Just desserts or just desert?

They say that a fool and his money are soon parted. But there sure do seem to be a heck of a lot of people who seem to be interested in expediting the process :p I’ve written before about literary scams and financial scams but the latest one I’ve come across is a recruitment scam 🙂

I’ve been looking into jobs in Dubai because we would possibly like to move there – my sister lives there, the place seems to have the latest techno-gadgets, better access to books and movies, so what’s not to like, eh? 🙂 Anyway, in the process of looking at recruitment agencies and possible places to submit my resume, I ran across JobsInDubai.com. I came across the site via web search (or because some other site listed them) and at first glance, it looked legit enough. So I used their online form to apply.

The next day I get an e-mail from them – my CV was a perfect match for a job they had listed! All I had to do was fork out $74 (it’s *only* $34 if you are in the US or Canada and free if you are in the Gulf BTW) as a refundable deposit and I would be on my way to my dream job. Now when somebody starts asking me for money (especially for something for which they should be getting payment already), alarms go off all over the place. You should be in my head – it’s kind of like a scene from "Mission Impossible" :p

So I did some digging and guess what? JobsInDubai.com are famous – and not in a good way. There are many posts about them online – like this one, or this one. Neither of those articles come out and say that JobsInDubai.com are scammers – they hint that perhaps they might have reformed. However, my experience plus what these articles say (and what I found online) leads me to believe that they have not reformed and are in fact, actively working on scamming people.

For one thing, there is an interesting tactic they employ at any blog or site which comments about JobsInDubai.com – you soon get somebody named Beanster (or some such name) and Nofel Izz (the owner/founder whatever of JobsInDubai) turning up to defend the company. Beans says he’s just a bystander – but seems to know a lot about JobsInDubai and their current location etc. Nofel will respond to the accusations but will never address any of the central issues such as why they charge money and how come they claim to operate in the UAE and Canada (and as far as I know, it’s against the law in both places for a recruitment agency to charge a prospective employee money) but are not abiding by the laws of the country.

Both these individuals claim that the negative comments about JobsInDubai.com are made by employees of other (non-fee charging) recruitment agencies in the Gulf. That this is just plain underhanded business tactics. Now I’m not affiliated with any of these other employment agencies. Heck, if I was affiliated with them, I wouldn’t have found out about JobsInDubai.com because I wouldn’t have been searching for Gulf jobs :p

The other thing I find interesting is that Nofel in his interview with "Windows" magazine states that under their new mode of operations, they don’t actively submit resumes to prospective employers. Instead, they simply enter your information into their database and prospective employers can pay them Canadain $195 for 500 resume views. But in their e-mail to me, they claim that my resume is a perfect match for a job they have available – implying (though not actually stating) that my resume would be submitted to this prospective employer. Smells a bit like the fish market? Yeah, I got that pong too :p

Updates about being inundated

I’ve been meaning to update the blog for a while now but what with a trip to Dubai (from November 8th to the 10th) where we went gadget hunting, the setting up of the said gadgets on our return, work, doing some web server stuff for some people I’m working with and so on, there hasn’t been much time for updates. Finally, I’ve found the time to put up an update and to also mention a few things that I wanted to mention before.

The first thing is that I’ve put up a new blog called "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" 🙂 This is basically a serialization of my novel – the one I’ve talked about here before. As I’ve mentioned before, I plan to rewrite the novel almost totally. But there are some people who read this version and liked it very much. Since this version will probably never see the light of day in any other form, I decided to serialize it online weekly and see if anybody else likes it 🙂 If they do, then I’m happy. If they don’t, well, nothing lost.

The other thing of note probably is the fact that I have been dragged back into BlogShares :p A long time ago, I used to be really involved in BlogShares. Then I lost interest and I believe the site itself crashed/was down. Then it was revived again and I discovered that my old user ID no longer worked. So I signed up around the beginning of this year but didn’t really get into it at that time. I was reminded of BlogShares again by Simon, who made a passing reference to is somewhere or other online, and so went back and checked on my account. I was surprised to find that my stock had gone up a lot and so got back into the game in earnest 🙂 Of course, it became even more fun when Laurie decided to join in – but for a while, they tagged us as cheaters because we both came from the same IP and were doing a lot of connected deals :p

The return of scummy scammers

There are some people who would do anything to part you from your money. They would even go so far as to warn you about other people who might try to mislead you about the first bunch of people :p It’s kind of interesting to watch as an exercise in misdirection. However, it is also alarming when you consider the fact that those not of a suspicious bent (or of a more gullible persuasion) could actually fall victim to these lying, cheating scum.

