How To Spot A Psychopath

LED lamps for standard low-power automotive sockets - things like interior lights, number-plate illuminators and brake lights - are now widely available and dirt cheap.

So I bought one, to see if it works any better than the standard interior light in my car.

There was nothing wrong with the standard interior light, but like a lot of low-power automotive bulbs, it’s offensively inefficient.

The bulbs used in cars for things like interior lighting and instrument panel illumination have as their two chief design goals cheapness and durability. Both of these goals push manufacturers towards very low-efficiency devices. And the standard “dome” light in the middle of the ceiling of most cars generally doesn’t even have much of a reflector behind its bulb, so something approaching half of the light just goes into warming up the light fitting.

So the dome light in my car looked like a fine candidate for LED improvement to me. Particularly now that one lamp will only cost you $AU8.98 delivered from Hong Kong.

(I got mine from this eBay seller.)

My car’s interior light uses the small 31mm size of “festoon” bulb, the kind that look like a glass fuse but with points on the metal caps on each end.

The 31mm form factor doesn’t give a lot of room for modern super-LEDs. You can now get 31mm lamps with a single allegedly-one-watt white LED in them…

…or you can go for the type I got, with no fewer than six surface-mount sub-1-watt super-LEDs.

There are also replacement bulbs that use a cluster of standard 5mm LEDs. They may be OK for things like instrument panel lighting, but you shouldn’t expect as much light as you’ll get from a single 1W LED unless there are at least a dozen 5mm LEDs in there. Even then, it’s doubtful.

If you don’t see a lot of yellow phosphor looking back at you, you’re probably not looking at a very bright lamp.

I gave the new bulb a whirl on my bench power supply to see how much power it consumed. Then I tried the same thing with the (rather old) stock bulb.

The LED lamp drew only about 55 milliamps (mA) at twelve volts, for a power rating of only about 0.66 watts. Raising the supply voltage to 13.8V - which is what you’ll get when the car’s running and the alternator’s turning - raised the current draw to about 105mA, for 1.45 watts.

The stock bulb has a nominal ten watt rating. From 12V it drew around 0.725A - that’s 8.7W. From 13.8V it drew only a little more, about 0.785A (this is because the resistance of light bulb filaments rises with their temperature), giving 10.83 watts.

I expected the LED lamp to deliver much more light per watt than the incandescent bulb, and it also gets a big effectiveness boost from only throwing light out one side, wasting none of it by shooting it uselessly into the dome light fitting. But this was still a pretty huge power difference. At 13.8V, the old bulb draws 7.5 times as much power as the LED lamp; at 12V it draws more than thirteen times as much.

It was pretty easy to install the new lamp, although it did turn out to be a bit longer than it was supposed to be, making it a bit of a tight fit and also making it impossible to install it perfectly level. It ended up tilted a bit toward the left seat, though not enough to make a huge difference to the illumination on the two sides.

To cancel out any side bias, I tested the brightness of the two lamps with my somewhat accurate light meter sitting at the base of the gearshift (and with the standard plastic diffuser in place, too).

The light meter is calibrated in lux, a unit that’s weighted to match human brightness perception. This gives the LED lamp another advantage, because the long-life low-temperature incandescent bulb gives very yellow light, while the LED lamp gives the characteristic blue-white of “white” LEDs. The blue-white has more energy around the green frequencies where human vision works best, so a given raw energy level of yellow-white light will appear dimmer, and read lower on a luxmeter, than the same energy level of blue-white.

Anyway, the stock bulb gave a reading of about six lux with the engine off (13V), and about nine lux with the engine running. Not a bad illumination level, given that it was being measured quite a bit lower than the place where you’d typically be, say, holding a map you were trying to read.

Swapping in the LED lamp gave… exactly the same readings!

My light meter isn’t terribly accurate down in the single-digit lux, so I won’t swear to you that there wasn’t actually a bit of a difference one way or the other. But there clearly isn’t a huge difference. And the new lamp, subjectively, lit up the cabin of the car just fine. Despite drawing around a tenth as much power.

This sort of thing can make a big difference in certain circumstances. If, for instance, you have a typical small car battery with about 25 amp-hour capacity before it starts getting very unhappy, a ten-watt interior light will drain it in thirty hours. Swap to a one-watt LED lamp and you’ll probably still be able to start the car even if you leave the light on for ten days.

This doesn’t matter much for normal automotive interior lighting, but if you’ve got a caravan or motor home or something that has a lot of friendly yellow incandescent bulbs in it, it could be a very good idea to swap them for the new cheap LEDs.

I hope you don’t need me to tell you whether there’s any reason to buy those Kinoki, and various other, “detoxification” patches which you’re supposed to stick to your feet.

