How To Spot A Psychopath

What does capitalism mean?

I’ll tell you what capitalism means.

It means this.

(Via.)

Y’see, there was this one fireworks store, and then another one opened up across the street.

And then it kind of turned into a theatrical performance.

Here in Australia, the only place where you can still buy proper fireworks - we DREAM of these sorts of things (from the same site as the video) - is in the Australian Capital Territory, a strange little place where the high-level politicians live, and which is also the only place where hard-core porn is still legal.

You may draw from this whatever conclusions you wish.

I recently had to edit my Firefox persdict.dat file to remove a misspelled word which I’d added to the dictionary by mistake. It’s not very hard to edit the dictionary, but Firefox apparently provides no graphical-interface way to do it. This is a bit of a pain for “normal” users.

(Note: If Firefox is still running when you edit the dictionary, it’ll keep rewriting the old version of it over the corrected one.)

Aaaanyway, this gave me the chance to view my personal Firefox dictionary. I found it entertaining:

Sitemap
nameservers
theremin
Photoshoppery
Gizmodo’s
overcurrent
phish
AVI
faq
lumens
href
rechargeables
milliamps
AdSense
that’re
Headshot
YouTube
commenters
cockie
nameserver
AAC
PCMCIA
Tamiya
DSHEA
Thermite
plugpack
Crabfu
IrDA
dansdata
signage
DLL
scammers
OLPC
Winamp’s
plugpacks
phishes
animatronic
Austrade
oobleck
botnet
WinXP
combinations
subwoofer
NSFW
northbridge
aluminium
there’d
Radeon
WAV
VDC
pissy
that’ve
incher
Azureus
Seraphim
difluoroethane
polycaprolactone
biodiesel
unsubscribing
permanganate
anybody’s
buggerload
prefetch
Metafilter
autofocus
Slashdot
eMate
Schneier’s
phish’s
dodgy
widerange
PVA
Mitsuwa
Athlon
ISPs
Prius
lux
mA
Gizmodo
Gretchin
zoom’s
DSL
gizmos
autoerotic
GeForce
spidered
SupCom

Full disclosure: The above does not include several Commonwealth-spelling words which I’d added to the dictionary because I hadn’t yet switched to the English-Australian dictionary.

Changing dictionaries in Firefox is another thing that’s not as simple as it ought to be, but it’s still pretty easy. If you want a non-US-English dictionary, you just download and install it, like any other add-on.

I like how the Australian dictionary shows up in the add-on list:

As regular readers will know, I’m actually pretty much on the fence about Commonwealth/Australian versus USA spelling. This ambivalence extends to language usage in general.

“Pretty much”, for instance, smells American - so, often, does “pretty” by itself - but I’d much rather use it instead of “by and large“.

(And, conversely, “much rather” is a Commonwealth-smelling term. “Rather” by itself is pretty darn English, even if you don’t split it into “rah-THERR!”)

I spell “humour” and “valour” and “colour” with a U, but not because I think it’s some sort of badge of, um, honour. And I often write “I guess” instead of “I suppose”, because I think “guess” conveys the meaning of the term more effectively, even if it’s generally agreed to be a distinctly American coinage.

There are also several Commonwealth spellings that’re simply ridiculous. Like “programme”, which England adopted in the 1800s because, at the time, it was cool to sound French. America never got that memo, so they stuck with the older, far more sensible, “program”.

Likewise, “analogue” pains me every time I write it.

Feel free to paste your own amusing user-dictionaries, or heretical personal unpatriotic usage preferences, in the comments.

A reader who’d noticed my affection for “the hideous, terrifying combination of polycaprolactone and robotics” just pointed me to…

…XRobots’ Android 10. Which is, I think, not entirely unlike what you’d see in the workshop of a necromancer. Especially if he’d read a book about tensegrity lately.

Next project: Polycaprolactone Sedlec Ossuary, please!

