Few people are as careful as I am when buying on eBay but still I got caught.

Long story short I have a server at home and I wanted a means to back it up so, tape being somewhat expensive, I opted for hard disk backups so a USB docking station attached to the server and to use some means of backing up files to it ... maybe copying or perhaps Windows own backup tool.

So I was looking drives on eBay, drives that were (probably) used, slow, SATA I or II  ... speed and warranties weren't really an issue as the drives wouldn't be in use for long periods, just backup up the data and put the drives somewhere else, perhaps even off site. I found some 250GB drives going for around £25 which looked quite handy but then I decided to widen my scope a bit and found a 1TB drive (new, 3 year warranty) going for £30 all in ... wow!!! Feedback was a little low but good and nothing else was obviously wrong so I bought 3. I told a colleague at work and he found an even better deal ... 2TB drives for £33 and I thought I might get some of those too when I got home that evening.

The following day I got a mail from eBay informing me that the listing for the 1TB drives had been removed and giving me advice on how to reclaim my money should the items not arrive. No worries, it seems I was protected but it led me to do further research.

My initial method was simple enough ... check sellers of hard drives (it's entirely possible they've targeted other areas too) and compare the various characteristics of a number of very low priced internal & external hard drives. The following are examples of the listings I checked:

• New Seagate Green 1TB SATA 3.5_ Internal Hard Drive
• NEW Seagate ST2000DL003 2TB SATA3 5900rpm 64MB NCQ Hard Drive 3.5" desktop HDD
• Hitachi 2TB Touro DX3 Desktop Hard Drive - USB 3.0

I found the following to be true in all the cases I checked:

• The seller had low but 100% positive feedback (between 10 & 30 or so)
• The seller had relatively recently signed up to eBay (those I checked all signed up December 2011)
• The seller purported to be British (those I checked were all Surrey based).
• Seller feedback was as a buyer only and with feedback profiles so similar it couldn't be coincidental:
  • A whole suite of similar/same items.
  • Purchases from identical sellers.
  • Very recent (within the last month)
  • Small items, non-UK (purchased in dollars & usually from the far East)
  • Items purchased over a very short time span, usually on the same date and at about the same time.
  • Long delivery (typically 5 to 11 days)
  • Delivery from outside the UK

Later, proceeding from one user I believed to be a scammer, I changed my research method and tracked back via users they had apparently purchased from to reveal users with low purchase feedback but not involved in selling that had many of the same characteristics as above. This led me to the conclusion that more accounts were being prepared, that though they haven't sold anything yet they were being made ready to rip more people off as, though details varied to some degree, they tended to fit the exact same MO.

Examples of such accounts (with their feedback) are:

• wadfg46 (27)
• nicolequirkiro (22)
• nicolequirkiro (22)
• josephrolesfy4 (23)
• josephrolesfy4 (23)
• gosjolce (3 )
• tinashtorr (35)
• gufrize (32)
• myliaw197811 (17)
• liulian8511 (4 )
• cesarjonesihs (14)
• benjamindavis1es (14)
• marybashzos (13)
• sidneyjacobof1s (14)
• adrianngm3wmccalll (14)
• ordair3 (36)
• adrianhx0wyeungv (12)
• adrianso4owelche (12)
• tsurun589 (25)
• adrianqb5mwebberf (11)

I predicted before it happened that the 2TB internal drive listing would be withdrawn and indeed, a day after I had written the first draft of this document, it was. I also predict that the final listing will be similarly withdrawn.

It seems therefore prudent to work on the assumption that these people (whoever they are) are planning to hit the UK very hard and that a lot of genuine, bargain seeking eBayers are going to lose money, be bitterly disappointed or at least be significantly inconvenienced by these people.