Yes, they go all black and stinky if you stick ‘em on your feet for a few hours; that’s supposed to be evidence that they’ve sucked heavy metals, carcinogens, parasites, body thetans and poltergeists out of the soles of your feet, by some means unknown to science that apparently has something to do with “bamboo vinegar”. Or tourmaline. Or fairies.

Fortunately for the continued survival of every human on the planet, skin is not a semi-permeable membrane. So the stuff the patches are supposed to be extracting cannot pass through the skin at all, unless you’d be sweating it out anyway. And why any of that stuff would be attracted to a vinegary pad is also left unexplained.

(Oh, and then there’s the fact that the substances allegedly being extracted are probably not present in your body in quantities sufficient to turn anything black in the first place. The alternative-medicine kind of “detoxification” is, in brief, a big fat scam.)

Similar pads turn brown if you just pour some tap water on them, because they contain a powder that goes nasty when it gets wet. They’re like those “ionic foot bath” things (which have even more hilarious advertisements!), that go just as brown and yucky even if you don’t bother to put your feet in them.

All of this means I wouldn’t even bother to mention the darn foot patches, were it not for a post I just read on the excellent Hanzi Smatter.

As anybody familiar with that blog will know, there’s only one way to get mentioned there.

And yes, it turns out that the kanji the Kinoki company have chosen to put above their company name doesn’t really mean much.

“Wood tree sap”, if anything.

In no language do those kanji sound like “ki-no-ki”, and they are also not the name of some ancient Japanese herbal concoction.

The “wood tree sap” interpretation makes some sense, since the modern “detox” pads are apparently just the descendants of humble de-odorising pads which also contain “bamboo vinegar”. Bamboo vinegar is not actually tree sap; it’s an acidic liquid which is a byproduct of bamboo charcoal production. Like normal vinegar, it’s got acetic acid in it (so I’d hazard a guess that any significant amount of it on your feet wouldn’t actually smell that great), but it’s the product of pyrolysis of bamboo, not fermentation.

(If you dry-distil wood in the same way, you get “wood vinegar“, a very similar substance which was once a commercial source of acetic acid. To my knowledge, no carpetbagger has gotten around to saying wood vinegar is good for what ails you as well - but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. Pyrolisis of wood will also yield methanol; chug enough of that and all of your problems will be over!)

Bamboo vinegar works - or, at least, can in theory work - as a deodorant because it’s about as acidic as normal vinegar, and most bacteria can’t cope with that low a pH. Hence the effectiveness of vinegar pickling. But bamboo vinegar is not the “juice” or “sap” of the bamboo in any normal sense, any more than coal tar is the “sap” of coal. And nobody’s demonstrated that it has any particular medical utility.

That doesn’t stop the foot-pad people from implying there’s some sort of mystic Eastern wisdom involved in their magical detox stickers, though.

Australia is not alone in having some pretty hilarious copyright laws. But the Australian Copyright Council site presents some quaint little variations on the common themes which have just given me considerable entertainment.

The ACC’s a non-profit company, largely government funded, whose purpose it is to provide Aussies with advice about our somewhat dotty local copyright laws. Their information sheet on “home taping” (the Australian government hasn’t quite noticed hard disk video recorders yet) is about as straightforward as I reckon it could be (PDF here). It makes clear that the ACC’s as bewildered by the current legislation’s weirdness as all the rest of us. Fair enough.

But that weirdness seems to be leaking out, into the ACC’s own brains.

I can’t really say I’m surprised. Get this, for instance:

Here in Australia, it is currently legal to make exactly one backup copy of software which you have purchased, as long as there’s no copy protection on that software, because Australia now has DMCA-ish anti-circumvention laws.

So far, so (relatively) sane.

But you’re not allowed to back up anything but the actual program files.

To quote the Australian Copyright Council Information Sheet on that subject (PDF here), “you would be entitled to make a backup copy of a disk or CD-ROM that only contained computer software, but not a disk or CD-ROM that included other copyright material, such as a computer game, music, text or images” (emphasis mine).

So, apparently, you can copy anything that ends in .exe or .com off your program disc… but nothing else. Not even the readme file.

Which means, going by what they seem to be quite clearly saying, you can’t actually make any kind of real backup of something like a game disc, which these days is likely to contain only a few per cent of executable code by volume, the rest being taken up by the all-important graphics and sound data, without which the game will not work.

Actually, it’s likely to be impossible to legally back up anything but the installer program on most game discs, since the rest of their content is likely to be a few giant compressed files containing all of the stuff which the installer unpacks and copies to your hard drive. Some will be “software” by the copyright-law definition; most will be “other copyright material”, and you probably can’t separate them. Not that it’d be worth doing if you could.

