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The Magic Box Hoax
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."
He received a patent on his black box, so it must true and not a hoax, right?
Another reason why patents are worthless pieces of paper.
This was the pre-DSL era. Everybody and their brother was supposed to be searching for this very thing - broadband-type bandwidth over standard old telephone lines. These investors wanted to believe in this magic box. When people actually want to believe in something, it becomes orders of magnitude easier to convince them of it. Even so, this guy went to great lengths to convince them. I'm sure there are other, smaller investors that were swindled from shadier, less-convincing con-men using this very same theme.
You can find the patent here. It's completely bogus. Any patent examiner with a minimum background in electrical engineering should have thrown this out, and anybody investing millions of dollars in it should have had it checked out by someone who actually knows something about electrical engineering. This is really no different from the patent and investment follies of the Internet bubble.
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.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !
This is a classic bit of snake oil - "I have this wonderful thing, and you can get a piece of it, but DON'T GO BACK THERE!"
That otherwise intelligent people fell for this just goes to show how most of us don't always act logically all the time.
Besides - pushing video over CAT-3 isn't hard: you just need enough OOMPH to deal with the attenuation, which over a few feet is not so bad. I've seen little boxes you can buy that allow you to send a VCR's output to another room over 100 feet of little thin zip-cord - all they are is a balun (balanced to unbalanced transformer) that matches the 75 ohm output of the VCR to the wire.
It's pushing that same signal over MILES of cable while somebody else is pushing a different signal over a different pair of wires in the same bundle without interfering with each other that's the tricky bit. Solve that with enough signal to noise ratio to allow multi-megabit transmission, and you will be rich. You also will be violating half a dozen laws of physics, but....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sometimes it is good to be a cynic.
No, but sometimes it is good to be a skeptic. In fact, in my own experience, it is always good to be a skeptic.
The cynics I've known were convinced that all human behavior was motivated wholly by self-interest, which, even if it is true in an ultimate sense, is an attitude guaranteed to close your mind. The skeptics, on the other hand, merely insist that all claims be testable and repeatable: they doubt, but their doubt is healthy and reasonable, and leave them with a mind-set that I think of as structured incredulity.
If more people were skeptics, charlatans like John Edwards and James Van Praagh wouldn't be able to make a living, and this "Magic Box Hoax" could have never occurred.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Madison Priest's Patent
Editorial: Bwa-hahahahahaha, Dumbasses. Maybe they should invest in Alex Chiu
-Sean
I was a spectator to a similiar case, where a guy calling himself Paul "Voss" Hinds was trying to get money to start a flight simulator game company. That story has a LOT of parallels.
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.
I thought this [the bandwidth of the telephone lines] was supposed to common knowledge to engineers
Yes, it is common knowledge. About 20 years ago it was 1200 BAUD, then it changed to 2400BAUD. It stuck at 9600BAUD for a long time, and now we run DSL at something 500K BPS. Yes, it is common knowledge...Don't let the fact that "common knowledge" was wrong in the past delude you into thinking that common knowledge today might be incorrect.
Wow, you mean that we shouldn't trust people because people in the same profession committed horrible crimes? Wow!
That does it. I can no longer trust police officers, firemen, doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, stock market folk, bankers, store managers, or anyone else. They've all got members who've committed felonies!
No, no, no need for justice for them. Their professions obviously predispose them towards criminal behavior. Let's just assume that they're all crooks--the ones who aren't are just biding their time.
I mean, heck, every priest secretly wants to coodle a young boy. And all that talk about "forgivenenss" that they've been going on about for 2,000 years really is just PR, and they don't REALLY believe that.
... or maybe you're a +5 troll, and we should think rationally about who we trust in all manners, and not make sweeping generalizations about professions who can only function if they are trusted?
Wired mag ran a story last year about a guy with a similar scam. P.T. Barnum rules!
For all those who are outraged that the scam took in so many (i.e. "Why didn't they get some competent people to recview it before investing), the answer is that they did. The article talks about the way that many scientists reviewed the invention, but were never quite able to say that the invention was impossible. On this basis, the investor's said "it appears to work. I'll take the risk and assume it does actually work."