Who am I talking about? Scammer agents, of course 🙂 First, there was the Top 20 worst agents list. Then there was Barbara Bauer kicking up a ruckus about AbsoluteWrite.com and getting the plug pulled on them back in May. Now it looks as if the scammers are taking a different tack – they are banding together to bilk more gullibles of their money and at the same time, appear legitimate by creating their own association of agents. This new association, named the International Independent Literary Agents Association appears to be unable to count, let alone represent anyone. They have a Top Ten literary agent list which has only nine agencies listed :p And guess who heads the list? The self-same Ms. Barbara Bauer Ph. D. who was the star in the AbsoluteWrite drama and who also appears prominently in the Top 20 worst agents list.

Of course, the IILAA has lots of stuff to say in their defence 🙂 According to them, there are a lot of hate sites out there that are intent on besmirching the names of agents. (Of course, their message would be more accessible to most people if they took out that annoying background and the text which melds into the background – but then again, they’re professionals, so what do I know? :p) Basically, the people who investigate agents and ferret out the scammers are doing so because they have an ulterior motive. They apparently have an agenda. Of course, the IILAA never states what this agenda might be. They certainly do know how to get people’s paranoia working. Maybe they should work in political propaganda rather than spending 20-30 years on being agents and not selling a single book?

Yes, they do have a Coming Soon page where they say they’ll list the "newest sales by their members" – I’m really waiting on that one, good fiction is hard to find these days :p

Hal Spacejock Support Crew

Simon Haynes (yes, the same guy I’ve talked about a couple of times before :p) has got a rather nifty marketing idea over on his blog 🙂 Given that he’s already given me one of his books for free (join his contests) and I’m in the running for a copy of his other book(s), I figured I might as well join the support crew – you know what they say, if you can’t get your own book published, help somebody else market theirs :p

The good stuff

Spam is everywhere. That has become a universal constant :p Of course, most of the spam I get is useless to me since it is about home loans, or enlarging (or shrinking) body parts or strange women with manly names who are coming to my neighbourhood and want to meet me – I’ve heard of a boy named Sue but now I’ve also heard from women named Roger and Douglas who say that they would very much like to meet me :p

However, most of the time, the spam has nothing at all remotely to do with anything I’m interested in. Today was different. Today, two different e-mail in my inbox offered me two things that I am very much interested in – publication and money :p The first was from an outsourced software development firm in the Ukraine. Now I do some software consultancy work myself over the Net and I charge people anywhere from $10 to $20 per hour depending on the kind of work that I do for them. This company offers to subcontract the work for me at $9 – $15 an hour. I’m supposed to get rich doing this but I really fail to see how since I won’t have much left over after I pay them. Then again, maybe they just mean that I’ll have more time to devote to my writing and get rich using the methods outlined in the second mail …

The second mail says that my next novel could be in the New York Times best-seller list! Now never mind that I didn’t ask these people to tell me about how I could do this. They’re probably really good-hearted chaps who want to make sure that everybody gets their book on the New York Times best-seller list – there are people like that out there you know. What kind of makes me suspect that their golden heart might not be pure 24 carat gold is the fact that they are trying to sell me a set of "spellbinding CDs with a practical, step-by-step guidebook- designed to impart literally YEARS of useful information on how to navigate your career as a successful author". Heck, what more could I ask for? I’ve already got the years of experience to be an author on CD, I will be rolling in the money tomorrow!