So, given that I was wont to assume that anyone with 10 feedback or more was probably OK, how do you go about protecting yourself? Unfortunately, unless eBay start policing these kind of accounts, it's never going to be easy. My personal check list is now going to be as follows:

• Seller Life: 12 months or better.
• Seller Handle (name): Must "look" OK. This is based on my experience of forum admin where I've found that forum handles often look a bit strange because they are generated by software robots. Given that the sellers are almost certainly automating part of the process the names often tend to just look just that little bit "off".
• Seller Location: Typically I only buy from European or US sellers ... I do occasionally buy from the Far East but I'm much more careful about doing so.
• Feedback: 20 or more as a seller (when buying from someone you want to know what they are like as a seller so buyer feedback is largely irrelevant).
• Long delivery dates from outside the UK.

I made my purchase less than 4 days ago (at time of publishing) so it's entirely possible that the seller is actually genuine and that I will receive my goods in due course (I don't think so but I have to concede the possibility). This does, however, seem unlikely as the similarities listed above combined with the low price, the removed listing and the warning from eBay makes me very suspicious indeed. Indeed I am so suspicious I have flagged up to eBay 3 further items in the hope that others won't be similarly caught ... if I've done so wrongly then my apologies to those I've maligned but eBay is a big enough organisation to investigate properly & make informed decisions so, with those and this article, I've done just about as much as one person can.

It appears that some deals are too good to be true so be warned people ... as they used to say in Hill Street Blues, "Let's be careful out there".

Kekerusey

Owner/Admin: "Geekanology"
Co-Founder: "Science, Just Science" (A UK Based Education Campaign)

Starring and directed by Kevin Costner I have heard many bad things about this movie, it gets nearly 3 stars on IMDB (9% on Rotten Tomatoes) so, though I've always had a slight interest in it, I've never quite got round to watching it and making my own mind up. Just before Christmas I bought a copy off eBay for £3.50 and found out if that was to be a bargain or not.

I loved "Dances With Wolves", I've loved many of Costner's epics and thought his earlier "Waterworld" (regarded by many to be an expensive failure) wasn't so bad except for the stupidly enigmatic ending.

Based on Davin Brin's popular book "The Postman" the plot of the film is basically sound and revolves around a drifter (Costner) who chances across a dead postman in a post-apocalyptic America and decides (or rather is decided) to take up the role himself. Long story short the drifter tries to exploit the role, runs away from it but it short-circuited by a younger man who sort of idolises him and this forces the drifter to take the role more seriously and his fledgling service (now with tens or hundreds of postmen and women) becomes a significant community cohesive service in the area. Romance is there in the shape of Abby (Olivia Williams) but unfortunately, in his travels, the drifter has crossed paths with a tyrant warlord named Bethlehem (Will Patton) who decides that the postal service, with its focus on reuniting the US, is standing in the way of his ultimate domination. Despite the drifter's offer to disband the service the service has a life of its own and Bethlehem, realising that, decides to hunt down all the remaining postal workers and wipe "The Postman" off the face of the US with inevitable consequences.

To be honest I actually quite liked the film, most of it at any rate ... it was a little cheesy at times, it was arguably much like "Waterworld" or "Dances With Wolves" but it did entertain me. My big problem was, just like "Waterworld", at the end in a scene set some 30 years after the main film is set where a statue has been erected to "The Postman" and is being unveiled by his daughter. The people at the event looked exactly like people around about the time the film was made, men in suits and leather shoes, women in mid length skirts with modern jewellery and stockings/tights; all sitting on what appeared to be folding chairs from some community centre perhaps. Call me picky but somehow I don't see a society recovering to a point apparently exactly like the one before society collapsed a mere 30 years or so after an apocalyptic breakdown ... I'm sorry but had they ended it at the scene set 30 years earlier I would have been much happier and for this ending alone I have to drop the film quite a significant amount.

Obviously I have it on DVD so I can only ask would I recommend it to others ... sadly I'd have to say no, not really, it is watchable but the ending really does ruin it and I can only give it 5 out of 10.

A missed opportunity.

