The Magic Box Hoax 481
Rasvar writes "Here is an interesting article from The Florida Times-Union about a high tech hoax that managed to pull in the likes of Blockbuster Video, US West, Ted Turner, Sen Orrin Hatch and numerous others. I actually attended one of the "demonstrations" of this device years back. I came away cynical becuase of the way he presented stuff. Sometimes it is good to be a cynic. This is a very good article on an impressive high tech scam."
huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
people believed this guy? (Score:2, Insightful)
My respect for Intel just went down a notch for believing this guy who has a record like this.
-Vic
Charlatans Exist Because We Love Them (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but sometimes it is good to be a skeptic. In fact, in my own experience, it is always good to be a skeptic.
The cynics I've known were convinced that all human behavior was motivated wholly by self-interest, which, even if it is true in an ultimate sense, is an attitude guaranteed to close your mind. The skeptics, on the other hand, merely insist that all claims be testable and repeatable: they doubt, but their doubt is healthy and reasonable, and leave them with a mind-set that I think of as structured incredulity.
If more people were skeptics, charlatans like John Edwards and James Van Praagh wouldn't be able to make a living, and this "Magic Box Hoax" could have never occurred.
Re:Who's to blame? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it is common knowledge. About 20 years ago it was 1200 BAUD, then it changed to 2400BAUD. It stuck at 9600BAUD for a long time, and now we run DSL at something 500K BPS. Yes, it is common knowledge...Don't let the fact that "common knowledge" was wrong in the past delude you into thinking that common knowledge today might be incorrect.
Re:Trusting a Priest? (Score:4, Insightful)
That does it. I can no longer trust police officers, firemen, doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, stock market folk, bankers, store managers, or anyone else. They've all got members who've committed felonies!
No, no, no need for justice for them. Their professions obviously predispose them towards criminal behavior. Let's just assume that they're all crooks--the ones who aren't are just biding their time.
I mean, heck, every priest secretly wants to coodle a young boy. And all that talk about "forgivenenss" that they've been going on about for 2,000 years really is just PR, and they don't REALLY believe that.
... or maybe you're a +5 troll, and we should think rationally about who we trust in all manners, and not make sweeping generalizations about professions who can only function if they are trusted?
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
Man, it might be hoax, but this dude worked HARD to keep the hoax alive. It makes you wonder how far he would get in life he put all this energy into something worthwhile.
I hate to admire someone who's basically a thief, but anyone who goes to that much trouble almost deserves to get away with it. :)
How is this different? (Score:2, Insightful)
Same story different scale.
Why he got away with it for so long. (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, this was the heyday of the dotcom era. Everyone was getting rich, and there seemed to be no end in sight. However, there were a lot of investors with a sizeable amount of cash that simply hadn't gotten their piece of the preverbial dotcom pie yet. And seeing how the phone companies were developing competing technology, the sense of urgency was real.
As for criminal records, people are surprisingly lax about that sort of thing. Especially today, its so easy to run a criminal background check on someone, everyone assumes that someone has already done it, and doesn't bother. When other people are dumping multiple millions of $$$ into a company, and those people are well respected, intellegent people, it simply doesn't occur not to take the guy at his word. The only concern is getting in on it before its too late.
Scam artists, despite the vulgarity of their profession, are actually very talented and very good at what they do. They are literally experts in the art of social engineering. Anyone can scam a gullible nobody. Just send them a flyer in the mail and you'll have checks flying into your PO box. But to convince someone who's worth millions to give you a blank check with no verification that you can actually do what you say you can do. That's genius. Or it speaks very poorly for the competancy of the multimillionaires, which might just go to show that you don't need to necessarily be smart to be rich. And you don't have to be honest to get rich. And people might be too embarrased to get back at you once you're done fleecing them. Its a strange world indeed.
-Restil
Re:Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
skeptic(al) not cynic(al) (Score:1, Insightful)
He wasn't asking to to believe in a higher ideal
or asking you to believe in some general goodness
of people; he was asking to believe HIM about some
specific device.
Your skepticism is entirely natural and
healthy!
Re:Extrodinary claims require extrodinary proof... (Score:5, Insightful)
There was an interesting documentary on either A&E or Discovery (one of those two) based on the book Longitude. Somebody was talking about Harrison's apprehensiveness about letting others (ie. the Astronomer Royal) poke around inside of his invention and he made an interesting point: If you really did have a magic box and it did what you said it did, would you want potential competitors seeing its insides?