In a similar vein to the death-threat spam, I just received this:

From: “PaulAllison@cia.com” <paulallison @cia.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 22:49:21 +0200
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: CIA - Case ID: 528-84223 - WARNING

Hello,

Your IP address has been logged on more than 20 illegal Websites.
This does not necessary means that You browsed all of this illegal content.
Theres possibility someone else has access to your PC, physically or someone else gained remote access to your PC machine.
As a matter of that, we kindly ask You to answer all our questions regarding this case in reasonable amount of time.
List of all our questions is available for download at http://www.cia-intl.com.ba/ID528-84223.zip
If you do not answer these questions until 10.07.2008 we will start investigation and make final decision on our own. In that case, You’ll get the charge in writing soon after.
Please note that browsing illegal content online is serious violation of laws in many countries.
We expect your co-operation and prompt response.

Sincerely,
Paul Allison
Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW , Room 3220
Washington , DC 20535
Phone: (202) 324-30000
Case ID: 528-84223

Apparently this is some kind of July 4th special offer.

They even went to the trouble of making http://www.cia-intl.com.ba/ by itself redirect to cia.gov. I like to see that kind of attention to detail in a threat-scammer.

(CIA-dot-com, used for the probably-not-connected reply address, is actually just an ISP.)

Interestingly, this spam actually did come from a .ba (Bosnia and Herzegovina) source, bhtelecom.ba. And http://www.cia-intl.com.ba/ID528-84223.zip is still live, as I write this - it’s 476 kilobytes, and actually is a zip file, containing the 562-kilobyte ID528-84223.exe.

The jotti.org online malware scanner I’ve mentioned before, which submits uploaded files to umpteen anti-virus programs, got only one hit, from BitDefender. It reckoned the file behaved like the uninventively-named Win32.Malware. The Sunbelt Sandbox scanner generated reams of conclusions - basically, every bit of information you can get by running the program in a virtual machine and tracking everything it does for a little while - but as far as actual identification went, just dropped it in the VIPRE.Suspicious “miscellaneous” bin.

I then deleted the file and sprinkled quicklime over the part of the hard drive where it had been. I’ve learned my lesson.

Remember that doofus who was selling USB endoscopes on eBay using a bunch of the pictures from my review of it?

This happens all the time, to me and to other review sites. Unless the people responsible are really stupid and hotlink the images, we usually never even know it’s happening. I only find out about it when a reader tells me.

And that’s how I know about the further unlicensed commercial popularity of my eTime endoscope pics. Two different sellers (”calalily899” and “ukelectronic-zone“), one just using some of my pics, the other using some of my pics plus a little of the text of the review, just to rub it in.

I know why this happens. It’s because the pictures I take of things, especially of things that aren’t often photographed by other people, look too good. If my pics looked like drunken happy-snaps, nobody’d rip ‘em off. But when my picture of a product is pretty much indistinguishable from a manufacturers’ hand-out press-release shot, there it’ll be at the top of a Google Images search - though the copy of it Google finds won’t necessarily even be the one I put on my own server.

(If you’d like to read about what I would, if I were something of a tosser, call my “photographic workflow”, I’ve got a tutorial about it here.)

I don’t really care about people using my pics on their MySpace page or school report or something. I’ll give pretty much anybody permission to use my pics for non-profit purposes for free, if they ask. And if they don’t, I still don’t really mind - but I’ll send the full-resolution originals to people who ask for permission, while people who just pinch ‘em without asking have to settle for the versions I put on the Web.

Commercial image-pinching is different, though. If you’re making money with stuff I made, I’d like to get paid my share.

A couple of days ago, a reader spotted yet another eBay image-pincher, this time selling tiny R/C cars with some images and text taken from my old review of one.

So I whipped up a complaint letter for eBay’s VeRO system, and within a day all of the listings had been zapped. The VeRO system takes a bit of effort to get into, but it works really well once you’re signed up.

And now, just a couple of days later, here are more pic-copying endoscope sellers.

I have, however, had a thought.

