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."
Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
How about solid black? I'm thinking a 9600 baud modem can do that, depending on the compression.
Wanting to believe (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought that the POTS line bandwidth was to some degree limited by other things like filtering.
Otherwise things like DSL wouldn't really work.
(off on a tangent) I recall many years (1970s?) ago how they did (and maybe still do) broadcasts in Boston of Boston Symphony concerts at TangleWood in the Berkshires, over 100 mile away. They had recordings of the original source, they had the signal at the end of the phone line, and they knew what the difference was. They merely amplified the signal at the source end to compensate for the losses, making sure to not clip the signals. Result at the end in Boston was a signal completely acceptable for FM Stereo broadcasts.
So I can see if you are not completely expert in the technology, being able to make up your own examples, and talking yourself into believing that Certain Limitations had been exceeded.
Heck, Look at the history of the dialup modem, going from teletype speeds to 56k, far exceeding original expectations.
Other scams (Score:1, Interesting)
Check out Betavoltaic [betavoltaic.com] This guy that is the CEO has a long history of pseudoscience, and some of his officers worked on "perpetual motion machines", all of which needed a DC power source to run.
Posting anonymously to avoid the wrath of that asshole that runs the place. He likes to sue people to quiet them down about his scam.
Parallel case or same guy? (Score:5, Interesting)
He claims to be an Air Force Academy Graduate.
His AF records cannot be found by ANYONE, and he claims this is because of his involvement in secret projects.
He was out of sight for several months in 1997, and later claimed he was on death's door due to a scorpion sting under a fingernail.
He had a "fall guy" who he claimed ran off with the $10,000 he managed to get from investors.
He submitted as "proof" several SGI generated "screenshots", all of which used clearly typical demo features and openGL artifacts.
He claimed to own a P-51 Mustang and even submitted a doctored photo of a P-51 with his head cut-n-pasted into the cockpit and his name written under the canopy. The font for the canopy matched an Adobe Photoshop default.
He claimed to have shot down several Iraqi fighters in his F-16, yet no records of those shootdowns exist.
The list goes on and on, and this guy finally resurfaced using his handle "voss" in an online simulation, and he verbally attacks anyone who brings the scam up, challenging them to talk to his "astronaut general buddy". Strangely enough, this astronaut guy actually exists although I have not contacted him personally.
The parallels kept hitting me as I read the article, and I wonder if this was the same guy, or if (somehow) Paul Hinds had been set up by this same guy.
as they say on Car Talk: (Score:2, Interesting)
Selling Yourself (Score:5, Interesting)
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Why didn't the scientists say that this was completely absurd? A lot of reasons. First, they are being paid to review the invention. If they say that the invention doesn't work and it does, then they are liable for the massive losses incurred by the investor for a failed opportunity. If they say it doesn't work and it does, they get sued by the inventor. So, what do they do? They hedge their bets. They say that "more study" is needed, etc. To business types, this sounds like they are just being nerdy and cautious. Since they leave the question open, the investor (who wants to believe) goes ahead and goes for it, figuring that the 5 million dollars invested (or whatever) could well turn into billions.
<p>
In some respects, the scientiastws have failed them by not emphasizing their near-certainty that the idea was nonsense. And the businessmen failed themselves by not bothering to learn that, when a scientist says "quite improbable", he means "impossible."
<p>
sounds like everyday life to me, and should to most geeks.
So many suckers, so little time... (Score:4, Interesting)
This sound familliar (Score:3, Interesting)
Where Does Honesty Get You? (Score:5, Interesting)
I, or any number of us, could pull an evil-scheme like this off. But, for some reason we don't. For some reason we have ethics and values. And, for some reason, a guy like that has more money than he needs to live on. Obviously, the world is not fair.
VCR? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hal Puthoff (Score:5, Interesting)
Together with Russel Targ, this infamous team produced, let us say, somewhat credulous studies of spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller's remote viewing abilities. They also have the dubious distinction of having provided some of the best evidence that positive feedback improves ESP ability. Tragically, no skeptic who uses reasonable experimental controls seems to be able to duplicate their results.