Thinking about this sort of thing on a day-to-day basis appears, as I said, to have affected the Australian Copyright Council’s grip on reality.

I base this assessment on the fact that they forbid the world to directly link to any of their information sheets, or apparently even to any of their Web pages, unless you ask first.

So, because I’m sad to say I neglected to ask them (what if they said no?!), I was not in fact allowed to do this. Or indeed even link, without asking, to the page that forbids you to link to pages without asking.

People all over the world have been laughing about stupid linking policies since long before the Stupid Linking Policies site was established in 2002, but the darn things just keep popping up. They’re legally ridiculous and don’t even serve a social function, since anybody can tell in a matter of seconds who’s linked to them (well, as long as someone’s clicked the link) by just looking at their server logs, or using Google Analytics or any of a zillion other Web stats services. So you don’t even need to put a “if you link to me, please send me an e-mail” note on your site, much less angrily FORBID people to link to you unless you’ve explicitly permitted it.

You’re also, by the way, not allowed to print more than one copy of any of the ACC’s documents, without asking them for permission.

So if you print a copy and lose it, remember to ask before printing another one!

I suppose this is marginally better than the companies that refuse the world permission, under any circumstances, to link to all but one of the various pages which they carefully and deliberately made available for the world to see on the Web server they carefully and deliberately connected to the Internet, and didn’t even “protect” with a cockamamie page of legalese with an “I agree” tickbox at the bottom.

(It is, of course, also easy to make your Web server refuse deep links. If you don’t, then I suggest that you must not actually be terribly serious about FORBIDDING them, no matter how many capital letters you use).

But the Australian Copyright Council are supposed to be staffed by “experienced specialist” intellectual property lawyers. And yet here they are pretending that it’s possible to forbid people with whom they have no contractual relationship at all from downloading a file from their Web server without clicking through from the front page.

(And they’ve been doing it since 2006. Back then they said “Please ask us before linking to this website so that we can tell you about our URL and descriptors policy”. That’s less rude, but no less dumb.)

If someone’s harvesting content from your site and presenting it as their own, or hotlinking your images, or even just framing your whole site within their own (has anybody actually done that since, like, 1998?) then you have grounds for complaint, at the very least.

But “link policies” are like putting a statue in your front yard and then telling passers-by to sign a contract before they look at it.

My advice to people considering a linking policy: Mix it up a little. How about forbidding people from viewing your source code, linking to any page on your site or even mentioning that your site exists?

Awesome!

Remember those lame Internet filters which my faithful readers helped the smut-hungry youth of Australia to dismantle, last year?

Well, the whole taxpayer-funded content-control software handout program has now officially been declared (by Australia’s new Federal Labor government) to be a miserable failure.

Apart from the fact that the NetAlert packages were quite easy to get around, it turned out that nobody actually very much wanted them.

The Government predicted that 2.5 million households, about 31% of the whole country, would want their free copy of one or another of the packages (which they’d paid for with their taxes already, of course).

As it turns out, they got a grand total of 144,088 CD orders and downloads.

And not all of the people who got the filter software bothered to use it. The ridiculously-named government department responsible says only about 29,000 of the packages were actually installed.

That’s 1.2% of the target, for those of you keeping score at home.

The total price of the software filter scheme was 85 million Australian dollars. That’s about $US78 million, at current exchange rates.

So this software ended up costing the taxpayer about $AU2930 ($US2685) per installed unit.

A copy of Net Nanny will cost you $US27 from Amazon. That’s almost exactly one per cent of the effective price of the “free” software.

All that, to stop red-blooded Aussie kids from seeing boobies and doodles.

But have no fear - the new Federal government is much more sensible! They enthusiastically explain that their own very expensive scheme to implement “mandatory ISP-based filtering to deliver a filtered feed to all homes, schools and public internet points” will work far better. You know, just as it has in the other countries that’ve implemented secret Internet blacklists which, in effect, accuse lots of random innocent people of being child pornographers.

Never mind that, despite more than $15 million worth of advertising (including a booklet sent to every household in the country), it is now demonstrable that approximately three-fifths of bugger-all Australians have any interest in filtering their own Internet connection.

No, never mind that. We must be protected from filthy filthy porn, whether we want to be or not!

This is all more evidence that, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t matter whether censorware works. Which is good, because it generally doesn’t.

The purpose of censorware is not to Protect The Children, but to get some people elected and keep other people employed.

DVD Jon’s new application DoubleTwist looks completely awesome. I don’t think it really does anything that you couldn’t do before with umpteen tweaky utilities, but it aims to do it all in one simple program.

