News flash - Gasoline pills still a scam!

2 March 2007 — dan

I failed to notice that the Sydney Morning Herald summed up its previous Firepower coverage in this feature last Saturday.

There's some new info, too. Useless engine cleaning machines. Naming of the only identifiable active ingredient of the magic pills. The amazing revelation that the proudly trumpeted proof of Firepower's claims from General Motors, Volvo, Russian mining operations and so on does not actually exist.

Oh, and the fact that the principals allege themselves to be Jehovah's Witnesses, and have a glancing association with the extremely delectable Exclusive Brethren, on whose Australian activities the Herald has also been reporting on for some time now.

[This story turned into a whole big thing, which I've given its own category on the blog.]

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Science. 1 Comment »

1+3+1+3+2=55

15 February 2007 — dan

Joel Johnson, former glorious leader of Gizmodo, wrote an excellent column for them about the idiots who buy, and the idiots who write about, gadgets.

I didn't think I'd mention it here. But then a particularly egregious example of an unengaged-brain review slapped into my inbox.

ThinkComputers, you see, are very impressed with Brando Brando's 55-In-1 card reader. They gave it ten out of ten!

And why wouldn't they! It can handle fifty-five kinds of Flash memory card, after all!

The only teeny little cockroach in the banana split, here, is that there aren't 55 kinds of Flash memory card. Not even if you count old formats that almost nobody uses any more, and which this reader can't read, like PCMCIA and SmartMedia.

It's normal for card reader marketers to inflate product specs by pretending that it's remarkable that they don't just support CompactFlash cards from 1999, but also cards from 2006. Wow! That's two kinds of card, right there!

Yes, newer cards normally use some updated version of whatever the protocol is. But they're also backwards compatible with the old cards. They're the same darn thing as far as a reader is concerned. Motherboard manufacturers don't say you can use eleven kinds of hard drive just because the board supports every iteration of Parallel ATA, two flavours of SATA, and ATAPI. They tell you it's got PATA ports and SATA ports. Done.

Brando, however, have taken the number-inflation cheat to the extreme, dude. They've just listed every single name for every single revision of every single card format you can plug into their reader. They don't even mind putting down different names for the exact same thing, so they can count it twice. This is stupid, but it's even stupider to copy and paste that big indigestible list of formats into your review without at least pointing out how many real formats it's talking about.

So let's do that, shall we?

CF I
CF II
CF I WA
CF I ELITE PRO
CF PRO
CF PRO II
CF Ultra II
HS CF
CF Extreme
CF Extreme III
CF Extreme IV
IBM MD
Hitachi MD
MAGICSTOR

OK, that's all one kind of card. From a modern reader's point of view, there are only Type I and Type II CF cards; it doesn't matter whether they're one of those nifty-but-obsolete tiny hard drives or not (the last three on the list are moving-parts drives). And the only difference between I and II is that Type II cards are taller. Same pinout, same socket, not even worth calling them two cards.

So that's one out of 55, so far. Promising!

MS
MS MG
MS PRO
MS PRO EXTREME
MS PRO MG
MS DUO
MS DUO MG
MS PRO DUO
MS PRO DUO ULTRA
MS PRO DUO MG
MS PRO ULTRA II
MS ROM
MS MEMORY SELECT FUNCTION
MS DUO HS
MS PRO EXTREME III
MS PRO HS
MS PRO DUO MG HS
M2

I'll be generous and grant that the three different sizes of Memory Stick qualify as three kinds of card.

XD
XD H Type
XD M TYPE

OK, xD counts as another format. We're up to five in total now. Only 50 to go!

SD
SD PRO
SD ELITE PRO
SD ULTRA
SD ULTRA II
SD EXTREME
SD EXTEREME (sic) III
SD HS 150X
SDHC 2.0
MINI SD
T-Flash
Micro SD

Three sizes of SD, counting as three more formats. Total: Eight.

MMC
MMC 4.0
HS MMC
RS MMC
RS MMC 4.0
HS RS A15MMC
MMC MOBILE
MMC PLUS 200X

Oh, no - they're finishing weakly!

MultiMediaCard is just SD with no Digital Rights Management functions, so, at base, it only barely counts as a different card - though it is of course normal for card reader manufacturers to say that it does.

OK, I suppose it's fair enough to make clear to normal users that the reader can handle both SD and MMC. Let's raise the total to nine.

