetual motion.

Because I have a passing knowledge of the 100% historical failure rate of these sorts of things, I am completely certain that this newest device will fizzle out just like all of the others.

I'm hoping for a more dramatic denouement this time, though. Not just the usual sad bilked investors - I want revelations of corruption and academic arguments!

It probably won't be as much fun as Firepower, but it could still be good for a giggle.

UPDATE: The end of the Daily Mail piece mentions that this gadget was previously being hawked by a company called "Gardner Watts". I've found this piece from the Daily Telegraph which talks about it. It's from 2003.

Once again, the claims were apparently verified scientifically - by one Doctor Jason Riley of Bristol University, who is another real person.

And the claims were bigger that time. According to the Telegraph, the 2003 version delivered "energy gains of between three and 26 times what had been put in".

The 2003 Gardner Watts "cell" was going to be on the market "within two years".

But here we are, four years later, and still... nothing. All that time, and not one published paper, let alone a working product.

And not even a nibble from those cynical bastards at the Nobel Institute.

Posted in Electricity, Scams, Science. 7 Comments »

The amazing $125 sitemap

16 September 2007 — dan

Reply-To: peter.kramer@mplw.com
From: "Peter Kramer" <peter.kramer@mplw.com@gt;
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Sitemap File missing - http://www.dansdata.com
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2007 03:24:25 +0200

As I was on http://www.dansdata.com this morning, I was unable to locate a "Google Sitemap file" on your website.

I am not referring to a regular "site map" for people to visit online, but rather to a script called "Google Sitemap file" which helps Google to read and index your website overall content. I advise you to visit us online where we explain clearly what is a "Google Sitemap file" and what you need to do to get one: http://www.sitemapfile.net

A Sitemap file is a "script/code" placed in the root directory of your website which captures all the crucial information about your website, thus facilitating the crawling and indexing process for Google. We can set up your Google Sitemap file for $125 should you need help to do so.

If Google takes the time to publish a page titled "What is a Sitemap file and why do I need one?", it is obvious that every responsible online marketer should take action accordingly.
Read what Google says about Sitemap file and why you need one: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318

Regards,

Peter Kramer, Ph.D.
peter.kramer@mplw.com

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL: 1 (202)-787-3989 - FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.com:
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

Even if I didn't regard being described as an "online marketer" as a deep personal insult, it would still be my considered opinion that this service is a rip-off.

As other people have observed (after getting this same offer for sites that apparently already have a sitemap...), making a sitemap is likely to be a semi-automated process that takes about 15 minutes.

That makes $US125 for making one a pretty good hourly rate. Even before you notice that they're apparently offering four different and separate kinds of $125 sitemap - Google, MSN, Yahoo and "General". Only $375 if you order all four!

I can see nothing in the sitemap format that actually requires those files to be different for different search services. And since April 2007, Google, Yahoo and MSN have supported automatic "discovery" of sitemap files via a simple robots.txt entry. So you don't even have to manually submit your sitemap URL to get it noticed. Not that the submission process was ever difficult enough to justify a separate fee.

And there's more.

Global Vibration (insert joke here...) aren't even selling you an automatic-updating sitemap service.

As far as I can tell after reading their mildly illiterate FAQ, they'll just make one lousy XML file and then, I guess, charge you another $125 if you want more addresses added to it and aren't smart enough to twig to the fact that you can edit the thing yourself.

And, furthermore, dansdata.com has no need for a sitemap file, as a cursory examination of the site reveals.

The basic purpose of a sitemap is to make it easier for search engine spiders to find dynamically created pages that can't easily be located by just "clicking on links".

Web forums, for instance, are difficult to effectively spider. If you've for some reason decided to use a Flash interface for your site navigation, that'll also stymie spiders.

Google spiders all of the pages on Dan's Data with no trouble whatsoever, though. Google also discovers new pages on my site within hours, if not minutes. I used to manually submit new pages to Google just to make sure, but they show up in searches just as quickly if I don't.

Dan's Data also has zillions of incoming links from other sites. Even if I deleted my huge full index page and all of my intra-site links, most if not all of my pages would still be regularly spidered.