So I was all ready to download the beta and start freeing all of my DRM-ed media files from their corporate shackles… when I suddenly remembered that I don’t have any DRM-ed media files.

I’ve got some DVDs, but they seem pretty happy where they are.

If you’ve got audio, video or even photos (on a stupid locked-down cameraphone, for instance) that you’d like to move somewhere else but can’t, though, check DoubleTwist out.

The Tyco N.S.E.C.T. Robotic Attack Creature comes - or came, since it’s now discontinued - in two colours, and two frequencies.

Oh. Yeah.

I am, I assure you, perfectly aware that I am now required to make them fight.

I will do so, and of course make video of the result available to you, as soon as I find another radio-control warrior worthy of me.

(The real problem is getting copyright clearance for the only possible soundtrack.)

I know what you’re wondering. You’re wondering how many penis-pill spams I get per hour.

Well, gentle reader, it varies, depending on the time of day, from about six to about fifteen.

Per hour.

For some weeks now, the most popular ones have had subject lines that always contain a name, a word vaguely denoting bigness, and a word vaguely donating a dickish object, in various arrangements.

Some of the words for “big” are particularly entertaining. Actual subject lines I’ve seen include HoracioObviousFuckstick, BouffantPenisRosetta, and ClarkOverlargeBodypart (overlarge?).

(The penis I’ve been promised has also been described as “spacious”. I’m sure “massive” has been in there, too - though “sturdy” and “fearsome”, sadly, remain unused.)

The body of these messages always includes another of the three-word portmanteaux, followed by the URL of a Web site. There are many such sites - calormontes.com, grayskues.com, janeoplane.com, jeroneus.com, junioeres.com, planesjanes.com, razkoesu.com and slopitues.com were all promoted in one day - all registered with nonsense details to Some Dude In China.

All of them currently give you the same site (on, I think, the same physical server), promoting a product allegedly called “VPXL” from a company allegedly called “Express Herbals”.

The VPXL/Express Herbals guys are the source of the vast bulk of my dick-pill spam, and I bet they’re the source of most of yours, too, if you’re not using an airtight spam filter.

(I’ve got three active e-mail addresses at the moment. The filtering on my iiNet account lets through zero spam but no doubt bounces a few valid messages; I only use it for a few mailing lists and occasional personal messages, though, so that’s fine. I’ve also got an old Optus account I hardly ever use for anything, which is almost as well filtered; only a few spams a day get through there. And then there’s dan@dansdata.com, messages to which get an “X-Spam-Tests-Failed:” header tacked on by m’verygoodfriends at SecureWebs who host Dan’s Data, but are very minimally filtered by them, if they’re filtered at all. Hence: Spamvalanche!)

Like the previous fake marijuana spams, the VPXL ones come to you courtesy of a botnet - a huge collection of virus-infected home computers on ordinary Internet accounts, identifiable because the sending IP addresses for the spam vary widely but always belong to some ISP or other that serves the home-user market.

The botnet this time is called Mega-D, and it has the interesting quality that its infected machines almost all seem to be in non-English-speaking countries. (The previous Storm-botnet spam overwhelmingly came from the USA.)

The VPXL dudes now seem to be shifting away from the three-word spams. In one 155-minute period earlier today I received:

One VPXL spam directly promoting http://polierin.com/; it came from a codetel.net.do IP address (Dominican Republic).

One VPXL spam with an “I’m Feeling Lucky” Google link (http://google.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l&ai=acetate&num=137336094&adurl=http://clinrie.com?446) that takes you to the spammers’ site, in this case clinrie.com. The spam came from 58.19.232.188, a China Network Communications Group Corporation IP address.

One for jilafen.com from 80.146.114.212, a Deutsche Telekom address.

One for nidegnero.com from 201.19.74.24, a probably-Brazilian IP address.

And another variant, whose body text said “Pls Go ‘ www.redmehs ‘ dot com”; redmehs.com is VPXL yet again, registered to Chinese nonsense yet again. This one came from 68.118.233.112, though, which is an IP address belonging to Charter Communications in the USA.

There was exactly one spam that actually mentioned VPXL in the text of the spam - but it was malformed, with no actual link to anywhere you could buy the product. It came from 92.112.20.89, belonging to Ukrtelecom in the Ukraine.

And then there were a couple of the classic three-worders, one from Peru and one from Chile, both promoting zhbvdiaeg.com.

And then there was yet another variant, from a Colombian IP address and promoting http://geocities.com/kathydowns889/, which is a redirector page that sends you to neverwaitons.com, another facade for the Express Herbals server.

