February 9 MDMH News Editorial
From the President: On Scams, Con Artists and Copyright
Last week the server farm where our websites and server reside went through a major upgrade. We had been told that it would only briefly impact our websites. Such things happen, it was on a weekend, and the company adds to our services after each upgrade. Well, things didn’t go exactly as planned and the servers, mirror servers and email system pretty much collapsed.
All kinds of nasty things ensued that just boggled the mind! We had companies claiming we had gone out of business, we lost important communications in both directions, our launches of the Motor Diagnostics and Motor Health News eMag and the AllAmericanHybrid.com eMag were screwed up. The server farm customer service, starting out strong, collapsed by noon last Monday. Overall it was a real headache.
However, I have been doing business with Host Depot (hostdepot.com) for over 12 years and maintain six of the seven websites SUCCESS by DESIGN is responsible for on them (the IEEE DEIS web is maintained on IEEE servers). Afterwards some advice was given, and taken, directly by the CEO, Mark Erskine.
I remember when they were still young and I placed my first website on this American (Florida) based server farm, now a full service web hosting platform. When I would call for help I would often get an immediate response from Mark Erskine himself on the phone. The owner was tech support, with other partners handling the 24/7 human answering service. Even though they have hugely expanded (deal with the grammar, I am having fun), they have insisted on a human answering tech support 24/7, usually within minutes (worst case was about 3.5 minutes at 1am), and support emails returned within the hour with either an update, solution, or other. Regardless of the fact that we are one of their smallest customers. Yep, honest to goodness customer service!
So, I am taking last week’s hit on the chin. Inconvenient? Yes. Cost us money and response time? Yes. But they have been loyal to us for 12 years of great service, so why shouldn’t we be loyal to them? In over 12 years I have suffered less than a total of 2 week’s inconvenience.
So, when I received this email:
Hi, I’m writing this to other fellow Host Depot customers that I know of. I’m not sure about you but our site being down for roughly three days without any status on Host Depot’s website or not picking up their 24/7 tech support line is completely unacceptable as a service provider. At one point someone accidently answered the support line, as soon as he picked up I heard someone yell in the background, “No, don’t pick up!” That was the last straw for me. I defiantly lost business from the downtime, we ran TV commercials on the east coast for our partners early last week, and starting on Saturday I got call after call from our partners about a waste of money the commercial was as the site is down!
If you lost business from Host Depot’s poor service or lack of service you might try Web Hosting Spot. They moved my site over and had it up within a day, as soon as Host Depot was online long enough for them to transfer me. They even monitored Host Depot’s servers for me so that I knew when they came back online. The fact that Host Depot would not even answer their phone to give an update was unacceptable and very unprofessional. I lost $1,000’s throughout the years with them; they had many times sent me emails on accident that were meant for other customers. I went ahead and kept them even considering how they always made me mad with their late fees and threat to turn off all my sites if I didn’t pay the $25 late fee. If you are looking for a new hosting company then you should try Web Hosting Spot. There help in moving me over was excellent, they always called me back or replied to me within a couple hours. They even are willing to help out anyone else that had unacceptable downtime over the weekend, read below.
Randy
From: 'Web Hosting Spot' [mailto:support@webhostingspot.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 10:12 AMTo: 'Randy Smith'Subject: Hosting Service
We have successfully completed the transfer of your account and services over from Host Depot. To show our gratitude of your business and maybe help you out for the downtime you received from your previous hosting company we have given you your first 3 months free. This our way of giving back and helping businesses grow in times of need, it also allows you to get a feel of our excellent services and support we provide.
We do understand that there may be others that want to move away from Host Depot as you have, so we have setup a promotion code for others to use to get the same discount we have given you. You can refer others to sign up with the promotion code hostdepot; this will give them three months free with a one year sign up.
Best regards,Web Hosting SpotWeb Site: http://www.WebHostingSpot.com
Domain names for as little as $9.95 a year!!! Including transfers and renewals.
SSL Certificates for as little as $89.00 a year!!!
I responded with:
Always paid my bills on time and have never lost a dime until last week in the 12 years I have done business with HostDepot.
I am assuming that you are probably a salesperson for ‘Web Hosting Spot,’ either that or a customer that Host Depot could do without if you don’t pay your bills. I looked up Web Hosting Spot’s reliability, because that is what I do for a living. Good luck with that.
Personally, I am sticking with a company that has remained good to me with only one flaw in 12 years.
Lose my email address.
Sincerely,
Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP
President, SUCCESS by DESIGN Reliability Services
President, AllAmericanHybrid.com
Editor in Chief, IEEE DEIS Web
Vive la révolution de l'entretien!