Re:Selling Yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
Investment firms and corperations usually keep sums of money around specifically allocated for the use in high risk projects. The idea is based on Pascal's wager. In a nutshell Pascal's wager says that it is better to belive that God exists because if you are correct you gain everything, and if you are wrong you lose (almost) nothing. I won't go into the details of the philosphy or argue whether or not his line of thinking is/was right or wrong.
VooDoo Science by Dr. Robert Park, which was reviewed here on slashdot, talks about how companies set aside money which they invest in inventions like this. The thinking is that if the invention really works, the company will win big. If you invention is a scam (in most cases it is) the company is only out a couple of million. You must remember that if you do "win," your company will make billions. It is the same (some would say misguided) logic that results in people playing the lottery.
I am not going to debate whether or not this logic holds water. I do want to say that many times when (large) investors look into these scams, regardless of what a scientific study says, they are willing to invest because they are already predicting they will lose the money. Unfortunately, small and personal investors fall for the scam too.
See, this is why we need the scientific method (Score:3, Insightful)
The psychics of the world are no different, they demonstrate their powers only on their own terms. They won't submit to a real scientific test because they are frauds, and they know it will fail. Anytime someone tries to sell you on something that you have no way of independantly verifying, be careful. They might be well meaning but more often than not, they are a con man.
Well they should have demanded better tests (Score:4, Insightful)
Cisco receantly had a new DSL technology they wanted to sell us on, they call it Long Range Eithernet. Allegedly, it gets 10mbps, both directions over regular phone lines at distances of around a mile. Now Cisco is a big, reputable company, not some small time con artist and we are friends with the engineer in this city. Doesn't matter, we STILL wanted to test it for ourselves. So they sent us an LRE switch and two remote units. We tested it, and indeed it does perform as advertised.
Now we know for a fact that it works. This wasn't a smoke and mirrorrs test, it was conducted in our lab, by our people. They weren't even around (the just loaned it to us for a month and said have fun). We got to run all the tests we chose on it. All this, for a product from a reputable company. But you know what? That's how you need to do it. Don't rely on what the people who make something tell you, demand to test it yourself. See if it works as advertised in YOUR environment.
This is doubly true for new technologies. Make the inventor bring his tech to your labs, demo it on your terms, and have your people run the tests. Then you know it isn't being rigged because you can check to make sure everything is on the level. I'm not talking looking at some poorly drawn semi-plausable circut diagrams, I'm talking about having the actual prototypes in your lab and under the gun.
Re:Where Does Honesty Get You? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you really so naive as to believe that unethical people who have a lot of money don't enjoy it? That sounds to me like something that people without money tell themselves to console themselves, sort of like telling your kid that the school bully is actually miserable, when in fact he's probably having a great time picking on other people.
Well, enjoy it while you can, because the people [microsoft.com] with [mpaa.org] money [riaa.org] and [wto.org] power [whitehouse.gov] are looking to make sure you have even less money to enjoy than you have now, so that they will have even more money and power to enjoy.
Feel free to bury your head in the sand and tell yourself that it's okay, while legislation like the DMCA and SSSCA gets passed and enforced. Yes, it'll all be okay, even if you no longer have any money and are living in a corporate run police state. Because at least you'll still have your ethics!
(And yes, I despise those people without ethics and am sickened at how they seem to be able to do so much better than people with ethics, but I'm not naive enough to believe that the fact that I have any ethics makes one damned bit of difference in the real world. In fact, I know it puts me at a significant disadvantage, and sometimes wish I didn't have these ethical beliefs that prevent me from doing something about that).
So what, we're lied to every day (Score:4, Insightful)
Also there's all these "get rich quick" schemes and whatnot, but what they all have in common: there needs to be someone gullible enough to believe all those smooth lies and greedy enough to act before thinking for the scheme to work. How's this one different from any big corporation selling their product with even bigger lies? Just because it's a single guy instead of a whole corporation thats selling hot air on lies?
If that guy get's sued i'd like to sue all that corporations who told me i could get the hottest women in town just because i wear the right sneakers, drink the correct beverage or drive the right car. Then i have some serious issues with any companies selling XXX-light products because i didn't loose a single pound despite eating tons of the stuff. And then i want a free passage to my plot on the moon.
Where exactly is the difference between a scam and "good advertising"?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)