The runners-up in the dick-pill spam-flow are the “Canadian Pharmacy” type (the sites are usually subtitled “#1 internet online drugstore”). The most prominent products on these sites are, of course, always erectile dysfunction drugs. Which you almost certainly will not actually receive if you place an order.

In my 155-minute period I got one promoting marquitamontemurrodd.blogspot.com, which redirects to a Canadian Pharmacy site at putwish.com, which is registered to a pile of Chinese nonsense that closely resembles the standard VPXL-domain registration nonsense, leading me to suspect they’re related. The spam came from 220.128.197.130, some Taiwanese mail server.

And then there was one that directly promoted canocaw.com, “Target Pharmacy”, registered to more Chinese nonsense and also billed as “#1 Online Pharmacy Store”, and looking much the same as the “Canadian” version. The sender was 84.108.33.6, belonging to Bezeq International in Israel.

Another one promoted tamilacyg.blogspot.com, which redirected to another “Canadian Pharmacy” at pha-cana.com, an unusually comprehensible domain name for these guys. More Chinese rego details; spam sent from 82.54.82.43, Telecom Italia.

And one promoting ruoedi.kiltyale.com, which is “World Pharmacy”, which looks a bit different from the Canadian and Target varieties. Kiltyale.com is registered to marginally more real-looking Chinese details than the other pharma-sites, but the spam came from 190.156.83.182 in Colombia, which suggests the Mega-D net again.

And then there was one promoting the entirely genuine-sounding URL http://gbcdelmafhjk.filmplenick.com/?iafhjkxowptygzchcmbcdelm, which is a “Viagra + Cialis” site calling itself “VIP Pharmacy“. Filmplenick.com is registered to a US address, so even though this was another spam from a South American IP address, I suspect it’s not the same people as “Canadian” and “Target”.

And then there was one for www.onthebob.com, a site that’s regrettably down right now - one of only two pharma-spams whose promoted sites didn’t work - and which is registered to pointless details in Brazil rather than China, suggesting that the culprit is different again. The spam came from 60.242.181.54, which is a TPG Internet IP address right here in Australia.

The other complete failure had the subject “Hydrocodone, Vicodin, Phentermin, we are 100% reliable pharmacy retailer cufqev21ph”, and advertised gop.uhthclrenewed.com, which is down (so not quite 100%, I guess). Actually, the uhthclrenewed.com domain isn’t even registered as I write this, so spamming about it would appear to be slightly premature. This spam originated from 66.228.248.134, belonging to the gloriously titled “Park Region Mutual Telephone Co. and Otter Tail Telcom” in the USA.

On top of these, I got one ad for pohfrensei.com, selling the entirely non-icky product “WonderCum”. This is the VPXL people again; that domain is registered to more Chinese nonsense, and WonderCum and VPXL are often sold - or complained about - on the same sites. This spam came from a BT Total Broadband IP address in the UK, though.

(The VPXL people have also been responsible for “Elite Herbal”, “Manster”, “ManXL” and the delightfully understated “Megadik”.)

There was also one quit-smoking spam advertising something called LiveFree at www.celarpo.com/f/. That’s probably unrelated to the dick-pills people; the domain is registered to someone allegedly in the USA, and the spam came from 201.226.17.2, somewhere in South America.

I also got one sad little “RE: February 88% OFF” (the number varies - in one mail check a while ago I got eight different “discounts”…), allegedly from “admin@viagra.com”, with a link to a broken redirector. Presumably that’s the remnant of an older botnet, still spamming sporadically away with out-of-date info.

Along with all of the above, and not counting the spams not in English that I couldn’t figure out, my 155-minute period netted me nine casino spams (including four copies of “RE ORDER Casino”), six offers of business loans, two counterfeit-watch spams, five counterfeit-other-things spams (four were in Asian character sets, but “Gucci” and “Tiffany” stood out in the headers…), two “offshore printing service” spams (I’ve been getting those for a while), one fake-lottery spam, two eBay phishes, and exactly one of those magical messages that’s nothing but the bare minimum headers needed to get it to you, with no subject, To: line or body.

Yes, I have thought about just redirecting all of my mail through Gmail or something so that I won’t smell this constant tide of manure any more - even if all it can do is slap up against my MailWasher deletion queue. I doubt Gmail filtering would be any worse than what I’m doing now - I may be manually scanning over the headers of my mail, but I’m sure I’ve failed to notice valid mail and deleted it anyway.

But there’s a sick fascination to doing it this way.

It’s interesting to see the sheer quantity of repeato-spam. You don’t get to appreciate the magnitude of the problem - sucking up Internet bandwidth, server power and the money you pay for Internet access - if you hide behind a filter.

