How To Spot A Psychopath

Herewith, Wikipedia’s surprisingly learned article about Opposite Day.

(When it was nominated for deletion in 2005, only one voter was concerned that the vote might in fact be happening during Opposite Day.)

Our back deck ceased to be a restaurant for birds several months ago. I decided it was time to put out some seed again.

As usual, $US10,000 worth of brightly coloured beasties turned up shortly afterward.

Along with the usual Sulphur-cresteds and rosellas, this time we got a couple of galahs.

We’ve had a galah or two hanging around the seed before, but I never got any photos of them. They’re pretty birds, and relatively reserved when there are only a few around. Get a few hundred of them in one place, though, and they turn into one of the world’s premier sources of frivolity.

(”Galah” is also a somewhat archaic Australian colloquialism for a fool. The birds haven’t really earned that, but I believe the boobies deserve to have their complaint heard first.)

Galahs have a crest, but it’s not nearly as impressive as that of the Sulphur-crested. As with the big cockatoos, they raise the crest when excited.

These two got to spend quite a while with their crests up…

…because the bigger birds, as usual, insisted on pointlessly bullying them.

This sort of inter-species animosity is one of the reasons why conservationists don’t actually much like backyard bird feeders. An unnaturally large and reliable food source in one very small area forces different bird species to rub shoulders, and they never seem to enjoy that very much.

They never actually seem to come to blows, though. Even when the notoriously aggressive currawongs show up and start staring down the cats through the window, the other birds just give them a wide berth and come back later.

And now, I am pleased to present…

…a variable-geometry cockatoo.

Everything old is new again. It’s been years since I got any spam trying to sell me legal herbal smoking mixtures, but here they come again. But, this time, there’s a lot more to the scam than meets the eye.

“Legal weed” concoctions seldom have any more actual effect than does snorting a fat line of baking powder. They invariably, however, have names that make them sound as if just opening the bag and taking a sniff would blow Bob Marley’s head clean off.

This time, the spam’s trying to sell “Big Buddha Bud”.

Or, as I discovered when I searched for that string, perhaps it isn’t!

It would appear that the Big Buddha Bud spams were, a week or three ago, promoting thebudshop.hk. That server had a protean IP address, shifting from one address that resolved to a home broadband provider to another, minute by minute if not second by second.

That could only mean that the site was being served by a botnet.

And that, in turn, probably meant that the site’s only purpose was to harvest credit card numbers.

If, after all, you’ve got an online shopping site that can only be traced to countless virus-infected home PCs, why on earth should you bother actually sending anybody anything they’ve bought from you?

Thebudshop.hk is gone now, but thebudshop.net is alive and well. And its shifting IP address remains.

When I looked at it it a few minutes ago it was at 75.208.93.134, an address in Verizon Wireless’s allocation. Then it changed to 76.188.169.229, which is a Road Runner address. Then it was 63.131.13.17; that belongs to ChoiceOne, a bank! And less than a minute later, it resolved to 76.15.25.162, an Earthlink address. And then 76.247.75.67, which is AT&T. I doubt any US ISP will be left out, if I keep on checking.

(If you manually point a Web browser at any of the botnet IP addresses, by the way, you get an interesting little page that says “Coming Soon! Please check us back later… Ddos Protection by the leet boys ;)”. This is an interesting thread to tug on, if you’re after more information on this particular botnet.)

I had no idea it existed until this moment, but it turns out that this “botnet hosting” is a known phenomenon. It’s a brilliant idea, too! Why use your army of zombified home PCs only to send spam, when you can also use it to host the super-dodgy sites you’re promoting?

Botnet hosting seems to have taken great strides, as well. Sites like this are supposed to be flaky, but thebudshop.net looks rock solid (not to mention professionally designed!) to me. This botnet seems to be delivering the kind of super-distributed redundancy that major Internet companies dream about.

My spam had two high points today.

One of them was not the terrible news that the invaluable link directory at teksavers.com was REMOVING MY LINK OMG from their site because I had failed to respond to their repeated unsolicited requests for a link from this ancient motherboard review to http://www.teksavers.com/, with the title “Buy Sell Refurbished Cisco”.

I simply cannot figure out why I haven’t done that. Too late now!

Spam high point one was brought to me by the new wave of random-subject-lined replica watch ads, which seem to be sourcing their random words from a much more awesome dictionary than most.

My favourite so far is today’s masterpiece, “Rainbow Kaleidoscope Ice-cream Egg Magnet”.