<p>
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.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Here's a story about a similar scam from the dot com era. This guy raised $20M, and spent $16M of that on a party in Las Vegas with entertainment provided by the Dixie Chicks and The Who.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
The most dumbfounding was at the Fort Gates Ferry, a ramshackle barge that crosses the St. Johns River near Welaka. Priest would often demonstrate the invention there, transmitting video from a computer on one side of the river to a partner on the other side. It seemed, the Zekko executives thought, an impossible test to fake.
Then they saw more than a half-mile of coaxial cable coiled on the dock.
"Madison had actually run co-ax under the St. Johns River there," Mons said.
Man, it might be hoax, but this dude worked HARD to keep the hoax alive. It makes you wonder how far he would get in life he put all this energy into something worthwhile.
I hate to admire someone who's basically a thief, but anyone who goes to that much trouble almost deserves to get away with it. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
According to the article, it was Teddy Turner, Ted Turner's son.
From the bottom of the patent:
+--------------+
| |
Data | YHBT | Data
=====+ YHL +=====
In | HAND | Out
| |
+--------------+
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
This article pisses me off, why? This scammer has an expensive home, a few cars such as a Jaguar (ok, Jaguar sucks but it is arguably better than his Eclipse), boats, and a couple of planes --- oh, and he still has a bundle of cash.
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.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
Perhaps this is of interest. Hal Puthoff, the "Texas physicist considered an expert in the concepts Priest said he was using", is---I believe---also known as Harold Puthoff.
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.
First of all, notice that there were actual experts that quoted that the invention was "implausable, but not impossible". At the same time, dsl, while not in widespread use, was definitely on the marketing tip of many a phone company. Broadband over regular phone lines was definitely possible, this guy just happened to be doing it faster. The experts weren't going to outright denounce it without at least LOOKING at the technology first.
Secondly, this was the heyday of the dotcom era. Everyone was getting rich, and there seemed to be no end in sight. However, there were a lot of investors with a sizeable amount of cash that simply hadn't gotten their piece of the preverbial dotcom pie yet. And seeing how the phone companies were developing competing technology, the sense of urgency was real.
As for criminal records, people are surprisingly lax about that sort of thing. Especially today, its so easy to run a criminal background check on someone, everyone assumes that someone has already done it, and doesn't bother. When other people are dumping multiple millions of $$$ into a company, and those people are well respected, intellegent people, it simply doesn't occur not to take the guy at his word. The only concern is getting in on it before its too late.
Scam artists, despite the vulgarity of their profession, are actually very talented and very good at what they do. They are literally experts in the art of social engineering. Anyone can scam a gullible nobody. Just send them a flyer in the mail and you'll have checks flying into your PO box. But to convince someone who's worth millions to give you a blank check with no verification that you can actually do what you say you can do. That's genius. Or it speaks very poorly for the competancy of the multimillionaires, which might just go to show that you don't need to necessarily be smart to be rich. And you don't have to be honest to get rich. And people might be too embarrased to get back at you once you're done fleecing them. Its a strange world indeed.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
This was the pre-DSL era. Everybody and their brother was supposed to be searching for this very thing
Ain't that the truth! At the time that scam artist was operating I was an engineer at US Robotics. We had damn near a revolving door of these kinds of kooks coming in and out. Most never got in, but every now and then one would. As a fairly visible, and known very cynical, engineer, I often was invited to meetings with these types to try to flesh out if they were full of it, or had something interesting. I had 2 favorites, one a scam, the other became 56K.
The one that was a scam was hysterical. Like the situation in this article, I am pretty sure the guys I met actually believed in it as I think they were too stupid (or too blinded by instant wealth) to know any better. Their "magic software" (yes, they called it just that) would magically give 2 to 5 times better throughput. Over the phone they would not give any details except that it was NOT compression. They would not give me a copy to eval, but offered to fly out to Chicago to give me a demo. So, what the heck, I invited them out to meet with me and the Product Management exec. It ended up being a waste of two hours, but worth it for a good laughable story.