The current repeato-spam onslaught is, I think, created by the distributed botnet senders. Botnets are a great way to spam, but they have no way to coordinate their sending lists.

Spammers never prune their mailing lists anyway, and I do know that one should never underestimate the stupidity of spammers, but I think even the dumbest modern mass-mailing software ought to be able to avoid sending the same spam to the same recipient twelve times in one run. If you’ve got thousands of zombie PCs sending your spam independently, though, it becomes much harder to prevent the same recipient getting (essentially) the same message over and over and over in a short period of time, because none of the individual bots know which other bot has sent which message to which recipient.

This is probably why I got three copies in quick succession of “AGF has an exellent opportunity for you! Australia”, plus one “AGF is a smarter way to money! Australia”, three “New part time job - good salary in Australia”, one “Work with us today - earn money today!”, one “AGF company helping individuals in business online” and one “it is your new job possible!”. All in the course of, I don’t know, maybe three hours.

I suppose someone’s dotty email-forwarding great-aunt might think this just meant these people were really really eager to find new employees. But super-repeato-spam like this, and like the three-word dick-pill tirade, ought to have some negative effect on the message’s credibility to even the most cretinous of other recipients.

Another attraction of paying (at least a little) attention to incoming crap is that you get to see how much of it, as in this case, resolves to just a very few senders.

If someone found, and dealt with, in one way or another, just the VPXL spammers, the total volume of spam in the world might well drop by a double-digit percentage. It’s not often that crime prevention has such a definite monetary payoff; since spam costs the world tens of billions of dollars a year, you could easily save a sum equal to the Gross Domestic Product of an African nation by shutting down just one major spam-group, as long as another didn’t rise up to take their place.

And that might well not happen, if we establish just a little deterrent value. First World nations need to crack down on spam more effectively, and Third World nations need to realise that spammers are (a) rich and (b) probably all pudgy and easy to rob, ‘cos they spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer.

Legal prosecution would be good. But I’d settle for standover men.

“I bet that stuff you sell’s given you a really big dick. Would you like to keep it?”

To be perfectly honest, I don’t really care very much if someone rips off the pretty pictures I take of products and uses them for their eBay listings.

If you ask me for permission to use my pictures for commercial purposes, I’ll cheerfully license them to you for a small fee.

But most people don’t ask, of course. They just do a Google Images search and take whatever they want.

That doesn’t actively take money out of my pocket. It just deprives me of royalties from someone who clearly doesn’t want to pay royalties anyway. Which is why I don’t very much care.

(Cue ISO Standard Piracy Argument in 3, 2, 1…)

Anyway, a little while ago, I reviewed a pen-shaped close-focus webcam thing called the ETime Home Endoscope. It’s a neat gadget.

There aren’t many pictures of the ETime Endoscope online, so if you image-search for it, you’ll get a bunch of my pics on the first page of results.

This, and the absence of any decent handout pictures from the people who make the camera, has made my pictures pretty much the only option for someone who wants to sell ETime endoscopes on eBay or wherever but (a) can’t be bothered taking their own pictures and (b) doesn’t want to pay for someone else’s pictures.

Since I’m now signed up with eBay’s Verified Rights Owner (”VeRO“) program, though, all I have to do to get eBay to delete any listings that copy my stuff is send them an e-mail. A couple of days later, the offending listings will be kaput.

So every now and then, when a reader points out a ripped-off listing to me or when I find one myself, I do that.

I did that with one seller of the Endoscope a while ago. Their listings disappeared, and they didn’t post any more that I’ve noticed. Apparently taking pictures of the stuff they sell cuts into their profit margins too much to make it worthwhile, or something.

The other day, I found that another eBay seller, “endoscopes.endoscopy“, was doing the same thing. They appear to be under the impression that putting their own advertising text on top of my picture, and/or sticking three of my pictures together with some others from the ETime site, is enough to make the pictures theirs.

Even as I was typing this, the above PhotoBucket-hosted image mysteriously disappeared. Clearly the work of someone who’s quite sure that everything they’re doing is perfectly above board!

I saved it, though. Here’s the top portion of their composite image, which contains no pictorial content besides my images and ones from the ETime site.

Their PhotoBucket page at the moment still contains several versions of the composite image. From the text on the variants, it would seem they’re also listed on eBay as “usb.etime.pencams“. And here, here, here and here are their direct copies of my images, except with the aspect ratio screwed up and text slapped on top.

Oh, and apparently they don’t like people copying images from their own site about hockey! It would appear that people “who steal all our photos and ideas” are “punk asswipes“!

Couldn’t have put it better myself, guys!

