Slashdot Mirror
The Great Internet Con
Imagine a preacher-turned-conman starting a company that claims to have developed a new, high-compression method of delivering full-screen video over the Internet. Imagine mandatory 36 hour shifts and prayer meetings. Imagine investors pouring millions of dollars into this venture, and high-profile executives joining the company in hopes of getting rich when it goes public. This is an astounding story, told in great depth by The Standard. Pixelon, the company in the article, has been mentioned in Slashdot once before: when they sponsored The Who's live reunion concert and webcast last October.
No kidding, following this story I found a very funny/interesting site describing itself as "the dot-com deadpool" at FuckedCompany.com.
They have literally almost 300 *recent* stories about various dot-coms and how they fucked up in some way either screwing over their customers, employees, etc. or all of the above. The antics include Hollywood Video execs emailing their subsidiary Reel.com's CEO to fire all or most of the employees and the CEO simply forwards the e-mail to all in the company, Kozmo.com requiring almost every employee to submit to a detailed background check (and 50+ employees quitting or being fired), & copies of bad customer service feedbacks to Kozmo.com.
GEE, I'm glad I stayed with my solid "old economy", more traditional Silicon Valley electronics employer -- we've been among the fastest growing companies in the USA for several years (we're an ancient 9 years old), we're merging, acquiring, going IPO, making stock option money for employees and no B.S. even close to this stuff! I guess the dot-coms are finally realizing that even "new economy" companies need some kind of business-running know-how! It's a humbling time for all of us...
Does anyone else find it amusing that stories of con artists that would ordinarily not be newsworthy, are treated differently because they are 'on the web'? As far as I can tell, this guy is just another conman who managed to sucker people into buying into his scheme and then running off with the money.
Any time there are gullible people looking to make fast money there will be people like this - the Internet hasn't changed that - it's just another area to exploit.
think about it, this guy got everything he ever wanted probably:
a respectable job at a startup
being the spiritual leader in a high pressure situation
hell, he got the WHO to give a reunion concert
and the only thing that was actually lost were sucker VC's money. Well, it serves the VC's wrong for not doing their homework. And I bet his employees were well compensated.
Well, it's not what the internet commerce business was built for, but I think the majority of the people here prospered.
I read that early this morning (about 4AM). Look at that guy. Pretty scary, especially that closeup photo. What a loon.
I think I would have been tipped off when he started dropping names like the CIA, the Saudi Royal family and whatnot. "Hi there, I live in my Hyundai, but I used to work for the CIA and now I have developed a new product and I would love to get you on the ground floor.." Bzzzt! Nut Alarm!
Who has worked for someone like this before? You know, the cult leader type who makes proclaimations, expects undying devotion from his staff, regularly promotes and fires arbitrarily and so on? I worked for someone like this for awhile. He used to get depressed and sulk whenever he suspected people did not like or trust him. Then he would suddenly get happy and start screwing people over; cutting back their salary, reading their email, finding reasons to fire people, etc.
I don't think it has anything to do with "The New Economy" or "The Internet" but rather the timeless wisdom of P.T. Barnum. Pretty good research by The Standard, I wish all news articles were that good.
Also, I don't think he did anything wrong. All he did, both in Tennesee and California, is take advantage of people's insatiable greed and their suceptibility for quick buck schemes. He should get paid for teaching people how to avoid conmen.
On freshmeat yesterday, a GPL compressor for still and moving images that does Low Bit-Rate Image and Video Coding with Weighted Finite Automata, outperforming JPEG and is competitive with fractal and wavelet compression. Efficient enough to decode movies in software. I grabbed the code and checked out the demo images: it does seem to work.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
and the only thing that was actually lost were sucker VC's money. Well, it serves the VC's wrong for not doing their homework. And I bet his employees were well compensated.
The employees may or may not have been well paid. I bet they were very underpaid their last couple of weeks (read: they probably didn't get their last paychecks). The stock options obviously didn't pan out either.
Even if what you say were true, and everyone except the VC's (who got defrauded out of their investemnts) prospered, this is very short term prosperity indeed. Now the money has run out, the people are unemployed, and the VCs in question may well never invest in another internet startup again.
This kind of thing makes it more difficult for legitimate small-time startups to get off the ground, and as a result leads to less, not more, prosperity.
It isn't easy having much sympathy for wealthy VCs who throw their money around, particularly when we see really inane startups being so funded, but relishing their being defrauded is highly counterproductive IMHO. Far better to relish this priest finally getting sex the way he wants it for, the next twenty years, from his cell mate, forcefully, from behind.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
(Beginning rant now ...)