Author: “Physical Asset Management for the Executive (Caution: Do Not Read This On An Airplane)” and “Electrical Motor Diagnostics, 2nd Edition”
http://www.motordoc.com
As I suspected, I got this:
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: RE: Hosting Service
Sent: 2/6/2009 10:51 PM
The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:
'Randy Smith' on 2/6/2009 10:51 PM
550 5.1.1 <randys@textmymls.com> is not a valid mailbox
The email was a fake and a really slimy sales technique. In the ‘message options’ section of an email in Outlook, you can obtain the IP address and originator of the message. It was, of course, directly from WebHostingSpot. In effect, it amounted to a scam that I, and HostDepot, are continuing to investigate. Their claim is that they are located in Houston, TX.
You really have to be wary these days. And not just from the famous ‘Nigerian’ scams. They are popping up everywhere. There was even one out of Toronto, Ontario, where a copy of an advertisement that your company had put in a magazine would be taped to an invoice for payment. Looked legit, I have caught a few both here and with previous employers, but I can assure you there are people who are paying those invoices. Many of the scammers are not very nice when you respond to them or even deal with them through normal legal channels.
In one case that kicked off my concern about copyright was a ‘company’ that claimed to do maintenance training. It was supposedly part of a huge pharmaceutical company based in Europe that had an impressive website, huge names associated with them, job postings, etc., and an impressive board of directors. Our problem was that their chief trainer and contractor had taken a series of our papers, as well as papers from a number of others, and either added his name as a co-author or removed the original author altogether and replaced it with his own. While trying to contact someone within this huge company to take care of the problem, we discovered that the company was fictitious, set up by a fictitious person in Houston, TX, from a guy in California. We brought the problem into the light. His response was to generate harassment, make death threats, implore the lunatic fringe to kill my kids on blogs and forums, and put my family in danger while taunting me with emails, claiming I ruined his nonexistent maintenance career.
Was I scared? Folks, as I told my kids once when hiking in the woods: ‘There is nothing scarier in these here woods than me!’ Over the next three days the local and local Californian police and FBI offices got involved. Surprisingly, no matter how many times the Microsoft Live hosting people were contacted through to the supervisory levels, they decided their best approach was to do nothing at all. The cool thing is that the FBI and other resources have created the Internet Crime Complaint Center (http://www.ic3.gov) which allows you to initiate a complaint to the FBI and local officials for fraudulent, harassment and related emails and websites. I was sent there by the New Haven, CT, FBI office after calling their on-duty agent at 1am. Within 12 hours of our posting the site was down and the scum arrested on Federal charges. Contacting your local police is not effective because they do not have jurisdiction, which causes some people to get frustrated and give up.
With so many nuts on the web that have way too much time on their hands, some even at work, you have to wonder how safe you are as digital can become personal real fast. After a few experiences with specific individuals on public forums where I thought I would do a little good responding to questions, I have made the decision that I would only participate in forums or blogs that are properly moderated. Yep, I have learned not to be as much of a bulldog and when I see things misinterpreted, etc., and the only real goal of the other person is to try to ‘establish’ themselves by attacking someone who actually knows what they are talking about, I simply walk away. Besides, as a business owner, I have found that such sites and discussions have only ever been counterproductive and that direct emails with questions or heavily moderated forums usually have more legitimate questions and maintain a level of decorum. To this day, I cannot link a single business opportunity to giving away free advice on forums that has been worth the nuisances.
Such scams, issues, and problems are not limited to the unwashed. Over the past week the IEEE has been dealing with a number of people who have blatantly plagiarized other papers, had them pass through the reviewing process and get printed in IEEE proceedings, journals, and the IEEEXplore site. IEEE handles such issues aggressively!!!
The problem was that the primary ‘alleged’ culprits tend to be people in positions of authority. In one case, a professor at a prestigious Korean university and his graduate student. Worse, they added co-authors who have significant reputations and who claim that they were unaware that they were added to the papers – which means that the accusations are worse because each author must sign a form. It was even noted by one IEEE reviewer that she had even reviewed a paper under a different author’s name that she had published a year before!
For those of you who are IEEE members, you can find more information in the http://www.IEEE.TV or by going to IEEE.org then logging in through ‘My IEEE’ and going through IEEE.tv (a new member service in 2008). According to the program, ‘The IEEE Plagiarism Guidelines,’ the number of reported cases has been doubling in IEEE, alone, every year: “2004 – 14 reported cases; 2005 – 26 reported cases; 2006 – 50 reported cases; 2007 – 86 reported cases; and, 2008 – over 100 cases with more than 50 happening in less than two months.” The program discusses how to handle IEEE plagiarism and how to report violations, in particular for those involved in publication.