I’m speculating, above, about how these people’s reasoning works, because it’s kind of hard to figure it out from this:

Date: Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:36:42 -0500
From: “usbscopes@gmail.com” <usbscopes@gmail.com>
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: removing our ebay listings

Dear Dan,

1) We don’t appreciate you removing our ebay listings of e-time pencams off ebay!

2) We are an authorized ebay distributors of etime ehe pencams.

3) We didn’t use any wording or images off your website!

4) If you have our listings removed again, We are hiring an attorney in Australia to take you into court. So please be prepared!

endoscopes.endoscopy

After sending me this, they listed another ten or so auctions with the same ripped-off pictures in them.

I told them the exact pictures they had copied, and that I took those pictures in my house, with my camera, for my review of the product. And I filed another VeRO complaint, and got all of the new listings pulled too.

Their cogent response:

Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:47:21 -0500
From: “Steven Jordan” <usbscopes@gmail.com>
To: Dan <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject: Re: removing our ebay listings

see you in court asshole

(…followed by the quoted text of my e-mail, which it seems did not make much of an impression upon them.)

I’m sure these guys are hopping on a plane from Florida right now. I’d better make some space on my calendar.

And yes, I’m aware that this could have been much, much funnier.

But I have to work with what I can get.

Stephen Moss, CEO of Firepower International, hasn’t breathed a word about suing me since starting our correspondence with that threat. But he sent me a report yesterday. It was apparently done for Firepower by a Shell laboratory in Germany.

Just like all the best scientific studies, this one is a big secret, so I’m not allowed to make it available for download.

The test was of some substance referred to as “Polyfuel Type #1″, which was a thick gelly that had to be mixed with quite a lot of diesel before it became liquid enough to be poured into a fuel tank.

(Note - I originally said “jelly” in the above sentence, rather than using the non-word “gelly” which featured in the original report, specifically in the phrase “…which resulted in a gelly-like composition.” I presumed that this spelling was just a typo or a German translation glitch or something, but apparently the use of the letter J in that word greatly angered someone representing himself as being from Firepower. He then contacted Blogsome and made a number of demands, one of which was that I change the spelling to what it said in the original. No problem, Mister Firepower Spelling Expert!)

Mr Moss tells me that this thick… gelly… was actually just what you get when the almost-on-sale “Firepower Pill” is ground up and mixed with diesel fuel, and it was presented this way to make the test easier.

Since the report says the gelly had to be pre-mixed, for some time, with ten litres of diesel before it was thin enough to use, this raises some obvious questions about what the heck the Firepower Pill actually is. I’m also personally willing to bet that if you crush one of the (rather small) Firepower Pills and put it in some diesel yourself, you will not get any sort of gelly, or even jelly. Mr Moss has offered me some Pills to test for myself; I may take him up on that, just to see if they do gel diesel, or petrol, or anything else.

Anyway, whatever the heck it was that they were actually testing did, according to this report which Moss says I may not distribute, reduce the fuel consumption of a Volvo FM12 truck, in a proper rolling-road drive cycle test, by about four per cent. Less on the highway cycle, more on the city-street cycle, where the engine was occasionally idling. Emissions improved, slightly, too.

So we’ve got a test of something that I have to trust Mr Moss was in some way related to the Pill they’re now (almost) selling, on a large diesel vehicle (the Firepower Pill is meant to work on any petrol or diesel vehicle), which showed only a 4% fuel economy improvement, versus the 10%-to-30% claims Firepower make on their site and in their proudly presented anecdotal evidence.

In our correspondence, Moss has trotted out the “unburned fuel” fallacy, and stuck to it with some enthusiasm, even though Total Hydrocarbon (”THC”; quiet, you boys in the back row) emissions figures make clear that almost all of the fuel that goes into any modern engine is fully combusted.

The secret Shell report itself makes this clear. Here’s a darn great diesel truck, consuming much more fuel per kilometre than a passenger car, yet even on the urban cycle where it’s occasionally not moving at all (and before the magic Firepower substance was administered) it still only emitted 0.456 grams of THC per kilometre. It consumed 0.422 litres of fuel per kilometre on that test, which has a density of about 850 grams per litre, so it burned about 358 grams of diesel, and emitted less than half a gram unburned.

In other words, the worst it ever managed was burning 99.87% of the fuel that went into it.

Now, according to the report the 0.456 gram-per-kilometre THC figure dropped to only 0.389g/km when the Firepower concoction was added to the fuel; reducing THC emissions by 15% is a good thing, as long as there are no hidden downsides. But the notion that this reflects a more complete burning of the fuel which could have some perceptible effect on power or economy is ridiculous, since 15% of 0.13% is, to a first approximation, bugger all.