Sending a VeRO complaint takes at least a few minutes, and all I get in return is the cruel satisfaction of having stuck a rather small spanner in the works of someone’s business. The only entity that really gains anything from VeRO complaints is eBay, who I think keep the listing fees for just about every possible kind of cancelled auction.

So here’s what I said to these latest sellers (with slight variations for their particular offences), instead of just VeROing them right away:

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

I note that in your several auctions for the eTime Home Endoscope, you use a few images from my review of that product here:
www.dansdata.com/pencamera.htm

I did not give you permission to do this, and now require payment. Please forward $US250 to my PayPal account at dan@dansdata.com immediately. This sum purchases you the right to use any of the images from www.dansdata.com/pencamera.htm, for eBay sales purposes only, for the next 12 months.

If you do not make this payment within 24 hours, I will use the eBay VeRO system to cancel all of your auctions which infringe my copyright.

I’ve actually tried this before. Back in the day, all I could threaten commercial copyright infringers with (besides never-gonna-happen legal action, which is always the first stop for Internet kooks but is actually almost always pointless) was exposure before my Army of Goons. And I told ‘em to send me a cheque rather than PayPal me. But it did actually work a couple of times, out of the several times I tried it.

Let’s roll the dice again!

The above-pictured object is an HIS iClear Card. And I don’t know what it does. It was brought to my attention by a reader who suspects it has no function at all. I think he may be right.

According to the iClear Card’s product page on the HIS site, it, and I quote verbatim, “is HIS latest solution to video card noise reduction. It has an excellent implement of state-of-the-art design and technology and give you a better gaming experience by reducing the distortion and noise generated from graphic card. It reduces the noise distortion generated from high-end graphic card (from both Radeon and GeForce) or TV tuner card, which provide up to 10% increase performance on Signal-to-Noise Ratio.”

And they go on. Apparently it has “State-of-the-art design”. But if you look at its specifications page, the only spec it seems to have is a name.

I suppose the “state of the art” part is because it plugs into a PCIe x1 socket, not boring old PCI. It’s a bit hard to see in the picture, but I think it also has contacts for all of the PCIe x1 pins, too. But all it seems to have to connect to any of those pins are six capacitors and a few tiny surface-mount components, all sitting in the corner of an otherwise empty rectangle of fibreglass.

So I suppose it’s meant to be a power supply smoother, or something. It’s within the bounds of possibility that noisy DC input could have some sort of effect on the performance of a video card, if only making it less overclockable; putting a few more caps across the input rails would help with that. But many modern video cards get most of their power directly from the system PSU; hanging some caps across the PCIe power rails won’t make any difference to that.

And I’m entirely at a loss regarding how this has anything to do with “noise reduction”. Most PCs these days have a 100 per cent digital data path for the video subsystem, so there’s no need for noise reduction at all. Software tells the graphics card what to do, it figures out what colour all of the pixels should be, and then it communicates that information to a monitor via a digital link. “Noise” doesn’t enter into it, here; if there’s enough noise to actually affect even one pixel of the signal, the result will probably be a completely blank screen or a hideous mess. The effect of noise in digital systems is either zero or catastrophic; there’s nothing in between.

Perhaps the iClear Card is s supposed to make analogue “VGA” video less noisy. But I’ve never seen even VGA video that actually was noisy. I’ve seen distortion from cheap VGA extension cables and blurriness from the inescapable failure of CRT screens to display square pixels on their non-square phosphor, but not noise.

Alexey Samsonov at Digit-Life spoiled the fun by actually reviewing the iClear, testing it in the one application where it’d have the best chance of doing something - when a low-quality analogue TV tuner card is trying to tune a weak signal, but a video card a couple of slots over is emitting RF noise and making it difficult.

And lo and behold - the iClear actually did something!

For almost the entirety of almost every signal-to-noise-ratio graph in the review, the “without iClear” and “with iClear” lines are right slap bang on top of each other. But here and there, at certain frequencies, the without-iClear line actually does dip below the other one. In a couple of places, by as much as three decibels. And it never goes above the other line, which suggests that the differences aren’t just experimental error.

