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Spam Appreciation Day

13 July 2007 — dan

I rely on spam for my daily dose of randomness. Whether it's the smattering of apparently genuine (or maybe just address-testing) messages about adopting adorable puppies on the other side of the world that I received a week or so ago, or the numerous opportunities to build a collection of Korean-made railway rolling stock, old freighters registered in Panama and, of course, Chinese pumps, the less common flavours of spam give my inbox a pleasingly gonzo edge.

Recent examples:

An outfit called ByteShark, previously chiefly notable for its very plausible claims of a cure for baldness, has now decided to become some sort of "visual content" search engine.

I think you're meant to be able to upload a picture from your computer and find Web pages with similar pictures on them, or something, but all the search seems to do at the moment is take an incredibly long time (while showing you an ad for the baldness remedy!), and then turn up a bunch of severely sub-Google-Images results. If you upload an image, ByteShark appears to be very good at finding other images that resemble it in no way whatsoever.

The best part about the e-mail, though, was that it was sent to me, because Byteshark had brilliantly decided that since dansdata.com is hosted by SecureWebs, I must be the contact address not for securewebs.com, but specifically for shop.securewebs.com, which is the server that delivers the little "Hosted By" image on the bottom of dansdata.com pages. Which ByteShark now indexes. Hurrah!

It's OK to play around with exciting new search engine paradigms. Just don't start spamming people about your revolutionary product until it can at least pretend to work.

(UPDATE: Just now, on the 24th of October 2007, ByteShark have sent me another copy of the exact same announcement message.)

Example two:

I've always enjoyed the interminable politico-religious screeds that some people spam. Fair enough; you can't wait for people to discover your 500-kilobyte one-page Geocities site when the fate of Christendom, or something, hangs in the balance.
Here's something I got yesterday. I hope you're sitting comfortably.

mr. dan,

I was looking for computer check meters, I got your message on google images, saying , the meter told me that and reached you,

here what I have written to a computer software specialist, same for you. In the last my complete introduction.

:

   Dear mr. mansoor,

   sql server magazine,



       I append below my general information for your kind perusal

   It was good to see the name, mansoor, as my brother's name is

   also mansoor and he is settled in southafrica. I would be glad to know your origin. I have a question,

    how to put a sign-in seal , that would create a link between a certain

   computer cpu, and yahoo. I have got many accounts closed. so I complained to hong kong arbitration centre.

   what do you think a sign-in seal means authorised access by yahoo

to a certain computer, and what if firewall is put on, will sign-in seal

be created, or we should remove the firewall first and then , sign-in

seal could be made. I was unable to put a sign-in seal, to prevent

password theft. However my password was
not stolen, yahoo company officials have been frequently closing my e.mail accounts.

I knew about yourself, that you are founder and chief technology officer of I S P R I N G. My introduction is appended below.

munsifrasool_007@yahoo.com

pakistan

My name: Munsif rasool, s/o Late ghulam rasool

surname:
Babbar,

comp. NIC NO: 41303-1480967-9 issued from Pakistan's

national database authority.

education: commerce graduate

Deasirs/mam,

I am munsif rasoo, aged 37, and former agricultural developmentbank employee. I worked for this bank from 17-5-95 to 30-8-2002. During my service tenure in the year 1997,98, I wrote some direct requests to the
authorities of bank for legitimate purposes, to which bank responded, and I got the due advantages from bank. In the month of februaray-2001, security guards of army run company called sms security, fought outside first women bank ltd, gul centre branch, Hyderabad, and they later got a complaint registered at cantonment police station, saddar, hyderabad. I was later removed from the service on the pretext that I defamed the image of the bank.

However, I explained my position with regard to all the allegations levelled against me, explaining that why would I go to a police station to get a complaint registered, so that image of agricultural bank should be defamed.

In the month of august-2002 some conspirators ignoring head office instructions issued to audit zone-10, hyderabad, where I was posted,

came up with old matters and turned them into allegations that I wrote direct
requests to head office. On the contrary matters of the past had settled in past.