Kekerusey

Owner/Admin: "Geekanology"
Co-Founder: "Science, Just Science" (A UK Based Education Campaign)

My politics are basically what, in the UK, I refer to as old labour ... no I'm not a communist, no I don't have any personal issue with lining my own nest if I were fortunate enough to have it (and being realistic the only way that's ever going to happen is if I win it, unlikely since I don't buy the tickets). However there comes a time, a level of personal wealth, beyond which I believe it is inherently immoral to simply hoard it, to have it, to do nothing of any particular use except earn interest. So it came a s breath of fresh air to read Sam Harris' piece on wealth:

I’ve written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of “wealth redistribution” that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance.

Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing.

Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft—and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment.

Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don’t have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don’t create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy.

Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent’s, parent’s, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn’t an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money.

But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others. But there is nothing to prevent the ultra rich from cooking all their meals at home, using vegetables grown in their own gardens, and investing the majority of their assets in China.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the two richest men in the United States, each have around $50 billion. Let’s put this number in perspective: They each have a thousand times the amount of money you would have if you were a movie star who had managed to save $50 million over the course of a very successful career. Think of every actor you can name or even dimly recognize, including the rare few who have banked hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years, and run this highlight reel back half a century. Gates and Buffet each have more personal wealth than all of these glamorous men and women—from Bogart and Bacall to Pitt and Jolie—combined.

In fact, there are people who rank far below Gates and Buffet in net worth, who still make several million dollars a day, every day of the year, and have throughout the current recession.

It was also somewhat unsurprising that he got a huge (presumably American) backlash since it seems to be ingrained in some people, some societies, that taxation is a bad thing, that redistribution of wealth to those less able to make money (whether through ability, circumstance of birth or lack of opportunity), that caring for or paying back into the society of which we are all a part is a bad thing.

If fate (no I don't believe in that either) were to decree I should end up with my own personal multi-million/billion pound fortune I would use some for me and mine and the rest I would plough into some project that I genuinely believed would benefit us as a race. I know that's easy to say from my position of lacking it (wealth) but that is what I believe I would do.

All I can say is thanks Sam, I'm not the greatest reader of your blog but you said something that needed saying, something that I assume (in US society) took some guts to say so well done!

Kekerusey

Owner/Admin: "Geekanology"
Co-Founder: "Science, Just Science" (A UK Based Education Campaign)

There are “SciFi” films & series out there that make sense, there are some that don’t ... in the don’t category I list series such as “The X Files” (the truth may well be out there but it’s got naff all to with this series), “Lost” (good title ... 15 minutes in and I had entirely “lost” interest). There are others that rely on techno-babble, Star Trek & Stargate (love them though I do) amongst them and that’s fine ... I can live with techno-babble by making a rational trade off, I switch off the normal world step into the scenario I’m presented with and as long as it is internally consistent I’m fine with it. To my mind that is the secret to enjoying a science fiction film or series ... I don’t mind whether it entertains me on a rational level or on an entertainment level but, if the film strays too far from rational I demand that it makes sense within the scenario presented.

So when I first saw the pilot for the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica first came on screen in the form of a 3 hour pilot I absolutely loved it ... sure it had flaws, which series doesn't, but it was gritty & interesting in all kinds of ways; it had great characters including Commander Adama (James Edward Olmos), Apollo (Jamie Bamber), Gaius Baltar (James Callis), Number Six (Tricia Helfer) and the awesome Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff); it was stylish and it appeared to be, above all, rational by which I mean it was a scenario that made sense.

One intriguing thing was the religious relationship between the Colonials and their Cylon enemies ... the Colonials believed in Greco/Roman gods whilst the new model, humanoid, Cylons believed in “The One God”. Even as an atheist this was fine because the idea of gods are inherently irrational, there is never any proof so with two mutually opposed belief systems there could be no victor, no right or wrong so I had many, many hours of what looked to be an excellent, action-packed science fiction series to look forward to ... 3 seasons later I found out how hugely, mind-bogglingly wrong I was!