Mr Moss went on to favour me with the “catalyst” fallacy, which I have addressed on previous occasions, including the very first time my then-so-innocent eyes fell upon Firepower, back in 2006. In brief: The common fuel-additive claim that it makes the fuel burn faster (from the buyfirepowerpill.com site: “Treated fuel burns 25-30% faster…”), or more easily, is nonsense. Fuel in a modern engine already burns pretty much optimally; if it burns faster or lights more easily, all that’ll give you is engine knock, which is a bad thing.

Mr Moss also had a go at the “engine cleaning” fallacy, and just when I was wondering if I perhaps wouldn’t be hearing it, the “conspiracy theory” fallacy as well. And he reiterated his great fondness for anecdotes.

And that, plus this super secret report I’m not allowed to show you, is all he’s got.

Tim Johnston, the Chairman of Firepower Holding Group, has been selling fuel pills with these same claims since 1992.

Mr Moss seems to be distancing his outfit, Firepower International, from Tim Johnston - he told me that “Firepower International is not owned by Firepower Group, I think some articles have made the mistake of assuming we are the same entity. Firepower International is privately owned by a collection of investors and owns the worldwide rights to the Firepower Pill.”

(And interestingly, a reader’s just pointed out to me that the firepowerinternational.com domain is actually registered to Stephen Moss.)

But Firepower International, or Group, or Whoever, have all engaged in conspicuous displays of wealth - sponsoring sports teams and, Mr Moss insists, actually buying the million-dollar Rolls-Royce he was until recently depicted next to on the buyfirepowerpill.com site.

So you’d think that at some point over the last several years they might have found the time to spend a measly hundred grand on used cars to hand, along with some Firepower Pills, to an automobile association or technical college or something for proper testing.

But no. The Australian Automobile Association say they’d love to talk to Firepower, but over the whole of last year Firepower have unaccountably failed to pick up the phone.

So that’s it. The crowning jewel of Firepower’s evidence is this one secret report from 2004, of a substance that resembles their Pills in no way whatsoever, and which found not even half of the smallest benefit that Firepower allege is commonplace in all sorts of vehicles.

Mr Moss keeps urging me to just try the magic Firepower pills in my own car, whereupon he says I’ll be unable to deny the obvious power gains, if not the improvement in fuel economy.

But countless people - probably millions of people - have tried snake-oil fuel products in the past and been convinced of just those improvements, because they wanted to see them. They wouldn’t have bought the darn stuff in the first place if they didn’t think it was at least likely to work; that belief sets you straight on the train to a textbook case of confirmation bias.

Even if the product is something that’s actively harmful at best, like Slick 50, you can find a long queue of people who’ll swear, hand on heart, that it works.

You can also, of course, find a long queue of people who’ll swear that using an electric fan in a closed room is deadly dangerous, that elves are real, or that a fence post near Coogee Beach was an apparition of the Virgin Mary.

(I have personally witnessed that last queue. But not Mary.)

The first principle of science, though, is that you must not fool yourself - because you are the easiest person to fool. If you do an unblinded, uncontrolled test like just dropping a pill into your petrol tank and driving around, you can very easily completely fail to get any closer to the truth than if your test involved throwing darts at a piece of graph paper.

We’ve been working on science for about the last 400 years, and it’s really worked out quite well. If you’re lucky enough to live in a First World country, practically everything you see, touch and do on a daily basis is either entirely the product of, or has been almost unrecognisably improved by, science.

And science is hard. But it’s worth it.

It’s long past time for Firepower to put up or shut up.

It’s not just me and the Herald who’ve been paying attention to Firepower lately.

(Actually, I’d pretty much forgotten about them, until their CEO threatened to sue me yesterday.)

Here’s a Webdiary piece that sums up the strangeness that is Firepower, including the previous versions of their fuel pill. All these years, and it still hasn’t set the world alight.

Here’s a piece on Gas Week that asks, among other things, why almost $400,000 of Australian taxpayers’ money seems to have been handed over to these people. And here’s Gerard Ryle, the Herald journalist, summing up the story as it stood early last year, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Science Show. Firepower’s science doesn’t seem to have moved on in the interim.

Here’s a piece about the Australian Automobile Association trying to get Firepower - or any of the several other, lower profile, fuel-pill makers active in Australia at the moment - to submit to proper testing. That was a year ago, and Firepower said then that they hadn’t even noticed that the AAA had called. I wonder if they’ve answered the phone yet?

Oh, and much the same “results” that were presented to me in PDF form just yesterday were shown to Crikey a year ago, in great secrecy. Crikey weren’t very impressed, either.