Within the last year, I have been provided information that I had paid for and had posted it. I was contacted by a company who informed me that they actually owned the material, and provided evidence, at which time we immediately took it down. It is amazing at how easy it is for this to happen!
A few years ago, as noted above, such things were rare and virtually unheard of. Being a strong advocate of copyright, an IEEE Editor in Chief, and with IEEE’s aggressive stance on copyright violation, one can only wonder at how widespread the problem really is. Staying on top of it is a job unto itself.
During a recent discussion I made my opinion clear when I stated: ‘Let them rot.’ I believe it will probably be included in the public record.
It is unfortunate that many people do not respect intellectual property. The work, research and information behind an email, paper, study, book, report, presentation materials, and others, represents the value of the person who created it. When people feel that they have the right to decide how that property is handled without the author(s) permission, it is theft. The ONLY ones who have the right to decide how to handle the material is the author or whoever the copyright is assigned to AND copyright applies to ALL material that is created whether or not a copyright notice is placed on it. Fair use guidelines are the only way around this and copyright now extends well after the death of the author. Public government documents and ‘open source’ documents are exceptions.
Mind you, we have made a decision on our copyright policy starting this past January 1, 2009, in order to provide assistance to our industry. Details can be found at the end of this eNewsletter.
In the meantime, be wary. Some things are not what they seem at face value. A little digging will often bring such things to light. The crooks and scum of the Earth that engage in these practices (I don’t seem to have an opinion, do I?) count on you not digging or questioning.
The good news is that such individuals are rare. The bad news is that they have found the internet. They rely upon our knowledge that the average person is honest in their dealings and may only occasionally, or unintentionally, make inappropriate statements or use other material. Does this mean that we must distrust everyone? No, we must just be vigilant, and when something doesn’t seem right, go with our gut instinct and simply ask a question or two.
Post your question or comment on http://www.motordoc.com/mdmhblog/
Sincerely,
Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP
President, SUCCESS by DESIGN®
Web Editor in Chief, IEEE DEIS Web (http://www.ieee.org/go/deis)
Last week the server farm where our websites and server reside went through a major upgrade. We had been told that it would only briefly impact our websites. Such things happen, it was on a weekend, and the company adds to our services after each upgrade. Well, things didn’t go exactly as planned and the servers, mirror servers and email system pretty much collapsed.
All kinds of nasty things ensued that just boggled the mind! We had companies claiming we had gone out of business, we lost important communications in both directions, our launches of the Motor Diagnostics and Motor Health News eMag and the AllAmericanHybrid.com eMag were screwed up. The server farm customer service, starting out strong, collapsed by noon last Monday. Overall it was a real headache.
However, I have been doing business with Host Depot (hostdepot.com) for over 12 years and maintain six of the seven websites SUCCESS by DESIGN is responsible for on them (the IEEE DEIS web is maintained on IEEE servers). Afterwards some advice was given, and taken, directly by the CEO, Mark Erskine.
I remember when they were still young and I placed my first website on this American (Florida) based server farm, now a full service web hosting platform. When I would call for help I would often get an immediate response from Mark Erskine himself on the phone. The owner was tech support, with other partners handling the 24/7 human answering service. Even though they have hugely expanded (deal with the grammar, I am having fun), they have insisted on a human answering tech support 24/7, usually within minutes (worst case was about 3.5 minutes at 1am), and support emails returned within the hour with either an update, solution, or other. Regardless of the fact that we are one of their smallest customers. Yep, honest to goodness customer service!
So, I am taking last week’s hit on the chin. Inconvenient? Yes. Cost us money and response time? Yes. But they have been loyal to us for 12 years of great service, so why shouldn’t we be loyal to them? In over 12 years I have suffered less than a total of 2 week’s inconvenience.
So, when I received this email:
Hi, I’m writing this to other fellow Host Depot customers that I know of. I’m not sure about you but our site being down for roughly three days without any status on Host Depot’s website or not picking up their 24/7 tech support line is completely unacceptable as a service provider. At one point someone accidently answered the support line, as soon as he picked up I heard someone yell in the background, “No, don’t pick up!” That was the last straw for me. I defiantly lost business from the downtime, we ran TV commercials on the east coast for our partners early last week, and starting on Saturday I got call after call from our partners about a waste of money the commercial was as the site is down!