I opened that message, hopeful to be given the opportunity to purchase this wonderful-sounding product. But all it contained was the usual link to an odd-named and inaccessible server where, I fear, no Rainbow Kaleidoscope Ice-cream Egg Magnet would be on sale anyway.

(The next one to arrive had the subject “Solid Prison Post-office Necklace Fan”, which sounds much less appealing.)

Later in the day, I received this pearler:

Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:04:47 +0200
From: “Igal K.” <igalkr@013.net>
Subject: Article contribution proposal to www.dansdata.com
To: dan@dansdata.com

I’ve stumbled across your site - www.dansdata.com and
I want to make you an offer regarding contributing uniquely
written Insomnia & Sleep Problem related articles to your site.

As you know - Creating unique content for your site is the only
way to get high rankings in Google and other Search Engines.
Copying Articles from Article Directories became obsolete
now that Google is penalizing sites with Duplicate content.

This is where we can help each other in a win-win partnership - I
have a staff of skilled writers creating articles about subjects
such as ( Just to to name a few ) :

      Insomnia Treatment Tips
      What Are Sleep Disorders
      Chronic Insomnia Treatment
      Sleep Aid Guides
      Sleep Disorders
      Sleeping Pills Help

The articles that I’m offering will be unique and were never
published on any articles directory or website, therefore you will
have the full benefits of a unique content that is published only on
your website - in Addition you have full rights to edit and tailor those
articles to your own liking and your website needs.

The only thing I want in return are 2 links pointing back to my
Insomnia Related site at the bottom of each published article.

So if you’re interested in my unique win-win proposal please let
me know so we can start helping each other get Higher Rankings
in Google.

Igal K.

You know how sometimes you click on a result for some obscure search or other, and then find yourself on a site with a buggerload of Google ads and some real actual readable text… but that text doesn’t contain any valuable information at all?

In fact, the text looks as if it could be customised, with a quick search and replace, to apply to any subject?

I’m betting that this is the sort of “content” that Igal’s “staff of skilled writers” are offering my poor little site, which with its miserable thousand or so articles and laser-like focus on sleep disorders is clearly in need of Igal’s assistance.

(Amazingly enough, I don’t think dansdata.com contains even a passing reference to insomnia at the moment. Usually, subject-specific spam like this comes to me because someone found the word “sauna” on my site somewhere and decided that I therefore must be interested in ordering a few container-loads of Chinese pre-formed hot tubs. Heaven knows how Igal came up with the insomnia connection, in the absence of such an obvious link.)

I suppose it’s possible that Igal really does have writers on staff. If that’s the case, I imagine they’re the inexpensive and quirky kind.

Igal’s a wily one, too; he doesn’t mention the URL of his special insomnia site in his spam.

But I’ll betcha any of you unfortunate enough to be searching for information on sleep disorders will be seeing Igal’s site soon. At least until Google catches on, yet again.

This Lego vignette/comic is funny, true, and an effective deployment of a microscale Millennium Falcon. I don’t think you could ask for more.

(See also the classic “I’m naked! No clothes!“)

Incidentally, the old #4488 Mini Falcon is a great set, and pretty easy to make up from stock pieces, though you’ll of course miss out on the big printed dish if you make it that way. The comic refers to the gigantic #10179 Falcon, by far the largest Lego set released to date.

Lego have really milked the old Falcon since they got the Star Wars license - there’ve been no fewer than four quite different Falcon sets.

There I was, innocently reading Engadget, when I struck this post about how “Exradia suggests that iPhones could warp brains”.

Exradia’s argument is that cellphone radiation is harmful (which is dubious at best, but let’s continue), and that the iPhone is particularly dangerous. That’s because the iPhone battery is not user replaceable (not without soldering skills, anyway), which means, drum roll please, that you cannot buy one of Exradia’s special after-market radiation-reducing batteries for an iPhone.

On the face of it, Exradia’s claims sound like poppycock.

Let’s assume that cellphone radiation is bad for you. Well, that’s a shame, because mobile phones depend for their operation upon the emission of that radiation. A phone that cannot emit pretty much exactly that same radiation is a phone that will not work. Wrapping your body in earthed flywire is the only option, if you insist on still using a mobile phone.

So I was interested to hear Exradia’s explanation of what their “Angel™ batteries” (available for all major brands!) were actually supposed to be doing.

That explanation can be found here.

Apparently, “Exradia’s Angel™ technology superimposes a random noisefield on the bio-effective man-made EMFs that are typically emitted by cell phones and most other digital wireless devices. With Angel™, the body (cells) detects only randomised signals that cannot trigger a cell’s response and therefore cannot be harmful to cells.”