The bank, outside where , sms company security guards made the hue and cry and made scuffle, are still in first women bank ltd, opposite , pakistan airforce recruitment and selection centre, saddar, hyderabad. And the woman named iffat bashir who was manager, at the time of scuffle outside first women bank ltd, gul centre branch, has now joined united bank ltd, of his excellency sheikh nahyan bin m,abarak al-nahyan. a renowned industrialist of abudhabi. she joined this bank in the month of april-2004. In the month of june-2004, I also received a letter from the head office of united bank ltd, karachi. The sender was one mr. shahid habibullah, div. head, hum,an resources. He said that my cv had been included in computer database, as and when opportunity arose , I would be contacted. I kept wandering around the UBL,
regional head quarter for three years, but I could never get the job of even marketeer.

Hundreds of people were seen in the two branches of united bank ltd, i.e. gul centre branch and civic centrebranch, but some terrorists started terrorism and they onceagain started to fight.

That I am a poor and orphan, I was looking for a job to support my research activities, and goons from mohajir mafia started to get jobs in this bank.

I received a valid letter no.ps/DH/RCD/278, 21-6-2004, for a permanent post in united bank ltd, but terrorists started to threaten me, and I started to send a case against this bank to UAE and the newspapers of other countries.

I have made hectic efforts to get my job in agricultural bank back, but nepotism, and hostitlity never go, and I became a victium of hostility.

my father was regional manager, Agricultural development bank of pakistan , he passed away in the month of nov.1991, my mother also passed away in the month of may-1995, and now after august-2002 I am on roads and streets to find a source of income. What it turned out to be later, I have drafted a complete report against the psyche of pakistanis in the banks and other govt. institutions, please read this report at munsifrasool_007@yahoo.com

munsif_55@yahoo.com, because when I started to send my report to the newspapers of other muslim countries , I started to find my e.mail accounts to be closed. Hoping that someone gracious, and generous will help an educated person.

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

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

STOP PRESS: Underpaid computer store workers are not very trustworthy!

11 July 2007 — dan

This Consumerist piece about Why Geeks Steal Porn From Your Computer (When They're Meant To Be Fixing It, If They Get A Chance), is both informative and entertaining.

Let me tell you right now that if I were 21 again and working in some dead-end computer store McJob, I too would be rifling through the files of any user who needed our help to install iTunes. Anybody who is even marginally surprised about this would probably be horrified to see the contents of the back-room bulletin board of the average one-hour-photo place before the advent of the affordable digital camera.

There are some good tips in the Consumerist piece, but I disagree with the assertion that "drive encryption on your home computer is worthless". There are many easy-to-use encryption systems which provide data security that'll probably defeat the National Security Agency, never mind some dude in a pot-leaf T-shirt. If you just use Windows EFS and hand your password to the computer store along with the PC then they can of course access your data (and ordinary users who use EFS often lose all of their data as a result...), but there are other very fine options for people who just want to encrypt their accounting data, passwords and pr0n.

Hell, just putting that stuff in a Zip file with a ten character password'll probably do the job. Standard Zip encryption isn't very secure compared with many other schemes, but it's still often not practically attackable from any normal human's point of view. If the password's moderately long and not a dictionary word, and the attacker doesn't already have a copy of some of the data in the archive (giving the option of a "known plaintext" attack, which is the major weakness of standard Zip encryption), then a brute force attack is likely to take a very long time indeed. Even refined brute force attacks are likely to take centuries on current hardware.

Learning how to use encryption software is a good step towards learning how to use the rest of your computer like a "pro" as well. Before you know it, you won't have to hand your computer over to Super Excellent Computer Store's Data Commandoes just because you can't get rid of some crapware.

Posted in Nerdery, Scams, Strange Tales, Windows. 3 Comments »

The whole Scout troop can use it at once

4 July 2007 — dan

Every now and then someone who's read the stuff I wrote about Swiss Army knives writes to make sure I know about the ridiculous Victorinox super-knives, the SwissChamp XLT (which is just about still usable) and SwissChamp XXLT (which is really just a showpiece, though every now and then you find one on sale for a surprisingly reasonable price because some store accidentally got ten in, thinking they were products a human hand could actually hold).

Wenger, the now-wholly-owned-by-Victorinox second manufacturer of "genuine" Swiss Army knives, would appear to now have one-upped Victorinox in the monster-knife stakes, with...

...the Giant.