I'll once again be generous, and say that the Reduced Size (RS) version counts as another card type, even though (a) it's an orphan format and (b) it's got the exact same contacts on the front as standard MMC, so you stick it into the exact same slot on the reader.

So we're up to ten.

Once you winnow out the rest of the redundancies and separate entries for different revisions of the same thing, you're left with... nothing more. No old SmartMedia, no unpopular MMCmicro.

An unschooled consumer might assume that a 55-in-1 reader would have to be compatible with everything under the sun, but this is not correct. That's because this, to be generous, is a ten-in-one reader.

Which is pretty good going, seeing as it's only got five physical holes for you to put cards in.

Brando's product page links to some even lamer reviews, like this one and this one ("ever-changing memory paradigms", eh?). (This one's OK, though.)

Brando's store wants $US28 plus $US3 shipping for the "55 in 1" reader.

USB Geek, about whom I'm feeling guilty because they sent me some widgets to review about a million years ago and I haven't done it yet, have a slightly less flagrantly mispromoted reader for $US15, delivered.

If you can find something the Brando reader reads that the USB Geek one doesn't, and you care, then go on and pay twice as much for the 29736-In-1 Brando product.

Otherwise, though, please don't encourage them.

Posted in Scams, Shop talk. 7 Comments »

Sign here, and here, and here in blood...

8 February 2007 — dan

I was taken off guard when the white-shirt-black-slacks fellow at the door turned out to not be a Mormon (yeah, I know, those come in pairs).

Instead, he rapidly and cheerfully explained that I was eligible for a free month of electricity supply (which struck me as a bit odd - what if I decided to take up aluminium smelting during that one month?), and all I had to do to claim it was bring him one of our electricity bills to look at, then sign the piece of paper he had, which he explained was not a contract, absolutely not, nooooo, despite the fact that it looked very much like one to my untrained eye, what with the signing and everything.

He was really rather good. I didn't even have time to think of telling him to go and vigorously root a boot, even though that is my usual tendency in such situations.

He was representing Origin Energy, who have apparently been at it for a while (and yes, he was Indian - they come over 'ere, they take the lousy-paying commission jobs we don't want to do...). I don't know whether Origin are in the habit of doing Ombudsman-worthy things; this salesman certainly wasn't what you'd call frank and up-front, and the just-sign-this-it's-not-a-contract line is clearly illegal. I failed to record him saying it, though.

My sister, who is very polite and not very rich, was screwed over by one of these guys a while ago. He said the new phone contract would save her money. It, of course, did the opposite. New power reseller contracts in Australia are, I think, much less likely to be an outright rip-off, which could explain why there's not exactly been a blizzard of complaints (though Origin have apparently been very good at promptly cutting off the power to delinquent customers).

As a Stargate viewer, by the way, I find the Origin Energy Web site mildly hilarious.

"We'll be welcoming new electricity, LP Gas and serviced hot water customers to Origin. Hallowed be the Ori."

The Ori aren't the greatest of sci-fi enemies, but I suppose they'll do until the end of this, last, series of SG-1.

It's not as if the Ori do ridiculous things like killing off major characters with explosive tumours or something, after all.

Posted in Electricity, Scams, Strange Tales. 7 Comments »

Firepower mini-update

5 February 2007 — dan

As it turns out, the strange and suspiciously connected investment opportunity that is Firepower is, I'm happy to say, completely above board, and all of their products work perfectly.

Naaah - only kidding!

Actually, Firepower's magic fuel pills now seem likely to be the same thing that got another Western Australian company busted and (not very heavily) fined in 2003. And the guy in charge of Firepower was himself exposed as selling a worthless fuel pill in New Zealand back in 1992.

That last one must sting a bit, mustn't it?

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Science. 1 Comment »

PayPal money laundering scam

4 February 2007 — dan

Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 05:03:59 +0200
From: "GerX Man" <geremangere@gmail.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: transfer status

Hi. This is a very serious business, so, relax into your chair and listen. Do you here something? No. Of course you don't. Or, if you do, close your window and read carefully. You want money. So do I. I will send you money through paypal but each time you will receive an ammount from me you will have to send me back half. Let me know if we have a deal. Now I'm sure you can hear something. The money sound. To see that I'm serious I will send you right now $50 into your account. This time you won't have to send me back half. You can do whatever you want. You can geld your dog, cat, (if you have one), you can buy some crack (if you're narcotic), you can buy a Hustler magazine (if you're obsessed)... it doesn't matter. I will wait for your email.