If you lost business from Host Depot’s poor service or lack of service you might try Web Hosting Spot. They moved my site over and had it up within a day, as soon as Host Depot was online long enough for them to transfer me. They even monitored Host Depot’s servers for me so that I knew when they came back online. The fact that Host Depot would not even answer their phone to give an update was unacceptable and very unprofessional. I lost $1,000’s throughout the years with them; they had many times sent me emails on accident that were meant for other customers. I went ahead and kept them even considering how they always made me mad with their late fees and threat to turn off all my sites if I didn’t pay the $25 late fee. If you are looking for a new hosting company then you should try Web Hosting Spot. There help in moving me over was excellent, they always called me back or replied to me within a couple hours. They even are willing to help out anyone else that had unacceptable downtime over the weekend, read below.
Randy
From: 'Web Hosting Spot' [mailto:support@webhostingspot.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 10:12 AMTo: 'Randy Smith'Subject: Hosting Service
We have successfully completed the transfer of your account and services over from Host Depot. To show our gratitude of your business and maybe help you out for the downtime you received from your previous hosting company we have given you your first 3 months free. This our way of giving back and helping businesses grow in times of need, it also allows you to get a feel of our excellent services and support we provide.
We do understand that there may be others that want to move away from Host Depot as you have, so we have setup a promotion code for others to use to get the same discount we have given you. You can refer others to sign up with the promotion code hostdepot; this will give them three months free with a one year sign up.
Best regards,Web Hosting SpotWeb Site: http://www.WebHostingSpot.com
Domain names for as little as $9.95 a year!!! Including transfers and renewals.
SSL Certificates for as little as $89.00 a year!!!
I responded with:
Always paid my bills on time and have never lost a dime until last week in the 12 years I have done business with HostDepot.
I am assuming that you are probably a salesperson for ‘Web Hosting Spot,’ either that or a customer that Host Depot could do without if you don’t pay your bills. I looked up Web Hosting Spot’s reliability, because that is what I do for a living. Good luck with that.
Personally, I am sticking with a company that has remained good to me with only one flaw in 12 years.
Lose my email address.
Sincerely,
Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP
President, SUCCESS by DESIGN Reliability Services
President, AllAmericanHybrid.com
Editor in Chief, IEEE DEIS Web
Vive la révolution de l'entretien!
Author: “Physical Asset Management for the Executive (Caution: Do Not Read This On An Airplane)” and “Electrical Motor Diagnostics, 2nd Edition”
http://www.motordoc.com
As I suspected, I got this:
Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.
Subject: RE: Hosting Service
Sent: 2/6/2009 10:51 PM
The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:
'Randy Smith' on 2/6/2009 10:51 PM
550 5.1.1 <randys@textmymls.com> is not a valid mailbox
The email was a fake and a really slimy sales technique. In the ‘message options’ section of an email in Outlook, you can obtain the IP address and originator of the message. It was, of course, directly from WebHostingSpot. In effect, it amounted to a scam that I, and HostDepot, are continuing to investigate. Their claim is that they are located in Houston, TX.
You really have to be wary these days. And not just from the famous ‘Nigerian’ scams. They are popping up everywhere. There was even one out of Toronto, Ontario, where a copy of an advertisement that your company had put in a magazine would be taped to an invoice for payment. Looked legit, I have caught a few both here and with previous employers, but I can assure you there are people who are paying those invoices. Many of the scammers are not very nice when you respond to them or even deal with them through normal legal channels.
In one case that kicked off my concern about copyright was a ‘company’ that claimed to do maintenance training. It was supposedly part of a huge pharmaceutical company based in Europe that had an impressive website, huge names associated with them, job postings, etc., and an impressive board of directors. Our problem was that their chief trainer and contractor had taken a series of our papers, as well as papers from a number of others, and either added his name as a co-author or removed the original author altogether and replaced it with his own. While trying to contact someone within this huge company to take care of the problem, we discovered that the company was fictitious, set up by a fictitious person in Houston, TX, from a guy in California. We brought the problem into the light. His response was to generate harassment, make death threats, implore the lunatic fringe to kill my kids on blogs and forums, and put my family in danger while taunting me with emails, claiming I ruined his nonexistent maintenance career.