When I was a wee young lad, a professor sighed and told me "The difference between computer science and other forms of engineering is that if someone wanted a bridge built over the Chicago River, for example, and one bid said the work could be done in 8 months and cost $100K and another bid said 1 month and cost $10K, the person would choose the first bid, because the first bid seems practical and reasonable while the second bid seems unrealistic. Now if that person wanted a computer project done, no matter how improbable the smaller bid was, the person would choose that bid!" Now, many years later, I have witnessed the truth to that story that people always want miracles out of programmers no matter what we know can be done.
Until people learn that computers is a science and not magic, I think cons like this will continue. Perhaps some will be smaller (stretching the truth of how successful a start up will be) and not as large as this con, but they will continue until people learn.
(...ending rant now)
Actually, I forget the story, but it was about a small group of humans making the journey to Alpha Centauri at just under sub-light speeds (estimated time was about 6 years, IIRC). Their ship was equipped with lots of scientific equipment, and because of the members of the crew, they were making lots of scientific discoveries and sending them back to earth. Of course, as the distance between earth and them increased, the chance for error became large, so they found a way to compress their data. They wrote it all out, then applied a simple A->1, B-2, etc scheme to it. They then calculated 2^(first letter code)*3^(second letter code)*5^(third letter code) etc.. to make a large composite number. Then they looked in the near range of numbers around the one they calculated to find some number which had a minimal number of prime factors, and then transmitted the prime factorization and how far off that was from the large composite numbers. This can probably be within a few hundred bytes for messages of a million bytes or more. To decompress, all one had to do was to work out the number from the minimal prime number and offset, then find the prime factorization, and then decode from the exponents.
Of course, in the story, by the time that the crew was only sending messages in this type, the earth was in war, and by the time the last message was sent when the crew reached AC, the intellicual ability of earth was very reduced; the last message could not be decoded because they had no way to calculate the first billion or so primes.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
This is not an internet con, but a con that happened on the internet. People get conned all the time, mostly older or gullible poor people ("lotteries are a tax on people with bad math skills" was a .sig I recently saw here), but also on the eager, greedy, and trusting.
That this happened on the internet is simply because the opprotunity was there, much like the telephone/mail scam artists that prey on the elderly all over the USA. More and more hoaxes, scams, and chain letters appear on the internet every day because of the speed and anonymity inherent in the tool. I think that the most important point of this story was that the man got caught, despite all of the advantages that an "internet con" has.
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
It seems that more and more people want full screen Video over the internet. Well I truly think it will be a while before this happens. The problem is not bandwidth but the undeterministic nature of Internet traffic (what some venders like to call the Quality of service.) I maintained a distance learning classroom for a University that had two full screen connection (one each way) on a signal T1 1.5 MB using H320. It ran as smooth and was a clear as any cable TV connection. I tried to do the same with H323 on a 100TX connection over IP using 350MHZ P2 and software compression and we are back to very small unclear picture. Add just a small amount of competing traffic and things went south quick. The H232 connection was good with hardware compression if there was no competing traffic but was never as good as H320 over a T1 at 100mb!! Forget doing this on the Internet. This problem is well understood. I wish I knew how he was able to get as fare as he did with out some one like me asking OK where is the magic and how do get around the deterministic problem.
Preacher-turned-conman is a redundant term, at least if you judge by the crop of televangelists in the US...
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
Investing in internet startups is such a risky thing that you expect to be coned sometimes. You assume that most of the ventures you put money into will go nowhere. To the goy who has dumped $x million into a venture lousing your shirt because the market isn't ripe for your product, the product comes out after a superior competitor or doesn't work at all is irrelevant. You sometimes louse all your money.
Venture capitalists survive by NOT putting all the eggs into one basket. The only thing special about being taken by a conman is that you will never deal with that person again. Other failed ventures are water under the bridge.
Look at it this way: If someone came to you 5 years ago and said he was going to build a 128 bit CPU that would run x86 instructions in software at native speeds with less than 1 watt of power would you buy in ? The truth is all the really cool investments look far fetched on the surface and you would need months of study before you can make an educated guess as to weather it's flatly impossible.
VCs don't have the time or the inclination so they spread the risk around and louse a little on things like this. If you invest in 5 pixelons it only takes 1 transmeta to wash away all your pain.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Praise be to the Lord, I've been trying to find the URL for Slashdot everywhere!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
That article sounds like a storyboard for a Dilbert strip.
This is another view of the world.
That's not a bad thing. Maybe through the 'net they'll learn.
Actually, Flash animations are remarkably small compared to gifs.
I think that they do, and their families and friends.
The net is a magnificent thing precisely because it allows the massess access to publish to something available instantly world-wide. That is a power undreamed of even ten years ago for the overwhelming majority of the worlds populace... and is rapidly becoming a reality.
I think your elitist vision of a net only accessible to the privileged educated few would be quite horrible
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary