Saturday, August 30, 2008

reviewopedia and the scam trend

This is a true story which I hope will expose some scam artists out there. It all started when I recieved a bulk email message describing an opportunity of processing rebates. I usually ignore such blatant junk but it was curiously similar to data entry job scams I had seen before. More out of curiosity than anything else, I googled something about rebate processing jobs, and google's first result was a review on a site called reviewopedia.

Now the name of a site in many cases may not tell you much. But in this case it was clear what they were going for. Two things come straight to mind, a review site, and a wikipedia-like site. There are numerous sites for user review of products and services. If this were one of those, it might've been helpful. But it's not. It is a facade simulating user-to-user communication while in fact being run by one profit-seeking individual. His name, Steve Albright is at the end of every article. At first I thought he was one user of the site. But he is the sole reviewer. This is how he aims to get your trust.

And if you only look on the surface of the site, it is a convincing facade indeed. The first review I read, (that of the rebates job) was a negative review. This is another tactic to gain your trust, to make you think Steven Albright is "selective" and "looking out for you" when in fact he only writes positive reviews of sites that pay him to net them suckers. You can tell this simply by the fact that he never links directly to one of the sites. There is always a redirecting page on his site which then leads to the link (look in the status bar when you put your cursor over the link, it has reviewopedia in the address) This means that records are being kept of who goes from his site to the "program" or "opportunity" in question. And I'm sure he gets paid for anyone who signs up.

There are even user comments at the bottom of each page. Whoah wait, doesn't that mean that if he is being dishonest, users can refute whatever he says? Well to test that out I tried to post a comment to an article about something called profitlance on his site. This one had an almost flawless record of user comments, not a single one rating it less than 4 starts out of 5. I posted a reply saying that it wasn't working for me and surprise surprise:



He obviously filters out any comments that don't support the statements he makes. I'm convinced as well that he has added some of the comments himself.

The whole purpose of this? He makes money by promoting certain sites based on what they pay him. Not how useful they are or how successful their users are at making money with their "program." Personally I wouldn't trust anything that called itself a "program" or "system" for making money. It's some kind of bull shit buzzword that has been made up to make it sound like it's easy to make money. Like you can follow some secret formula and you will guarantee success. Well the world isn't like that, it's dynamic and you have to use your head. Sure, there are ways of making money. There are ways of making lots of money, but the ones that are easy can't be kept secret for long. You shouldn't pay for such "secret" information, research it yourself. You have no guarantee at these sites that the "program" works, until you pay them and find out for yourself. It's not a good idea to pay for something if the seller of this thing won't tell you what it is to begin with.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Open letter to the team behind Yahoo Messenger for Mac

I believe that your team is missing a very, very important issue. I am aware that Yahoo messenger is supposed to report all crashes to you, however there are problems which specifically go unreported. The reason for this being that Yahoo does not crash, instead it hangs indefinitely until it is forced quit. After restarting yahoo, no error reporting occurs. This problem occurs almost everytime I am viewing more than one webcam (including my own). Sometimes it happens much faster than others. I think it may be a RAM issue because it seems to happen more quickly when I am using more than one program. This could be a sign of a major memory leak in whatever controls the webcam.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Circumscrimination

Discrimination aimed at those associating with or in proximity to another discriminated person or group.

Living Coca-Cola Cap