It's only a thousand dollars if you buy online!

(I'm pretty sure that one of those big plastic shop-window Swiss Army knives with the motorised blades that slowly go in and out will cost you rather less than the Giant, and be just as useful.)

Posted in Strange Tales, Toys. 7 Comments »

Take care of the pennies...

30 June 2007 — dan

Drop shipping comes to the common man. (Via.)

Drop shipping, where A buys a product from B and B arranges for C, the actual source of the product, to send it directly to A, is a normal business practice for many online retailers. They may keep substantial stock of lots of mainstream items on hand, but their catalogue may also include expensive low-volume items that they don't want to sit and go stale in their warehouse.

A computer dealer may get hundreds of orders a week for hard drives and motherboards and CPUs, for instance, but only sell one video projector a fortnight. If they get eight projectors in stock and have only sold two when a newer, better, cheaper model comes out, they're boned. Better to not offer stuff like that for sale at all.

If the local distributor of that video projector has their act together, though, the retailer can just act like an order processor as far as that product goes, and get the distributor to send the product directly to the customer whenever someone orders one. This can also cause problems, of course, but as long as the retailer obeys the relevant consumer protection laws - just because they never even saw the product they just sold doesn't exonerate them from having to make things right if the thing turns up broken - everybody can, and usually does, end up happy.

So that's drop shipping as it applies to $5000 video projectors. This is drop shipping as it applies to 75 cent books.

And here's drop shipping for people who don't want to keep their eBay account much longer.

EBay is also absolutely jam-packed with people selling sooper sekrit lists of incredible low-priced drop shipping sources. You know - those special companies that sell things really cheaply to Masons, and Jews, and, uh, maybe the homos too - and to you, once you've bought the list! Makes perfect sense!

Some of those outfits are just variants on the multilevel marketing scam where suckers are tricked into paying for little more than the privilege of tricking other people into paying for little more than the privilege of tricking, et cetera.

Others, while they're very good at taking money from fresh-faced new drop shipping entrepreneurs, aren't so good at ever actually sending anything to a customer.

(I bet this post'll attract some really choice Google ads.)

Posted in Scams, Strange Tales. 1 Comment »

Stupid Claim Not True: Film At 11

29 June 2007 — dan

Here, the Bad Astronomer demolishes the ludicrous, but strangely popular, claim that our Sun is actually part of the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, not the Milky Way.

And so, uh, global warming is fake.

Or something.

(Ten points to anybody who posts a comment featuring an astrologer's point of view on this amazing Sagittarius revelation.)

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 10 Comments »

Embargoes, NDAs, and loopholes

31 May 2007 — dan

This Consumerist piece is a good summary of the not-terribly-secret world of the press embargo, which in the computer world manifests itself in those sudden snowstorms of online reviews that show up for each new piece of PC gear, all on the same day and nearly on the same hour.

There are, as the Consumerist piece makes clear, some perfectly valid reasons for embargoes to exist. But they're mainly just another way for the makers of news to control the journalistic process, just as the precious gift of "access" prevents journalists at White House press conferences these days from saying... well, anything much.

The whole embargo/Non-Disclosure Agreement thing has pretty much passed me by, since I'm not a worker bee for a big hardware site, and I always stick to the Never Sign Anything rule - which is also a good policy when confronted with forms that say that if the $20,000 devkit PlayStation 4 you've just been handed breaks while in your custody, you have to pay for it. Frankly, I'm surprised anybody ever signs those.

Anyway, here's my embargo story.

I broke the embargo on the Pentium 4, back in late 2000 when I was still working for the Dark Lord Murdoch.

Well, technically perhaps I didn't break the embargo, because nobody ever made me sign anything; I never even saw an embargo form, though I was of course aware that Intel meant there to be one.

What happened was, a new and exciting P4 computer (except not really, what with the low initial clock speeds and the Curse of Rambus Memory) showed up in our chaotic New Economy office. It was addressed and delivered to someone in the advertising sales department, let's call him Pete, who had no idea what to do with it, though he thought it might fetch a lot of money on eBay.

Pete asked the General Manager what to do. The GM knew I wrote reviews and so sent him to me.

I was pleased with my new toy.