So, they come out and load their magic on one of our test PCs and demonstrate what was effectively 115 Kbps throughput. Now, remember, at the time the serial port driver that shipped with Windows was limited to 19.2 Kbps. So, when they compared it to a "normal" Windows PC, it was indeed way faster. BUT, we (as well as every other modem mfg) shipped a free driver along with our modem that fixed that problem. MS also fixed the problem in Win98. When I showed them the same type of t-put on another PC in our lab, with the updated driver, their faces dropped, they shook in disbelief that some other genious had discovered this before them. I escorted them out of the building. As a parting gift I gave them a copy of the driver we used, and told them my shortcut back to the airport and recommended a bar on the way.
My other story is when we met a guy that had been thrown out of Rockwell and Lucent. They had basically told him his invention would never work outside the lab, and the real world phone network would kill it with all it's quirks. He was a Stanford math professor named Dr. Brent Townsend. Though not entirely incorrect, the goofy phone network did pose some serious challenges (particularly in US, Canada and Korea), and it took a couple years to really refine it. His invention was what became 56K (err, 54K, grin) modems. It significantly surpassed what "Shannon's Law" says was the max a voice channel could carry. From what I can tell (a very informed guess), a hair over 90% of the modem using populace (at least in industrialized nations) get at least a significant benefit (stable 42K+ speeds, most around 48K) out of this technology. A technology that almost never happened.
I mention Dr. Townsend to remind folks that not all the kooks are really kooks. The former (and many other examples) show it pays to be skeptical (and MOST of the kooks really are kooks).
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
I'm picturing a bunch of companies with copper networks led by King Arthur galloping with a bunch of coconuts up to a castle. The man (who somehow looks like John Cleese with a peculiar french accent) at the top of the castle says that this is a castle of people with fiber networks.
King Arthur: If you give us food and shelter, you can join us on our quest for the Holy Grail.
Frenchman: Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he'll be very keen. He's already got one, you see?
King Arthur: What? Are you sure you've got one?
Frenchman: Oh yes, it's very nice.
King Arthur: If you don't show us the grail, we shall take this castle by force!
Frenchman: You don't frighten us you copper-based pigdogs! Go and boil your buttons you sons of silly person. I blow my nose at you so cold, Arthur King. You and all your Silly English Kniggits! I fart in your general direction.... etc
At that point, the Fiber Optic French people catapult a gigantic light-based switch at them.
King Arthur and his Men: Run Away! Run Away!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !"
There was an interesting documentary on either A&E or Discovery (one of those two) based on the book Longitude. Somebody was talking about Harrison's apprehensiveness about letting others (ie. the Astronomer Royal) poke around inside of his invention and he made an interesting point: If you really did have a magic box and it did what you said it did, would you want potential competitors seeing its insides?
Someone claims they can do something like that? Fine, make them come to YOU and demo it, and have your engineers look at the device. A full look, not a hands-off, across the room kind of thing.
Cisco receantly had a new DSL technology they wanted to sell us on, they call it Long Range Eithernet. Allegedly, it gets 10mbps, both directions over regular phone lines at distances of around a mile. Now Cisco is a big, reputable company, not some small time con artist and we are friends with the engineer in this city. Doesn't matter, we STILL wanted to test it for ourselves. So they sent us an LRE switch and two remote units. We tested it, and indeed it does perform as advertised.
Now we know for a fact that it works. This wasn't a smoke and mirrorrs test, it was conducted in our lab, by our people. They weren't even around (the just loaned it to us for a month and said have fun). We got to run all the tests we chose on it. All this, for a product from a reputable company. But you know what? That's how you need to do it. Don't rely on what the people who make something tell you, demand to test it yourself. See if it works as advertised in YOUR environment.
This is doubly true for new technologies. Make the inventor bring his tech to your labs, demo it on your terms, and have your people run the tests. Then you know it isn't being rigged because you can check to make sure everything is on the level. I'm not talking looking at some poorly drawn semi-plausable circut diagrams, I'm talking about having the actual prototypes in your lab and under the gun.