First of all a warning, this review is one huge spoiler, in order to deal with it as I intend to do it can’t be anything else. So, if you don’t want to know what happens, if you want to make up your own mind and do so objectively, without prejudice stop reading now. If, however, you want to be fully informed, to know the reason why I was so bitterly disappointed with it, a possible reason to (perhaps) stop before you start, before (as I did) you waste huge amounts of time and money on it ... read on.

Battlestar Galactica started well in the pilot introducing us the characters and the second war between Cylon and Human and the first season, with some baggage, went on well to expand on that fleshing out reasons for tensions between father, son and adoptive daughter (in order to preserve something for the wannabe viewer, I’ll try and keep some specifics out), why the military and civilian authorities didn’t see eye to eye, why the Cylons were engaged so determinedly in an effort to wipe the Humans out and on how determined (and why) the Humans were to survive.

Over seasons 1 to 3 there was some (inevitable perhaps) decay in the story, there were good episodes and ones that were not so good but when they were good it has to be admitted they tended to be very good and the bad episodes weren’t actually so bad as to be uninteresting. More to the point, as in often done these days, a story was being told ... a story that arced across each episode's adventure, tying the whole series together, asking questions, sometimes answering them, telling a story of a lost people trying to find their way home and above all asking what they would find when they reached that home, the mythical planet Earth to which the thirteenth tribe of Cobol was believed to have gone. In some ways this was, for me, becoming a kind of new Babylon 5 ... in some ways it wasn't quite as good (until the dire season 5 Babylon 5 just kept improving) but in other ways it was far, far better.

Season 3 ended with Starbuck returning from the dead and by half way through season 4 (with no surety it would continue what with the Hollywood writing strike) it appeared our fleet had reached Earth and, from the wrecked cities & all too familiar seeming skyline, at some point in our future. If only they had ended it there ... it wouldn't have been a good ending, it wouldn't have answered all the questions but if only, if only!

The writer's strike ended and a little later the series continued and, god, was it depressing? Primarily dealt with a mutiny over multiple episodes which could, quite frankly, have been covered in one, maybe 2 ... there were lots and lots (and lots more) of "in corridor" scenes, person to person stuff and not a whole lot of FX/action. The impression many of us fans seemed to be getting was that they were saving their FX for one huge FX laden finale ... and that is exactly what happened but not quite in the way I thought it would.

At this point I am going to give a final notification so you know that now, if any time, is the time to duck out, I WILL be revealing things you might want not to know if you're the kind of individual that can enjoy this kind of crap  ... you were warned!

The mutiny is over and we've lost at least one major character, a civil war has burnt itself out in the Cylon fleet and Hera (the half-Human/half-Cylon child) has been kidnapped and taken to the Cylon's mammoth Colony/C&C Ship. So Adama organizes a rescue mission and, expecting not to return leaves the rest of the fleet under the protection of allied Cylons and that is when we meet, for the first time, this Cylon monster  ... this ship is no Cylon Baseship, it's an utter behemoth besides which Galactica, at 1.4K length (or indeed an ordinarily huge Cylon Baseship), is dwarfed (and that's by one of its appendages alone). Judging by the visuals the "ship" is maybe 15 times the length of Galactica but that doesn't stop our intrepid crew (nor should it) as she smashes her front into one of the monstrous arms and then ... sorry? Yes that's right smashes her front into ... what do you mean, "like cardboard?" Oh yeah ... so it would!!!!

Let's run by that again ... under the pounding gun fire of this Behemoth (yes I know that Sam is controlling Galactica's return fire but not, so it seems, for the first 20 seconds or so in which time the Galactica would have been little more than pulverised mist) Galactica launches raptors and vipers and rams herself against the base (nearer the central hub) of one of the Colony ship's arms. Let's think about that for a moment ... Galactica is damaged not only through the withering fire she's experienced but, as had been established in previous episodes, she wasn't doing so well structurally anyway yet she manages to ram her front section not merely into but THROUGH the armour of the Colony ship to allow her crew to exit and embark on a mission inside that ship to rescue Hera. I mean come on ... cardboard doesn't even cover it ... this thing is big, AT LEAST, 15 times the length of Galactica (so 20 kilometres across minimum) and something that big would be built, if you'll pardon my French, like a brick shithouse! Even assuming she survived the Colony ship's fire, Galactica would either have pancaked on the surface of the behemoth or bounced (likely in many, many pieces off the surface) back into space ... you'll remember that an arguably superior Battlestar broke into many, many exploding pieces when Lee Adama crashed her through a couple of Cylon basestars at the beginning of season 3.