I also observed that there was no Non-Disclosure Agreement form to sign in, on or around the computer's carton, and asked Pete if he'd signed anything.

He hadn't.

So I took the computer home, ripped through the review at warp speed, and published it on the Australian IT site, scant hours before the embargo deadline every other reviewer was sticking to.

(You won't find the review there any more, or anything else I wrote. That's because of the goldfish-like memory of various news.com sites, which I've mentioned before. The review's here on dansdata.com, though, in case you want to relive the days when 256Mb of RAM for a P4 cost one thousand eight hundred Australian dollars.)

As it turned out, there was an embargo notification included with the P4. It was one paragraph in the middle of the cover letter, which I don't think Pete ever gave me. Intel later agreed that a larger font size, and perhaps even investing in a colour printer, might have been an idea, while they revamped their system to make sure they didn't keep sending review hardware to ad men, graphic designers or the muffin delivery guy.

The review, as you'd expect, was massively popular... for the several hours it was up, before Intel Australia told us to take it down again until after the embargo time.

Since it wasn't exactly a Watergate-level story, we did. It would have been pretty funny if we told them to get knotted, left it up, and then sat back to see whether they refused to have any further dealings with the tiny and unimportant News Limited media channels, though.

Intel (or at least their PR people) weren't actually noticeably upset about the whole thing, so it would have been churlish to turn it into a big argument.

Then, though, a moderate amount of hell broke loose, with a few other hardware writers castigating me for not playing the game. One awfully famous fellow insisted that I simply had to have signed an NDA, most likely in blood, and then deliberately broken it, and was therefore a lying son of a bitch and could forget about ever seeing any links from his site to mine ever again. Until he forgot all about it, and all of the other sites he'd blacklisted for various other real or imagined sins, a year or three later.

I also received feedback from one of the hacks at The Register, where actual journalists work.

She said obviously The Reg would have run the story if they'd had the chance, and as early as possible too. What sort of pillock wouldn't?

You can tell a real journalist by the nicotine stains, the cirrhosis of the liver, and the refusal to treat PR people with the respect they don't deserve.

A journo's a pretty low form of life, but there are plenty lower.

Posted in Shop talk, Strange Tales. Leave a Comment »

Talk crap for money! It's easy!

30 May 2007 — dan

$10 Police Flashlight Hack! - video powered by Metacafe

There's some insight and a considerable amount of confusion in the LifeHacker thread about this video, so rather than tack a wordy comment onto the end, I decided to post about it here. And then it sort of snowballed. But first, the flashlight thing.

Yes, you can relatively easily upgrade cheap flashlights with a higher voltage battery pack and a cheap bulb to match. Grab any old Maglite clone, install 12 volts worth of cordless-drill NiCds and a 50 watt halogen downlight globe (or more), and you're in business (not much run time, but feel the brightness!). CandlePowerForums is an excellent place to kick off your new obsession with flashlights (or it would be, if it weren't down at the moment).

This particular project, though, isn't a good idea.

One commenter observed that the flashlight might melt, but I wouldn't worry too much about that; I reckon running a bulb meant for six volts from three CR123s will burn it out long before it manages to make the plastic smell funny. You're pushing the bulb to something approaching twice its rated wattage - filament lamps increase in resistance as the filament heats, so you can't do a simple V=IR calculation for higher input voltage, but the difference isn't huge over normal working power ranges. Double power will absolutely murder the poor little thing.

Surefire, in contrast, rate their filament lamps for 30 hours of life, and it's hard to find anybody who's had one blow that soon, even if they drop their light, hit things with it, or screw it onto a frequently-used firearm.

(Normal flashlight bulbs do not like being shocked while they're operating, as anybody who's ever hammered on a tyre iron with their 6-D Maglite and killed both the working bulb and the foam-padded spare will know. The Radio Shack bulb is rated for 15 hours, but that doesn't include dropping the flashlight. LED lamps, in contrast, are rather more shockproof than many other components of a flashlight.)

I'd be very surprised if the bulb in this "overclocked" flashlight lasted 30 minutes. 30 seconds would not be out of the question, with fresh CR123s.

But then, as I'd reached the above point in the writing of this post, I noticed that a couple of commenters on the Lifehacker thread said they'd done the hack and it worked fine.