There's those computercompanies who tell us their "magic boxes" will make our lifes better, or their software. TV-broadcasters ensuring us we couldn't live without watching their Channels every day (makes one wonder what humankind did before the invention of TV), car companies convincing us that we need a car that can drive 150 MPH although there's only very few chances to do so, ...
Also there's all these "get rich quick" schemes and whatnot, but what they all have in common: there needs to be someone gullible enough to believe all those smooth lies and greedy enough to act before thinking for the scheme to work. How's this one different from any big corporation selling their product with even bigger lies? Just because it's a single guy instead of a whole corporation thats selling hot air on lies?
If that guy get's sued i'd like to sue all that corporations who told me i could get the hottest women in town just because i wear the right sneakers, drink the correct beverage or drive the right car. Then i have some serious issues with any companies selling XXX-light products because i didn't loose a single pound despite eating tons of the stuff. And then i want a free passage to my plot on the moon.
Where exactly is the difference between a scam and "good advertising"?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
you know, from the article, it sounds more like that the "investors" were more interested in keeping his invention out of production. Particularly Blockbuster and Qwest had tremendenous motivation to supress the idea, whether legitimate or not. I seriously doubt Blockbuster was interested in obsoleting their own business model. And Qwest owns of the more miles of wire than anyone in the world. Whether they knew it was a hoax or not is kind of irrelevant, since the principle investors never intended the product to be developed anyway.
In the demo, however, they were just going to do a DS-1. I took a t-berd DS-1 test set, a Navtel protocol analyzer, and some cables, including a DS-1 loopback plug (RJ-48). We met them at some hospital in Jacksonville, present were Madison Priest and Mark Strong. Mark video taped the whole thing, which made me kind of nervous.
They took us down to the communications room in the basement of the hospital. There were two Packard Bell computers sitting on the floor. They were both plugged into the same powerstrip. The interesting part was there was not one power cable, but three for each computer. I think two of them ran into one of the ISA slot openings, and were "expoxied" in by what looked like latex caulking. It was a real mess.
Each computer also had an RJ-45 for the T-1, and an internal analog modem. I plugged the t-1 test set into one computer, and a loopback plug into the other. Madison then used hyperterm or procom (I forget which) to dial from one computer to the other thru the Hospital's PBX. When the modems synced up, the T1 came up. I verified I was seeing the loopback, sent some different bit patterns, and errors. When he pulled the pots line, the T1 went down (loss of signal).
Next, they wanted to show it ran over long distances. They used one computer to dial a number in my office in xxxx which was forwarded to the number of the other computer next to us. This worked just as expected. The T-1 came right up. We let the test set run awhile to make sure the line was error free. Mark Strong made it a point to videotape him asking me if it was working. About all I could say was that "It appears to be."
We went to a conference room nearby to talk while the test ran. Madison was pretty strange. He got, what I would term, angry several times during the meeting. I stayed out of it pretty much till at what point our VP asked me what else I needed to verify to make sure that it was capable of carry a T-1. I said I wanted to put the protocol analyzer on the circuit and make a call through xxxx. Then I wanted to send frames and measure the latency of the circuit. I said I know about how much latency I should see, given that signals travel about 100 miles per millisecond.
Then all hell broke loose. They refused to allow that test, or any others. They claimed I was trying to steal their technology. We ended up packing up and going home.
Over the next several months, we heard from them about doing more tests. We wanted to do a long distance video feed, but the week that was supposed to happen, weather was not good (I think it was too icy) for their general aviation plane to make it. They started calling themselves VisionTek, and they informed us, of all things, that we wouldn't see the latency we expected because this thing could transfer a signal faster than the speed of light.
I had suspected the power cords were the actual data path, and my latency test was going to test that theory, but they never allowed it to happen. I don't think they had come up with the "faster than light" story by that time, so I believe we caught them with their pants down.
I don't think we ever invested any money in them. I always believed it to be a hoax, but was just doing my job to investiagate it. I also knew that Madison Priest was an ex-con, and after witnessing his temper, I didn't want to become any more involved than I had to. I certainly wasn't going to challenge him or do anything that would lead him to believe that I *personally* was the reason he didn't get money from my company.
As a matter of fact, I think I should post this anonymously if you don't mind...