The fact that Priest's box has something to do with Puthoff's area of expertise is hilarious! I wonder if the author of the article was being *intentionally* ironic.
Re:Who's to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember someone proposing illuminating lines with an x-ray maser, in an attempt get very high speed transfer. It exceeded the limitations of the wire by not using it. The wire only contained the data.
If I had "done my research" I would know I can't get 40gHz signals down an Aluminum wire, but waveguides work just fine.
If we listen to all limitations, we won't get anywhere. You just have to ask how something works.
Re:Who's to blame? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Rutherford Appleton Lab's VULCAN X-ray Laser here in the UK gets down to about 5.9nm, though it's apparently huge (providing 90J of energy IIRC) whereas the CMT ('Comet') is obviously compact but only produces 5 or 6J of energy.
That's probably out of date by now but the point stands...
james
Huh? VisionTek? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not that I would accuse this article of being a hoax itself, but VisionTek is a company that makes [excellent] video cards....I use them in my boxes. Poking around Google yielded no companies with similiar names....what gives?
A Couple of Other Scams (Score:2, Interesting)
An acquaintance of mine is particularly susceptable to these. He's a real dreamer type who made lots of money on one gamble (purchased cellular telephone bandwidth rights shortly before cellular telephones took off) and then lost it all on two others.
The scam that took most of it was a guy who was going to wire every stadium box in America with fiber and equip them with dual processor computers and 42" displays (in 1997 time frame). Basically, the idea was to let the rich simultaneously surf the Internet, see their email, get special game statistics, watch replays, etc while watching the game. Even if he did it, I never understood how he was going to make the millions of investment money back. This was an example of a scam that used plausible technology, but never had a sustainable business model. The investment capital was just being pocketed.
The other was actually a perpetual energy scam. Yes, people still fall for that one. This was some sort of device with multiple rings made of just the right metals and spinning in different directions or something. Somehow, it supposedly extracted energy from the Earth's magnetic field. I researched it a couple of years ago and found that the guy has been running the scam for over 40 years. This guy's big hook was religious based at the time. He claimed to have died in a traffic accident with a ruptured aorta and been miraculously brought back to life. When he awoke, the schematics were in his head for this device. They had been given to him directly by God. He was giving this story from the pulpit at really conservative Christian churches across the SouthEast and attracting all sorts of investors.
I wonder why there is no suspected scam site on the Internet? Maybe the legal risks would be too great...
A little bit of justice (Score:1, Interesting)
It never ceases to amaze me how many nontechnical business people - people who are unable to actually produce a single useful thing from scratch - are under the delusion that they are the people that produce technology.
The real cons take place when investors steal the perpetual rights to powerful technology developed by financially unsophisticated geeks for a few paychecks.
It's nice to see someone putting something over on the real thieves for a change.
Re:Decimated the speed limit? (Score:2, Interesting)
The name comes from a practice used at times by the Roman Army (if my sources are correct).
When a unit of soldiers did not perform well in battle, and particularly showed cowardice, they were lined up in groups of 10. One was chosen from the group of ten to be brutally beaten and killed by the other 9. It was used as a tool to motivate the troops to fight to the best of their ability.
So given that, 10% of the soldiers were removed, leaving 90%.
It sounds like (Score:4, Interesting)
I was involved in a similar scam (Score:2, Interesting)
Upper level management was very impressed with the algorithm because it was an "analog" audio compression algorithm, and everyone in the music industry knows that analog sounds better than digital
The story is pretty much the same-- the guy never produced a working prototype, either analog or digital. He even sent me a visual basic program which of course never actually ran.
I wasn't there to meet the guy in person, but the demo that was described to me was incredibly easy to fake. He basically had a black box, and plugged the audio source into one side, and the output from the other side into an amp. Incredibly, the output sounded just as good as the input!!!
Unfortunately the story has a sad ending (for me at least) because in order to explain why I couldn't get the algorithm to work, I hinted that perhaps just maybe the guy was running a scam. (As if the lack of working prototype wouldn't explain it.) The president of the company actually yelled at me over the phone "do you think I'm an idiot!", "do you think I'd let myself by taken by a con artist", etc, etc. Needless to say I was fired a few months later...