In Rainbows update

~ Inquisitor

The email I’ve just received says that the files for the album download will be 160Kbit MP3s. Depends on whether it’s 160 ABR or CBR, of course, but still not that shabby. Should be tomorrow morning (along of course with Portal and HL2 Episode Two), so stay tuned for a review then.

Edit at noon: The zip has just downloaded really, really quickly off the distribution server – Radiohead have obviously got their act together with regards to bandwidth. The files are 160CBR, but sound pretty good though. First stage review soon (and rest assured, I won’t be with that guy on the BBC site who thinks Pablo Honey is their best album.)

Giving with one hand, taking with another

~ Inquisitor

Sony have cut the price of the PS3 in the UK to something a little more reasonable, months after they did so in the States. Previous to this price cut, the £425 60GB PS3, which excluding VAT (the right way to compare these things) is £361.70, was the only model in the UK. In the US, this model is $499, which when converted to pounds is £244.65 – so an entire £115 (a little over $230) was going directly into Sony’s pockets as a stupidity tax on Brits. Now the 60GB is £349, £297.02 excluding VAT, meaning the ripoff is now only £50.

Never give Sony an even break however – they’ve also introduced the 40GB cut-down PS3 we’ve been hearing about, for £299 (removing VAT and converting, $520), but it’s a serious ripoff – they’ve reduced the number of USB ports, removed the SD card etc. slots and even worse than that, they’ve removed PS1/PS2 backwards compatibility.

Which was in software anyway so doesn’t cost them anything to include whatsoever. And of course this crocked model is going to be the only PS3 in Europe in the future. Always give it to Sony to mess things up big time – the US’s only PS3 in the future will be a $600 80GB model with the same backwards compatibility and sockets as the original Euromodel.

And there still aren’t any games. If you want a console, buy a 360 and/or a Wii. If you want to play PS2 games, buy a PS2 – you can buy it very cheaply. If you want a Blu-Ray player, buy a Blu-Ray player. Do not buy the PS3; if you must, buy the 60GB, but it only encourages them.

Another “clever” 419 in my mailbox

~ Inquisitor ~ 9 Comments

This one is new to me – it’s all done in Jesus’ name! So of course I had to do another deconstruction.

Dear in Christ,

Well, I’m not “in Christ”, so there’s a hit right away. Hell, I even link to Pharyngula on my linkbar. Obviously has just bought a mailing list from one of the other scumbags in the area.

Calvary greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am Deacon George Useh, a member of Day Spring Ministry, basically a Prayer and deliverance Ministry.During a Prayer and fasting session in my Ministry, I asked our Lord Jesus Christ to give me the opportunity to redeem my life and purify what remains of my wealth, God delivery revealed to me to Invest in His Kingdom through you and your
 Ministry.

Jesus told me to, uh, “Invest in His Kingdom” by scamming the unbelievers out of their savings! Wow, how cynical.

As the bible says\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\"Go to the world,preach the gospel,spread his words,heal the sick............\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\"

…and scam all the mugus? Oh, not there in my copy, but maybe Nigeria’s translation is different. I have no idea.

I got your email when i was lead by the spirit to be in search of the man of god on Christan search on the Internet.Like i have told you earlier in my last email that the lord minister to me to give to charity.

Well, except for the inconvenient fact that I’m somewhat lacking in religon and I’ve never seen any email from this known 419er before…

The first link on Google for the name, by the way, is a police blotter in Chatanooga which features someone who’d received fake money orders from the exact same scammer earlier this year – this particular variant has been operating for a while. You’d have thought a spammer would make sure that he was using names that couldn’t be zeroed out by a run on Google, but there you go.

I am not interested in the Earthly commissions as my rewards is from the Heaven above.I and my institution are blessed to help the needy and not after the rewards of the world as the bible says if not the lord that buideth the house the laborer labour but in vain...........

…and then the labourer sent out a mass spam campaign to a bought-in list of email addresses and rolled in it for a few years.

Nice spelling issue there – “laborer labour”. It does look like there’s more than one hand in this letter from the fluctuations in spelling and capitalisation, one American English speaker and one UK English speaker at least.

I will like to donate to you/ministry and i will like to donate through a money order of 6,500 dollars for him to cash.Better still,i have some other charities which i wants to donate funds to and i will wants oncashing the cheque to help me donate some part of the money to the other charities or needies as well.

And now we get the money order element of the scam. $6500 seems awfully small for a scammer to use, but it would be big money in Lagos.

I am giving you 2,000 dollars out of the money and i wants you on cashing the cheque to help me donate the remaining 4,500 dollars to some other charities or needies whose in formations i will give you when the cheque is cashed in the cash stores.I will want you to furnish me with the following in formations below:
(1)Name which you wants the check to be addressed
(2)Address where you wants me to send the cheque to(NOT P.O BOXES)
(3)Your Mobile telephone number for prompt communication.

Wow, nice way to have enough information to steal someone’s identity. This scam could be extremely lethal:

  • “I want your bank account number for security” or
  • “Can you send me a photocopy of something with your address on it so I can verify?”
  • Hence, identity theft for credit card applications/loans/bank accounts/passport applications/so on and so forth

But because the scammers are thick, this is probably just a cheque cashing scam (and notice this uses both British and US spellings in different parts of the email again). You cash the cheque, the scammers receive $4500 in the post and then the local cheque cashing place calls up demanding all their money back when it comes through as fraudulent.