Sometimes, (especially when I read stories like this) I think that the only people who actually get rich from writing are the scam artists or the ones who tell you how to do it instead of doing it themselves :p But then again, writing isn’t always about getting rich. Sure, the money would always be nice but it also is nice to know that you’ve created something that others find useful or enjoy and remember. So with that dream in mind, I guess it’s time to delete the spam and move on …

Scammers, spammers, agents and reagents

Yes, I’ve been gone for a few days while we moved house and things always seem to happen when I’m gone :p This time, one of my favourite writing forums, Absolute Write (AW), went down and a whole soap opera erupted around the disappearance of the site. Now the thing is, when there is drama of any sort, there springs up all sorts of stories (and versions) based on the drama. This one was no different. Let me try to be objective and present the facts and you can draw your own conclusions :p

It had apparently all started with the SFWA s list of top twenty worst agents – this is a list of scammer agents that writers need to look out for, ones that will rip you off and not actually do anything towards you getting published. Apparently, one of the agents on the list, Barbara Bauer, was offended at the fact that she was mentioned in one of the AW postings and had made a call to AW’s webhost asking that her name (and e-mail address) be removed from the forums. It looks as if Ms. Bauer has been dealing in this kind of intimidation tactics for a while but in the case of AW, the end result was that the site was shut down.

That was when the drama began 🙂 Now keep in mind that I wasn’t there when all this started and so my account of events might not be the true order of events. That said, it looks as if the AW community and friends rose up in outrage at what had happened to the Absolute Write forums. One of the most vocal gatherings on the Net regarding this issue has been this post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden over at Making Light. The AW "community" alleged many things in the process. But first, bear in mind that a "community" is not a single individual but one composed of many individuals with different ideas, opinions and reactions. Personally, I feel that online, a "community" tends to veer towards "mob" at times – just because of the anonymity factor and because the larger, unspeaking portion gets overshadowed by the smaller outspoken ones who say certain things on behalf of the "community" that might not actually be the majority consensus if put to a vote.

Whatever might be the case, hard things were said about both Barbara Bauer and AW’s former web hosts. The twist in the tale here was the fact that one of the owners of the hosting company had been an active member of the AW community and had apparently done a lot to help out with hosting issues, according to this post by her husband/partner. As far as the "community" was concerned, the damning evidence was this post by the lady in question herself. Some took this to mean that she sabotaged AW in order to promote her own writing forums. On the other hand, the only thing said by the owner of AW, Jenna Glatzer, about this whole brouhaha was this. Of course, given that it probably is a legal matter now, you can’t blame her reticence but people being people, this certainly can lead to further speculation and further unfounded allegations.

What do I think? I don’t really know. I try not to be so quick to jump to conclusions ever since Passepartout on the cartoon version of "Around the World in 80 Days" said "Don’t jump to conclusions or the conclusions may jump on you" :p We all mostly like things to be black and white, to know who’s the saint and who’s the sinner. But the problem is that in life, things are never that clear cut. Sometimes we do something with good intentions but it goes downhill or we do something bad but it ends up bringing good results. Without knowing what was in somebody’s heart (and that only the person involved and God would know …), it is difficult to say what a person’s motive for doing something is.

I agree that pulling the forums so quickly and with so little notice was a bad stunt. But then again, from a web hosting perspective (I work for a hosting company) it is not unheard of for hosts to react strongly towards spamming/abuse complaints. On the other hand, that usually happens when the host has no real idea whether the client was spamming or not. In the case of AW, since one of the owners was actively involved with AW, they obviously knew what was going on. So it goes back and forth :p There are things for (and against) each point of view and I cannot sit in judgement. Each person has to make up their own minds as to who might (or might not) have been guilty.

But what we do have to realize is that what has happened has happened. No matter how much of a hue and cry is raised, the fact remains that AW is down for the moment. All that we can hope for is that both AW and its former hosts will be able to work things out amicably and that AW can go back to providing the excellent service that it provided to writers before all this happened. What the writers can gain from this is more awareness of the fact that there are scammers out there who will try to gain your trust and relieve you of the burden of holding on to all that hard earned money :p Above all, keep in mind that the Internet is not always a fair place – sometimes those who do good are the ones who get persecuted and those who persecute others or defraud others get away scot-free …

And the battle rages on …

I wrote about Blue Security, Blue Frog and the fight against spam a couple of days ago. At that time, I mentioned how a spammer was trying to intimidate Blue Frog users and get them to stop using Blue Frog. I also mentioned that the Blue Frog servers appeared to be under attack at that time.