Was I scared? Folks, as I told my kids once when hiking in the woods: ‘There is nothing scarier in these here woods than me!’ Over the next three days the local and local Californian police and FBI offices got involved. Surprisingly, no matter how many times the Microsoft Live hosting people were contacted through to the supervisory levels, they decided their best approach was to do nothing at all. The cool thing is that the FBI and other resources have created the Internet Crime Complaint Center (http://www.ic3.gov) which allows you to initiate a complaint to the FBI and local officials for fraudulent, harassment and related emails and websites. I was sent there by the New Haven, CT, FBI office after calling their on-duty agent at 1am. Within 12 hours of our posting the site was down and the scum arrested on Federal charges. Contacting your local police is not effective because they do not have jurisdiction, which causes some people to get frustrated and give up.
With so many nuts on the web that have way too much time on their hands, some even at work, you have to wonder how safe you are as digital can become personal real fast. After a few experiences with specific individuals on public forums where I thought I would do a little good responding to questions, I have made the decision that I would only participate in forums or blogs that are properly moderated. Yep, I have learned not to be as much of a bulldog and when I see things misinterpreted, etc., and the only real goal of the other person is to try to ‘establish’ themselves by attacking someone who actually knows what they are talking about, I simply walk away. Besides, as a business owner, I have found that such sites and discussions have only ever been counterproductive and that direct emails with questions or heavily moderated forums usually have more legitimate questions and maintain a level of decorum. To this day, I cannot link a single business opportunity to giving away free advice on forums that has been worth the nuisances.
Such scams, issues, and problems are not limited to the unwashed. Over the past week the IEEE has been dealing with a number of people who have blatantly plagiarized other papers, had them pass through the reviewing process and get printed in IEEE proceedings, journals, and the IEEEXplore site. IEEE handles such issues aggressively!!!
The problem was that the primary ‘alleged’ culprits tend to be people in positions of authority. In one case, a professor at a prestigious Korean university and his graduate student. Worse, they added co-authors who have significant reputations and who claim that they were unaware that they were added to the papers – which means that the accusations are worse because each author must sign a form. It was even noted by one IEEE reviewer that she had even reviewed a paper under a different author’s name that she had published a year before!
For those of you who are IEEE members, you can find more information in the http://www.IEEE.TV or by going to IEEE.org then logging in through ‘My IEEE’ and going through IEEE.tv (a new member service in 2008). According to the program, ‘The IEEE Plagiarism Guidelines,’ the number of reported cases has been doubling in IEEE, alone, every year: “2004 – 14 reported cases; 2005 – 26 reported cases; 2006 – 50 reported cases; 2007 – 86 reported cases; and, 2008 – over 100 cases with more than 50 happening in less than two months.” The program discusses how to handle IEEE plagiarism and how to report violations, in particular for those involved in publication.
Within the last year, I have been provided information that I had paid for and had posted it. I was contacted by a company who informed me that they actually owned the material, and provided evidence, at which time we immediately took it down. It is amazing at how easy it is for this to happen!
A few years ago, as noted above, such things were rare and virtually unheard of. Being a strong advocate of copyright, an IEEE Editor in Chief, and with IEEE’s aggressive stance on copyright violation, one can only wonder at how widespread the problem really is. Staying on top of it is a job unto itself.
During a recent discussion I made my opinion clear when I stated: ‘Let them rot.’ I believe it will probably be included in the public record.
It is unfortunate that many people do not respect intellectual property. The work, research and information behind an email, paper, study, book, report, presentation materials, and others, represents the value of the person who created it. When people feel that they have the right to decide how that property is handled without the author(s) permission, it is theft. The ONLY ones who have the right to decide how to handle the material is the author or whoever the copyright is assigned to AND copyright applies to ALL material that is created whether or not a copyright notice is placed on it. Fair use guidelines are the only way around this and copyright now extends well after the death of the author. Public government documents and ‘open source’ documents are exceptions.
Mind you, we have made a decision on our copyright policy starting this past January 1, 2009, in order to provide assistance to our industry. Details can be found at the end of this eNewsletter.
In the meantime, be wary. Some things are not what they seem at face value. A little digging will often bring such things to light. The crooks and scum of the Earth that engage in these practices (I don’t seem to have an opinion, do I?) count on you not digging or questioning.
The good news is that such individuals are rare. The bad news is that they have found the internet. They rely upon our knowledge that the average person is honest in their dealings and may only occasionally, or unintentionally, make inappropriate statements or use other material. Does this mean that we must distrust everyone? No, we must just be vigilant, and when something doesn’t seem right, go with our gut instinct and simply ask a question or two.
Post your question or comment on http://www.motordoc.com/mdmhblog/
Sincerely,
Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP
President, SUCCESS by DESIGN®
Web Editor in Chief, IEEE DEIS Web (http://www.ieee.org/go/deis)
posted by MotorDoc at
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