And then, lo and behold, I did indeed receive a $US50 PayPal donation, followed by another separate message from, uh, GerX.

The payment, however, was not from GerX, at least as far as I can see. It was from one "Alba Lugo", who has an AOL e-mail account.

Clearly, Alba Lugo and GerX are the same person, and this is all perfectly above board, and I should go along with it and become wealthy. What could possibly go wrong?!

(I've refunded the payment.)

PayPal seem to provide no way for me to complain about this. You can drill down in their Security section to a place where you can complain about fraudulent transactions made on your own account, but there doesn't seem to be a way to complain about scam artists sending you money from other people's accounts in the expectation that you'll send money back to their accounts and... oh, my head hurts.

(If I try entering the transaction number in the complain-about-a-fraudulent-transaction-on-your-account box, I get an error, because it's not a payment that I sent.)

Posted in Scams, Spam. 7 Comments »

Dear $FIRSTNAME...

1 February 2007 — dan

I get e-mail newsletters from PayPal, who're bright enough to know that I'm in Australia and so should receive their specially pointless Aussie-flavoured newsletter.

Regrettably, they've now made a very serious, but quite common, mistake in these newsletters. They've made them look like phishing attempts.

Nearly every e-mail everyone in the world receives "from" PayPal is not, of course, from PayPal. It's from someone trying to send you to a PayPal-lookalike page and steal your account details. The second you see a non-PayPal URL in one of those messages, you know it's a scam, right?

Regrettably, PayPal have now retained the services of the unfathomable dimwits at "Tipping Point" here in Australia to produce newsletters that look like phishes. They're full of http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/... URLs, which just scream "Fake!":

Log in:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=373

Security centre:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=372

Help centre:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=371

Password help:
http://paypal.tippingpoint.com.au/emailer/emailer_ct.asp?eid=0&cid=57&lid=370

Those URLs actually do redirect to PayPal's own servers, but for all you know they do it via some underhanded wizardry or other. They're exactly the kind of links we're all trying to teach our dads and aunties to stay the hell away from.

And then there are links like the "Take me shopping" one, which bounce through a PayPal server to somewhere else. In this case it's merchantoffers.com.au, which belongs to PayPal Australia, but once again smells far too phishy to modern noses.

Lots of other organisations have made this same mistake. But that's not an excuse. It makes repeating the mistake even worse.

Tipping Point, in case you were wondering, are apparently "An interactive marketing agency strategically focused to deliver business-effective digital solutions that "tip" online customers."

Thanks to verbiage like this, Tipping Point's home page wank factor is a respectable 5.34. Most companies have moved on from the kind of corporate cant that the 2000-vintage Wankometer detects, but Tipping Point appear to be waiting for it to come back into fashion. The questionable book they took their name from is the same age as the Wankometer, by the way.

I hope PayPal aren't paying Tipping Point the kind of money you used to get in 2000 for crap like this.

Posted in Scams, Spam. 1 Comment »

The train wreck continues

30 January 2007 — dan

Astoundingly, "Firepower, the Perth-based fuel technology company, has ... admitted it is unable to produce some of the promised independent tests that showed its supposedly miracle products extend fuel efficiency."

(I'll venture the bold prediction that they won't produce any of the other promised tests, either.)

Oh, and the headline of the article is "Firepower link to dead dictator and former spy", which is pretty neat in itself.

(My first Firepower post is here.)

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Science. 3 Comments »

And on it goes

20 January 2007 — dan

If you've got a highly questionable investment to sell and are therefore in search of people with a remarkably high ratio of disposable income to intelligence, you really can't go past sportsmen.

And, in a procedure practically diagnostic of pseudoscience all by itself, Firepower have promised lots of really convincing test results that prove their claims but, so far, failed to deliver.

(In case you're wondering, "spruik" is a more-Australian-than-English word meaning "advertise", particularly in the context of making a sales speech to people passing by. Some Australian shops employ "spruikers", traditionally English (sounding...) people, to stand outside with a microphone and a little amplifier and encourage people to come inside. This is a parody, but it's a quite accurate depiction of the species. And it's also aimed at AWB Limited, the previously mentioned scandalously corrupt Australian quasi-governmental organisation that's loosely connected with Firepower.)

Oh, wait - did I forget to mention that Firepower's European chief executive was previously the head of Halliburton in Germany?

(First Firepower post here.)

Posted in Cars, Firepower, Scams, Science. 7 Comments »
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