Breakfast Links: He-Man, Fraudster & Fraud
Art for a wintry/summery Monday.
Oh the other hand, if reading about the true life adventures with the Power of Grayskull isn’t your thing, you may find this interview with Frank Abnegale, (yes the guy who was the topic of that horrendous Leo movie, ok, I know, every Leo movie is horrendous), where he basically talks about how easy it is to commit fraud now - while back in his day, he had to build scaffolding around the huge printing press so that he could operate by himself what normally would have been a three person job. Although, strangely, I think he gets it wrong when he says that there’s no similarity between his motivations and those of young hackers today:
One thing led to another and it became more of a case of people were after me, so I had to stay a step ahead of them. I don’t think I was out to set any goals or to make X amount of money. I was very creative, so it became more of a game as time went on.
I think a lot of hackers think of things as a game, starting small and having things just get more and more intense. In other news, I notice that this is a computerworld article that in no way upset me. Amazing!
And speaking of how easy it is to commit fraud these days. If you haven’t been following the story of the million dollar pear cable challenge, it’s pretty interesting. It goes like this. Pear Cables offers their Anjou Speaker Cables for $7250 (that’s right, seven thousand dollars). The James Randi Educational Foundation calls bullshit and offers $1 million to anyone who can prove they are any better than plain ol’ Monster Cables. Michael Fremer (a writer for Sterophile Magazine) offers to be the double blind tester. Pear says, “Yeah! Awesome! Our cables kick butt, we’ll help out anyway we can. Pear then says, “Oh wait, no… we don’t want to help.” How’s that for confidence in the product!
Bonus Link: Dumbledore is gay.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:12 am
Fraudster and Fraud? You have no idea what the annoying Randi is up to. He’s the fraudster. Whatever Pear’s motives were in withdrawing, one person who no one should have any confidence in is the annoying Randi. He’s a fraud and not at all interested in the truth. Whoever posted this anonymous post about “fraud” needs a truth injection. Please contact me and I’ll give you one.
August 22nd, 2008 at 5:12 am
Actually, the real fraud is the commenter above me. He is a childish douche bag who claims to have golden ears, but is really just a snake oil salesman. The only “truth injection” he needs is his over-inflated ego rammed up his over-important ass.