I’d be interested to see what happened if you just plugged a completely blank card into the slot between the video card and the tuner, though. As long as the card has a ground plane and one lousy contact hooking that sheet of featureless copper up to the system ground, I suspect you’d see a similar reduction of noise at certain frequencies. You’d think that if the capacitors were really doing something, there’d be at least a small signal-to-noise improvement across the whole spectrum graph. That’s what HIS is claiming, after all, insofar as their claims are comprehensible at all.

Apparently Newegg have been giving iClears away for free with purchase of a video card, which implies that the card has not been a major commercial success.

At least they’re not claiming it makes your hi-fi sound better.

[UPDATE: Boing Boing Gadgets presents X-Maple pixel-flutter reduction block for PCIe!]

I-Wei Huang of Crabfu has a link from his SteamWorks page to his non-steam-powered remote-controlled contraptions. That link is called “Steamless Crap”.

He’s now given that section of the site a more dignified name, Crabfu MotionWorks. In which the latest creation is…

…the R/C Tortoise.

(Once again, the cat is unmoved. If something in the Crabfu back yard doesn’t blow hot steam and shriek like a banshee, it’s not worth worrying about.)

Like its ancestors the Swashbots, the Tortoise is a creature that converts movement of normal R/C servos more or less directly into leg movements. It’s operated as an animatronic puppet, with no automation beyond servo mixing on the controller.

But the Tortoise is a quadruped rather than a triped - with legs that look as if they’re made from the same low-temperature polycaprolactone thermoplastic as Swashbot 3’s disturbingly organic parts - and so it can walk much better.

The Tortoise still turns with a Swashbot-esque wiggle, but when it’s going forward or backward it’s much more efficient. And it’s all based on only three servos - each pair of legs is one arch-shaped piece of plastic. (There are actually four servos in the Tortoise, but one just moves the head.)

The Tortoise’s clumsy high-stepping gait makes it look, to me, like a creature that’s going to be very very large when it grows up.

(Via.)

There is a post entitled Announcement: Alex Sells Out! on The Daily WTF which includes, in deference to the site’s purpose, an announcement that ads will be appearing on the site almost four years after ads started appearing on the site.

But it also includes what may be the best Venn diagram ever drawn.

Can you just not get enough of my posts about Australian fuel-additive swindlers Firepower, but find it difficult to pick those posts out from the others in my Scams and Strange Tales categories?

Well, now your worries are over, because How To Spot A Psychopath has added - for no extra charge! - a whole separate Firepower category.

I hope this’ll help out the journalists who’ve been contacting me so entertainingly often for background info.

To save you all from yet another Firepower post, I’ll add the latest few articles about them to this one:

The law firm whose services Firepower retained to sue the Sydney Morning Herald and journalist Gerard Ryle for the articles Ryle wrote about them in 2007… has now filed an application in the Federal Court to wind up Firepower, and put the proceeds towards their unpaid bills.

The Sydney Kings, the basketball team Firepower sponsored, are now officially dead, with large outstanding debts.

So Tim Johnston, the high-rolling Firepower chief executive who’s recently, apparently, high-tailed it out of the country, is now in hiding from a number of very tall and muscular men, in addition to the usual collection of angry creditors.

When I-Wei “Crabfu” Huang created his third Swashbot last month (previously), I never got around to mentioning it here.

Duly rectified:

The grouper mouth and skull-like carapace make it look kind of malevolent… until it starts moving. It still kind of looks as if it’s positioning itself to jump onto your face, though.

The “Shapelock” plastic from which Swash3’s made is to regular plastic as Wood’s Metal is to normal casting alloys. The plastic’s chemical name is polycaprolactone, and it’s available under other names, too. The bags of it that’ve been hanging on my wall waiting for a purpose are branded “Polymorph”, and I got them from Jaycar here in Australia.

I-Wei’s made three videos about building the bots:

(Via.)