Well, it turns out that the two events were related. The spammer who was trying to get Blue Frog users to stop was the same one who was attacking the Blue Frog servers. He had gone as far as to get an employee at an ISP to filter all traffic to the Blue Frog site except from inside Israel, where their servers were located. If I was surprised at that – at the fact that employees at ISPs were corruptible and didn’t really take their responsibilities seriously – I shouldn’t have been. We are after all, human and utterly fallible :p

Blue Security had overcome that particular issue by moving their company blog outside Israel by pointing it to a TypePad account of theirs. The spammer had retaliated by launching a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against the TypePad servers, denying service not just to Blue Security but all the other users of the service as well. Apparently, the spammer then proceeded to DDoS TuCows, Blue Security’s domain service provider, resulting in TuCows terminating their services for Blue Security.

Of course, this Yahoo news report (and probably others like it) seems to indicate that Blue Security might not have been totally blameless here and it looks as if people are actually blaming Blue Security for all this. I am not aware of the actual events that took place – besides, they say that there are three versions of the truth: his, hers and what really happened :p However, there are two things that I do find interesting – one, that major service providers (including registrars) will shut you down if somebody attacks you and you did not do anything. Basically, they are punishing you for somebody else’s misdeeds. Two, that people will find the most visible scapegoat for anything without actually bothering to find out who is at blame. This unfortunately, is typical of most people.

Sure, Blue Security might have been aware that they were being DDoSed and have pointed their domains at TypePad – if they did, that was reprehensible. It is also possible that they were never aware of the DDoS as they claim and that they simply pointed stuff at TypePad so that they’d have a site visible to the rest of the world. So why castigate them? Why is it that nobody talks about the spammer here and censures the guys who actually make the effort to go after spammers? I think it’s because this is not about who is right or wrong but about one thing and one thing only … money 🙂

TuCows is going to lose money if their servers are down and so they cut Blue Security loose – doesn’t matter that Blue Security was combatting spam and were a victim of the DDoS themselves. TypePad is angry because their servers went down and they look bad. Does anybody care that somebody took the stand against spammers? No. All they care about is their own businesses.

However, this situation has certainly made me go after the spammers with a vengeance 😛 I used to simply delete the spam in my Google and Yahoo inboxes. Not anymore. I report the spam with relish! If 10% of the people who were affected by this whole Blue Frog thing feel the same way as I do, the spammers have made a major mistake by launching this attack and they are going to find that it’s going to cost them …

Round and round it goes …

The whole thread of searches and information found in the process from that original reference to Asoka in my blog has been somewhat fascinating 🙂 First, it led to the Nine Unknown Men and now it’s led me by way of yesterday’s entry (which referenced Philip Jose Farmer) to the Wold Newton family :p

Yes, I know, you’re probably bursting with curiosity by this time to learn what the Wold Newton family is (yeah, right :p) but let me sidetrack for a moment (and if you’re really impatient, you can go follow the link above and come back here later :p). I have read Farmer’s "The Other Log of Phileas Fogg" a long time ago and was fascinated by it. I liked the alternate story behind Verne‘s "Around the World in 80 Days" and how deftly Farmer wove in and out of the story written by Verne. I’ve also read quite a bit of other stuff by Farmer and have been fascinated by his alternate takes on fictional characters. However, I had not been aware of his theory/history about the Wold Newton family and how they encompass a lot of different fictional heroes from all areas of fiction.

I’ve always been fascinated by family trees and grand sweeping sagas which span decades (if not centuries or millennia) and paint a majestic mural of dashing individuals on the canvas of time 🙂 (Woah, talk about wordy sentences :p) I’ve only attempted one such story myself and that was a long time ago. It could almost be called my first "real" story. It was about a family named Forman who left Earth to colonize a planet circling a star in the Sagittarius system. It had the grand sounding title of "The Sagittarian Saga". Initially, the story was just about the Forman family on the new planet after centuries of being there but later, I began adding more family members and more history. There was the story of Professor William Forman, the founder of the Forman clan and then Jano Forman, who actually discovered the means to leave Earth and so on.