That NOT PO BOXES thing is probably to catch out scambaiters, but I’m not entirely sure on that one. Maybe there is an ID theft element here of some sort, but I can’t be certain.

The ending is quite something:

As soon as i received this informations,i will go ahead to send you the check.After the successful completion of this first phase of the lords works with you then i can go ahead to send you another cheque and hence the continuous works of the lord.

I Am Yours In Christ,
Deacon George Useh
E-MAIL: Gospelpromoters001@yahoomail.fr

Look! A promise for more! And a disposable Yahoo France email address! Look at the confidence engendered by this guy.

And the ‘Lord’ has “continuous works”! Well, this scammer certainly does, that’s for sure. At the very least, however, we can be assured that if the Christian God, or for that matter a Jewish or Muslim God really does exist he’s going to hell – that’s at least four commandments right there (the third and eight through ten), and you could push for six (one and two, because as a 419er and as a scammer he obviously idolises Mammon.) I think nothingness is probably better, but who’s to say?

iPhone UK launch, deconstructed

~ Inquisitor
  1. Provider: O2. Appears to be no pay-as-you-go option, unlike the States. Also unlike the States, a fair usage plan – however, O2’s reference to “1400 web pages a day” indicates a pretty decent daily cap, especially since it’s still EDGE.
  2. Price: £269, plus £35/£45/£55 a month plan including said ‘unlimited’ data. Does include free access to The Cloud’s wi-fi points, however. Comparing to the US prices: our plans are over-expensive as normal, but if you remove VAT and then convert,

    £269/1.175 = £228.94 = $461.49

    which is really pretty acceptable on the usual rip-off Britain scale, especially when compared with that of the PS3 (US PS3 price, $499=£247.54; UK price still £425, albeit with an extra controller and one of those copies of the giant enemy crab game Sony are trying desperately to get rid of.)

  3. Phone: Exactly the same as the US iPhone, only with the new firmware so iTunes Wi-Fi Store included. EDGE and Wi-Fi. To be honest, since hardly anyone with a 3G phone actually uses any of the 3G features on their phones, Apple’s use of a 2G/EDGE/Wi-Fi combination as a battery-saving measure is little short of genius. No doubt a UMTS/HSDPA iPhone will come out eventually, however, once smart people at electronics companies finally work out how to reduce its energy consumption.
  4. Contract: 18 months. Again, fairly normal. That month-on-month cost is pretty hefty, however, although it does include unlimited data (not common here, excepting T-Mobile.)
  5. Overall: Let’s wait and see if anything interesting happens in France or Germany, or other European areas where unlocked phones are a bit more common. If you want one and you don’t mind O2, however, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t go for it.

Team Fortress 2 is…

~ Inquisitor

…just as fun as all the promotional videos up until now have suggested, at least on my first play through 2fort.

I am, of course, completely inexperienced in multiplayer gaming: TF Classic, Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament came out when I was still stuck on a 56K modem, a device completely unsuitable for TCP/IP based gaming, and as such I never got into the scene and all my FPS skills are trained towards the one-player experience. Now of course I have near-enough-20Mbit broadband, a high-end graphics card from two and a half years ago and spare time, all perfect breeding grounds for multiplayer gaming. And if you pre-order the Orange Box now off Steam (which unfortunately adds VAT so you get charged about £25 for it) you have TF2.

The design of TF2 is a masterstroke – they’ve taken big inspiration from Pixar and used cel-shading to create a game-specific reality. It uses exaggerated movements and expressions. This therefore differentiates it from all those over-realistic Battlefield-type games (which the original TF2, started before Half-Life 2 and then disappeared, was intending to be; Battlefield before Battlefield) and provides a unique gaming experience – a multiplayer team shooter that’s not afraid to be fun, whatever the consequences of that may be. It’s exhilarating.

So all this goes to say – if you spot me on a TF2 server and inevitably end up killing me, I will hopefully get better some day…

Adverts from hell

~ Inquisitor

I’m back in a Location Up North and thus back in the world of four channels, no Freeview and unskippable adverts, and there’s a few that have been annoying me repeatedly – Peugeot’s Rugby World Cup bumpers are major annoyances already and we’re only two games in (shame about that Italian non-try), and I want to seriously inhibit whoever made the talking animal technology from Babe cheap enough for insurance hawkers to use in their advertising.

(I am also, as you can see from this, somewhat lacking in good blog post ideas, hence this.)

The point here is: why do adverts seek to annoy? It is of course hard to make a piece of film that, shown repeatedly every fifteen minutes, that won’t annoy, but a lot of them seem to want to do it deliberately. Why do people buy stuff that seeks to annoy them into doing so? It’s perplexing.

I really do not get why people would want to use a Shiela’s Wheels type business from the image that they put out. I suppose this goes in the same questions bin as “why do people phone 090 numbers”, really, a question that I would also have trouble answering. I suppose I must think differently in some way, although I cannot think how.