I’ve heard much worse scientific word salad than that, but this still sounds like nonsense to me. Exactly how a battery is supposed to be changing the output waveform of the phone’s radio at all is a pretty big stumbling block; does the battery have its own antenna? If it broadcasts random noise in the frequency range in which the phone operates, wouldn’t the phone just turn up its own radio volume, if possible, to compensate?

I could go on, but I’m just speculating. The Exradia explanation isn’t clear enough for anything better.

Exradia’s “Bioeffects of EMF” page refers to a 2000 University of Washington study that found that microwave exposure fragmented DNA strands in the brains of rats. Apparently superimposing a random signal on that field was somewhat protective. Nobody else in the world has been able to replicate these results - quite the opposite, in fact - but that hasn’t stopped vendors of various allegedly-noise-emitting anti-radiation talismans from cashing in.

Hunting more info on this subject led me to The EMX Biochip™, and that led me… straight back to Exradia, who’re currently hit number 1 for “EMX Biochip” despite not having that string anywhere on their site. According to this page, Exradia bought “the EMX technology”.

What, exactly, the EMX technology actually is will remain a mystery, even if you read Exradia’s “Science Whitepaper” (PDF). Not the slightest clue is presented as to how a component in a phone battery can semi-randomise the radio output of a phone.

If the magic batteries don’t have their own antennae, all they could possibly do is try to inject RF noise into the phone through the battery terminals, hoping that it’ll make it through the circuitry to the antenna without interfering with anything or being eaten by other components (hint: that won’t happen), or find some resonant component before the antenna that can be used as an aerial in the absence of a proper one.

But here I am again, speculating. I’m forced to it by the vast windy wasteland that is Exradia’s explanation of what the hell they actually claim to be doing.

The Exradia technology page does go on to say “Angel™ has been proven to eliminate biological effects in all instances in which it has been tested in labratory research.”

If you’re now waving your hand in the air and saying “Ooh! Sir! Sir! I bet that research cannot be found anywhere on the Exradia site!”, then you get an early mark.

Everybody else now has to read this post on the Quackometer blog, which points out that Exradia seem to be a pretty serious business entity (compare the late and not very much lamented Batterylife AG), but which also expresses mystification about how the heck the Exradia/EMX technology is even supposed to be able to do the job they say it does. Never mind whether the job needs to be done at all.

The Quackometer blogger, Andy Lewis, managed to read more of the EMX intro page than I did before his brain seized up. He discovered that the EMX “technology” actually, on that page at least, claims to be influencing not the high frequency radio output of the phone itself - which, I remind you, is what has most cellphone danger enthusiasts hot and bothered - but the low frequency output (way down in the audio range) of other electronics in the phone, and the low frequency modulation of the microwave output.

Andy then makes the obvious point that if low frequency EMR is the problem, just squelching the small amount of it that comes from mobile phones is completely meaningless - every urban human is bathed in low level, low frequency EMR for most of their lives.

(And yet, when you control for other risk factors, even people who live under power lines - let alone the rest of us with our TVs and computers and clock radios - don’t seem to get any disease more often than other people.)

I was surprised about the whole low-frequency thing, because Exradia’s tech page specifically says “cell phones and other digital wireless devices emit man-made EMFs…”. If they were concerned about low frequency emissions, they wouldn’t have said “digital wireless devices”, which in this modern world all emit far more high frequency, gigahertz-range, radiation than anything else. And why would they have referred to that study of microwave effects on DNA if that wasn’t their concern?

So it would appear, based on the incoherence of the arguments presented for it, that the Exradia Angel battery is as silly as the Q-Link pendant (which Andy mentions in passing).

It’s not as obviously silly, and it does at least do something (power a phone). And I am grateful, don’t get me wrong, for the fact that Exradia never use the word “quantum”.

But the Angel battery’s special reason for existing is questionable, its ability to achieve that goal is doubtful, and even the people whose motto is “we think everyone should have one” (of course you bloody do, you’re bloody selling them) cannot explain what it is their product is even supposed to do.

[UPDATE: A few months after this post, Exradia ceased to be, joined the choir invisible, and screwed their creditors.]

Ben Goldacre’s latest Guardian column says horrible, hurtful things about the upstanding individuals at free-energy company Ecowatts, whom I previously mentioned here, and who’ve now gotten themselves publicity on the BBC.

Staggeringly, it seems just barely possible that they may be full of shit.

I’ll be disappointed if this really turns out to just be another “amazing discovery” that only appears so because someone didn’t buy a good enough multimeter.

I’m listening, for the first time, to Louis and Bebe Barron’s soundtrack for “Forbidden Planet”.