So the battle raged whilst the brave (or apparently not so brave since it seemed they were going to pull this off despite everything thrown in their way up to and including the laws of physics) men, women & Cylons of the Colonial fleet manage to find and rescue Hera and then pull the Galactica out (admittedly this time not under the withering fire of the Colony ship), somehow not managing to rip her front section off and leave it behind (think about the shape here guys). And then, to cap the dramatic battle, a dead pilot in a heavily damaged and drifting Raptor manages to loose his (or her if it was Racetrack) nuclear missiles to destroy the Colony ship (yes the kind of missiles that Galactica had survived many, many impacts of). Great! Marvellous! But even all of that could be forgiven if it weren't for the final, absolute insult to the viewer's intelligence yet to come.

The reformed fleet, having destroyed the remaining bad Cylons sets off for territories new guided by the re-animated (back from the dead) Starbuck ... "earth" it turns out was not the "Earth" that we know it was merely some transient stopping point for the 13th tribe. Fair enough ... eventually we arrive at another planet and during the remainder of the story it is revealed that the Baltar and Six inside Six and Baltar's heads (respectively) are angels sent by the one true god (a single god and not multiple ones as the colonials believed) and so is the re-invigorated Starbuck and that "He" (this one true god) was orchestrating the whole bloody thing according to his almighty will!!!

In short it was tiresome, it was dull and, as I say above, I really wish they had just left them on the shattered, transient “Earth” mentioned above ... that I hadn't stuck through the latter half of season 4 for such a pathetic and tritely religious ending. More to the point the ending, with all the big questions answered by "God dun it" invalidated ALL of the previous episodes something Ron Moore doesn't apparently get (and at times like that I find myself wondering whether explanation by baseball bat is considered such a bad thing) i.e. that fans of a series stick with it to get the answers, answers to important questions that have been raised throughout the series ... Babylon 5 had a really bad last season but if Straczynski had ended it similarly to Battlestar Galactica I would have reacted similarly! Thankfully, despite the fact I didn't like that last season, it turns out he didn't ... way to go JMS! But to the point, I struggled through the increasingly lame, overlong, dire episodes of season 4 because I figured the last episode HAD to be good ... in many ways it made me wonder why I bothered with the damned series at all.

I asked my friend who watched it with me what he would have done and he offered me his own vision:

We knew, even without their resurrection ship, the humans & their Cylon allies were outnumbered so he suggested we could have had:

1. The Cylon main battlefleet catch up with them and rejoin the bloody cat & mouse game that was done so well in the first & second series
2. Over a period of episodes the desperate humans could have come up with plan after desperate plan only barely managing to survive (with significant, perhaps mainly civilian, losses) then ...
3. Eventually coming up with a daring (out-of-the-box, probably Starbuck designed, plan to eliminate the Cylon fleet that is only partially successful and ...
4. Finally (the finale) the humans & their Cylon allies facing off against a still superior Cylon fleet but, with civilian ships adapted as kamikazes, eventually winning the day with enough people (human & Cylon) to continue to the real Earth.

Had Moore done something like that my blood-thirsty lust for space action, death & destruction would have been sated and I, without the need for breaking physical laws or the invocation of higher powers,  could have gone home a very happy man.

As it was I couldn't (still can't) see the point of it and in many ways it completely invalidate the earlier much better episodes much like the appalling sequels cheapened the first "The Matrix" film ... worse at least "The Matrix" stood quite well on its own.