So I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that Radio Shack bulb is just unusually strong?

Then, though, I clicked through to the Metacafe page for the video in question. And discovered that it had by that point earned (according to the Metacafe money-for-popular-videos system; I believe the origin of this money involves underpants gnomes) its creator nine hundred and fifty-six American dollars.

And it's not "Kipkay"'s biggest earner, either.

Even then, I could have let it go; it's not as if the guy's stealing from orphans, and what the hey, the trick may work.

But then I looked at some of Kipkay's other videos.

DVD Player Hack! - Click here for the most popular videos

The sum total of the useful information in this one, for instance, can be boiled down to one URL. But it's still made Kip $935 to date!

Trace Any IP Address Or Website! - Click here for more free videos

More than thirteen hundred bucks, for this one.

Let's ignore "the name of the IP address", Kip's instruction to use tracert when ping will do the same job, and the fact that at first glance he appears to be cool with the idea that the White House is in Boston. The major point is that geographic IP address locating cannot ever be more than vaguely accurate.

The site Kip suggests does its best, but it still confidently puts me 94 kilometres by road from where I actually live. It places the White House's IP address somewhere near the corner of P Street and 8th in Washington DC. That's only about a kilometre off, but the effective range of my RPG-7 is quite a lot less than that, Kip! Gimme information I can use!

Kip's got plenty of videos that're perfectly genuine, plus others like this one ($665!) that're borderline enough not to matter.

Make Traffic Lights Change!! Amazing! - Click here for this week’s top video clips

And this ($765!), while a complete and unexpurgated lie and probably plagiarised, could be classed as a harmless prank since it just gives people something to do while they wait for the lights to change.

And this one...

Potatoes Power My MP3 Player! Amazing! - Free videos are just a click away

...could be taken as a lame attempt to imitate the far more stylish (and, I think, rather less profitable) Mark Erickson, who, in case you're wondering, is not the same person as Kip.

(I still, however, think Kip should suffer one disfiguring skin ailment for every child who tries to build this potato battery and is left disappointed by Kip's lies.)

If I were very charitable I could even give Kip a pass for calling this...

Cool Ball Bearing Rocket! - These bloopers are hilarious

..."a new trick with ball bearings and magnets", despite the fact that the 2002-vintage scitoys.com page for the exact same thing has for ages been the number one hit in a Google search for "gauss gun" (which, yes, should technically be a coil gun, but never mind).

(Kip also rips off a #1-hit Science Toys page for this video. Oh, and he's not above ripping off Mythbusters, either. And he copies his floppy disk Enterprise from this four-year-old page.)

But then there's this...

HyperMiling! Plus Secret Trick! - A funny movie is a click away

...which starts with sensible tips and then slides into bullshit about acetone, which will absolutely not improve your fuel economy - it's another one of those strange phenomena that seems to happen less and less the better you test to see whether it's happening at all.

But hey, who cares about the hoses and seals in the cars of suckers, when Metacafe will give you twelve hundred bucks for talking crap!

And then there's this:

Does GOD Exist? The Eye... - The best video clips are here

Oh, and I choose my words with care here, for fuck's sake. This one's only made $157 to date, but that's about a million dollars more than this Pascal's Wager of the creation-evolution "debate" is currently worth.

(What's with the "100 years of [unspecified] Cray time" part, you might be wondering? That's because Kip can't even come up with his own Creationist claptrap, so what he's reading here was originally published in Byte magazine in nineteen eighty-five, and presumably republished without permission in some pamphlet Kip's pastor gave him.)

Getting back to nerdly topics, check out this one, billed as "You've seen it all over the internet but this is the original version!":

9 Volt Battery Hack! You'll Be Suprised... - The best free videos are right here

Well, OK, when I mentioned it in 2001 I didn't actually say that this was an emergency AAA-equivalent source. But I didn't pretend to have invented the idea, either.

I realise this isn't exactly an Ebert-versus-Schneider-level put-down. All Kip's doing is taking Metacafe's money for making videos for which people vote with their clicks. And it's not as if I'm starving in a garret or something; I for one would take Kip's money with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, but I don't need it.

But it's just so dispiriting.