And I don't have any "dynamic" pages at all. Dansdata.com is a good old fashioned flat-file site.

That makes it painful if I want to change an element on every page - I have to re-upload the entire site, which at the moment means about 36Mb of HTML - but it reduces the load on my server. And it also makes the site trivially easy to spider, since every URL is simple and static and there's no half-baked Content Management System shuffling stuff around.

Dansdata.com has been around since 1998, and has a PageRank of 6. Oddly enough, despite the fact that Global Vibration claim to have been providing "Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999" (http://www.mseo.com/ and http://www.globalvibration.com/ have apparently only existed since 2001...), their own site currently has a PageRank of... zero!

I would also like to propose a General Rule of Credibility: Anybody who puts "Ph.D." after their name whe they're trying to get you to buy something is less likely to be on the level than someone with no letters after their name.

If I were uncharitable, I might wonder where Peter Kramer got his doctorate. I might also wonder what discipline it was in.

Posted in Scams, Shop talk, Spam. 4 Comments »

Pitter patter, pitter patter of the phish

31 August 2007 — dan

"Mjlawson29" is one of eBay's most famous users.

Search for most eBay usernames and you'll just get a few hits from actual eBay pages. As I write this, though, mjlawson29 has "about 537" Google hits, from all over the Web. Pretty good for someone who isn't actually an eBay user any more!

A cursory examination of those hits will reveal that mjlawson29's fame comes almost entirely from the work of a tireless phisher, who's been sending phish-spam about allegedly unpaid items from that seller forever and a day. I get one of them every couple of days, if not more often. Have been for months.

Apparently this phisher thinks this repeated strategy is like playing the same lottery numbers over and over.

It is, of course, actually more like approaching the same annoyed commuters every single day with the same story about how you just need money for a bus ticket because otherwise you won't be able to make it to your grandma's funeral this afternoon.

Mjlawson29 was a real eBay user, with good feedback, but isn't any more. It looks as if they chucked it in at the end of September 2006. Coincidentally, the first mjlawson29 phishing spam that someone bothered to post to Usenet is from the start of October, 2006.

It feels as if I've been getting these phishes for a lot longer than that, but I don't archive my spam (only so many hard drives in the world, folks...) so I'm not sure.

I'm inclined to suspect that the sudden wave of undeserved abuse generated by the phishes drove mjlawson29 away from eBay. But who knows; maybe they just decided to take up a new and exciting career in stealing people's logins.

Project Honey Pot has a couple of entries for the phishers responsible for this particular crap-stream, and also ties them to several other repeated eBay-name phishes.

Have you also heard from "babyphat96", "loriweiss", "nascar*stuff*" or "selectiveseating", over and over again? I know I have!

(Loriweiss was a real user but is now gone; I don't know whether babyphat96 or nascar*stuff* were ever real, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. Selectiveseating is real, and still trading.)

It'd be simplicity itself for these phishers to harvest a new eBay ID to broadcast with each phish-run, but instead they stick with just a few, and use them over and over and over again.

Now, you would get repeated messages from the same user if that user genuinely did think you hadn't paid them for something. But you wouldn't get 'em for a year. And, as I said the last time I mentioned the output of these particular phishers, sending the same spam to millions of recipients ensures that the identifying features of that spam will become famous.

Phishers don't want to be famous. It's like being a famous secret agent.

Posted in Scams, Spam, Strange Tales. 3 Comments »

The sad saga continues

10 August 2007 — dan

The slow death of the Firepower fuel-enhancing-pill company continues, chronicled as usual by Gerard Ryle of the Sydney Morning Herald.

The latest instalment of this somewhat predictable story tells us that Firepower's pills - which, they of course now say they've changed, again - contain naphthalene, as seen in some other bogus fuel pills, and the previously mentioned ferrocene. Neither of these ingredients does anything remotely approaching what Firepower claim, as you'd expect. And yet it seems that Firepower really do have quite a lot of money.

It takes so long to unravel these claims, and so little time for the people who come up with them to switch to a new scam. Serial scam artists can be positively famous, and still end up hanging out with leaders of nations.

Until the average investor learns more about critical thinking, none of this ever going to change.

Posted in Firepower, Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 2 Comments »
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