And then the MAKE blog lays this trip on me too.

…

I see now.

This world is not real.

The camera can see.

Let me help you see.

I will change you into the truth.

For years, it’s been virtually impossible to buy Nerf guns here in Australia.

Giant pump-up water guns? No problem.

But guns that shoot sucker darts or foam balls? Not happening. You could go to a discount store and buy one of those crappy off-brand guns with the one-piece translucent rubber darts, but if you wanted something from one of the major brands, you were out of luck. Well, unless you were crazy enough to pay four times the purchase price for shipping from the States.

I presume this was because some pressure group or other convinced all of the toy shops that sucker dart guns were responsible for the Port Arthur massacre, or something.

But I’m happy to say that it’s changing.

Why, just the other day, I successfully bought a few Nerf N-Strike Nite Finder EX-3s (one for my Toy Weapon Wall, the rest for the all-purpose Present Pile) for nine bucks a pop, on special at Kmart.

The Kmart catalogue promised that the much cooler Maverick six-shooter would also be on special, for only ten Australian dollars per unit.

But it was Kmart, so their stock as usual looked as if it’d been piled up by people with push brooms, and after you sorted through the mess you found that the thing you really wanted wasn’t there.

Apparently Target stocks Mavericks as well, now - but the nearest Target store to me is more than forty kilometres away, while Kmart’s just up the road.

[I’ve been there, now. They didn’t bloody have any either.]

The EX-3’s better than I thought it’d be. Surprisingly accurate, and the fake laser sight (a red LED with an adjustable lens in front of it) is cool, too. Like a proper laser sight, it turns on when you partially depress the trigger. Unlike a proper laser sight, children cannot damage their eyesight with it. And if you don’t like it, you can just not put batteries in the gun.

I still definitely need a Maverick, though. I think I can survive without the celebrated Longshot sniper rifle, but I would also like the Buzz Bee lever-action rifle and totally awesome double-barrelled shotgun.

(Kmart had the Buzz Bee Tommy 20 battery-powered submachine gun for cheap, too, but video of it in action left me underwhelmed. I’ve got rubber-band guns for when I want to spend far more time reloading than shooting. And then there’s this ridiculous thing.)

And yes, I’m aware that Nerf fans modify their guns for (much) greater power and accuracy, and apply amazing paint jobs. I can’t be bothered with the painting, and would rather keep my toys safe for kids and drunks to use than crank ‘em up by drilling out the air restrictors and installing an umbrella spring.

If you’re one of those eBay dudes who sells pre-modded guns, though, do feel perfectly free to send me one for review!

You never know when a Nerf gun with a hundred-foot range may save your life, after all.

Another outstanding piece of mystifying spam:

Join the Thousands of Americans GETTING OUT OF DEBT!

Be DEBT FREE in as little as 12 MONTHS.

Please visit the link below and get a free debt consultation today. NO OBLIGATION!

http://eurocasinobj.com/indexd.html

Euro. Casino. BJ?!

Why, that’s exactly the sort of URL at which I’d expect to find sensible debt reduction advice!

If you go to the root of http://eurocasinobj.com/, you find exactly what you’d expect to find - a casino site offering you a no doubt completely kosher $555 Welcome Bonus as long as you run the SetupCasino.exe file they want you to download.

http://eurocasinobj.com/indexd.html, on the other hand, redirects to the similarly mystifying URL http://heroesthai.com/, which is a generic Web-2.0-looking “Goodbye Debt” site.

And which, of course, is probably also a big fat scam.

It’s an example of the peculiar rule of thumb which states that people with little money are easier to scam out of that money than rich people. Actually, “debt elimination” scams take it even further - they screw money out of people who have less than no money to start with!

A search of the Federal Trade Commission’s site for “unsecured debt” is enlightening.

Sometimes the scammers claim that they’ll negotiate with creditors in some special magical way that a normal customer couldn’t, accept payment for doing so, and then just don’t do anything. Genius!

The more creative scammers come up with a line of bull akin to that spouted by “tax protesters“. There are a bunch of peculiar arguments in this category. Generally, they all assert that widely-held assumptions - like, for instance, the notion that it is legal to lend money at interest, or that when a person borrows money he personally now owes it to the lender, or that civilian courts are not military courts - are not true.

These arguments also have in common the fact that not a one of them holds more water than a tea bag.

The FTC’s actual advice to people who’re knee deep in debt is also useful. They advise debtors to seek out cheap-to-free credit counselling, and specifically avoid one-size-fits-all expensive “debt reduction” outfits.

Especially the ones with weird URLs.