I know that out in the real world the people who fix their eyes on the prize and do what's necessary to get it, bugger the consequences, are always the ones who end up sleeping like babies on mattresses stuffed with money. I get that. But I thought things might be just a little fairer here in the Internet fantasyland.

There are lots of super-cool people out there in the hacking, fabricating and doing-science-at-home communities. They're seldom in it for the money, which is good, because there's seldom anything other than a large negative amount of money in it.

But if you think Kip deserves the money he's made more than, oh, Matthias Wandel, there is something wrong with you.

And don't e-mail me if you do believe Kip deserves the money more, because I already know why you think that. You read books about selling, and you think the boy's got "chutzpah", right?

Bullshit artists with selling skills are Part Of The Problem. They sell expensive credit to poor people, they sell worthless remedies to the sick, they sell wars to whole countries.

The rest of us don't need you people, and I don't care what you learned when you got your degree in marketing.

The world already has an ample supply of bullshit, Kip. Give us all a break and stop adding more.

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery, Science, Strange Tales. 8 Comments »

How To Make Your Kid Grow Up Like Me

17 May 2007 — dan

The other day, I realised I could only remember two of the kids' science fiction series that shaped my young mind.

First and foremost, beyond question, were the Danny Dunn books.

I loved them, not least because they made a solid attempt at getting the physics right.

Example.

When people get shrunk to the size of ants in practically any other sci-fi or fantasy story you care to name, they carry on with their lives more or less as normal in their scary new world of bus-sized cockroaches and bean-bag-sized blood cells, or whatever.

Which is wrong, for the same reason that it's wrong that Superman is so often able to take a firm grip of one end of a battleship or something and lift it bodily out of the water.

We can accept that normal physics doesn't apply to Superman himself, just as we can accept that absent-minded Professor Bullfinch in Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine has indeed managed to construct the eponymous Machine. But Superman doesn't magically make the battleship as tough as he is just by laying hands on it. The ship is still subject to normal physics, so when Clark grabs and lifts he should end up with two large handfuls of torn steel, and look like an idiot.

(Image Comics did this right at one point, with the new and clueless Mighty Man trying to lift a car by the bumper and, of course, just ripping the bumper off.)

Anyway, when Danny and company get shrunk, they find they can't walk any more. Because, of course, the acceleration due to gravity is still 9.8 metres per second squared, and if you're scaled down to a thousandth of what you were, that now looks like 9.8 kilometres per second squared.

So if you're standing up and tilt slightly forward with the intention of starting to walk, BANG you're on the ground. Just like an ant would be, if it tried to stand on its hind legs.

You suffer no damage, since scaling down makes you tougher in scale terms, but bipedal locomotion is completely out of the question unless your body and consciousness are accelerated by the same factor by which they've been shrunk.

Which, in the Dunn stories and in all of the crappy Incredible Voyage/Honey I Screwed Up The Physics Hollywood versions, they never have been.

So there.

(Warning! This sort of thing can lead to long conversations later in life about the stability of the Ringworld, which is even worse than prolonged Monty Python quoting when you're at a party and should be meeting girls.)

The other sci-fi(ish) series I could remember was Norman Hunter's immortal Professor Branestawm series, which takes a lot more liberties with physics but is plainly doing so in the service of humour. Branestawm is more of a wizard than a professor; he'd be perfectly at home in Unseen University.

(The Branestawm books, or at least the good editions of them, were also illustrated by nobody less than W. Heath Robinson!)

There was another series, though, that I just couldn't pin down. I could remember it featured a family adventuring around the galaxy in an old spaceship, with memory implanting machines to school the kids, and the spaceship needed its engines de-coked in at least one book... nope, no useful search strings arising from those memories.

(I include them here so that now someone who can only remember the de-coking, or indeed decoking, or decoked or decoke or coke engines spaceship books, will find this post.)

Anyway, considerable Google-bashing finally reminded me that those books were the Dragonfall 5 (or indeed but incorrectly Dragonfall Five, frustrated searchers!) series.

All three of these series are significantly dated these days, but I think that, in itself, has more educational value for the kind of nine-year-old who'll find them interesting. They're all out of print, too, but seem pretty easy to find on the used market, and should be available from any half-decent library.

Posted in Books, Nerdery, Science, Strange Tales. 17 Comments »

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