Now that I think about it, perhaps Farmer (and a few other writers who liked to link things together) influenced me unconsciously when I wrote these stories (never mind the fact that I hadn’t read Farmer when I originally started the stories :p But the history is a bit vague in my mind and I might have gotten to Farmer by the time I started adding to the history of the Forman family …) I know for a fact that my later reading of the greatest linker of totally-unrelated-and-disparate facts, Terry Pratchett, has certainly influenced my style of writing these days. So perhaps, Farmer did too. And perhaps, I owe him a debt of gratitude 🙂

Grab bag

Sometimes, when you go hunting for something, (not snipe :p) you find something much more interesting 🙂 For instance, a few days ago, I was talking about King Asoka of India and in the process of browsing through his Wikipedia entry I happened to stumble upon a reference to the Nine Unknown Men.

Now I’m a conspiracy theory nut (OK, maybe nut is too strong a term – I don’t live and breath conspiracy theories but I do enjoy hearing them and coming up with ones of my own :p) and so I immediately pricked up my ears and went over to the new Wikipedia entry. I must say that the entry kept me enthralled (and immersed) for quite a while – much like the reference to snipe hunting that I linked above. (Incidentally, I don’t know if I’ve heard the term snipe hunt before a couple of days ago but since then I’ve come across it a couple of times and wanted to see what it was all about – good stuff :p)

But back to the Nine Unknown Men. Apparently, the story goes that India actually presents a facade of being a technologically backward/developing country whereas it actually is far more advanced than the other countries in the world. The story continues on to say that this is due to the efforts of King Asoka, who realized that there was a certain kind of knowledge that would always be used for evil in the hands of humanity and so set up the group of Nine Unknown Men to guard this knowledge so as to ensure that it didn’t fall into the wrong hands.

From all I can gather, this story/theory was not started by Indians themselves but rather by a few Europeans who visited India and later wrote about this mysterious cabal. Of course, later, the theory seems to have been picked up by Indians as well and it is said that some prominent Indian scientists are believed to be either part of the Nine or in communication with the Nine regarding various subjects such as microbiology, alchemy, communication and gravitation. In fact, there are quite a few corollary stories such as the one about a secret temple under the Ganges River which cleanses the water of the rive using radiation (or microbes according to another account).

It’s an interesting theory and if you want to write a story, there’s enough material for several books. In fact, the whole story for some reason reminds me of a Philip Jose Farmer novel (or rather, an amalgamation of several). Now that I’ve read about them, the Nine Unknown Men are probably going to turn up in my own writing at one point or another – just not in the same way that they’ve been portrayed before :p

Creature comforts

I was trying to remember a creature that was mentioned in an old Alfred Hitchcock horror anthology for a short story I am working on at the moment. I like to litter my stories with references to other characters, events, places etc. and this half remembered story about a guy who is pursued by a creature (or was it a family of creatures?) who can only be seen as movement from the corner of your eyes seemed strangely apt for this particular story. Only trouble was, all that I can remember is that the story was from an anthology which might have been called "Stories That Scared Even Me". That anthology name is correct since I looked it up but I couldn’t find the story in the table of contents for that anthology – at least, I didn’t find a name that rang a bell 🙁

Since I couldn’t find the exact creature I wanted, I decided to widen my search and simply look up mythological creatures in the hope of hitting upon the same creature while searching from a different angle. I didn’t succeed there either but I did dig up a lot of information on something that had interested me a lot in days gone by – cryptozoology. In case you’re not aware of it, cryptozoology is the study of animals which are presumed to exist but for which there is no conclusive proof of existence. This also covers animals which are believed to be extinct but the presence of which is sometimes reported even now. The creatures studied under cryptozoology are referred to as cryptids. Some of the more famous cryptids are the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

The problem with cryptozoology has always been the lack of conclusive evidence and the human tendency to believe in anything fantastic. It’s strange but we’ll grab on to a fantastic story about a lost humanoid race skulking around in the jungle much more readily than we’d believe that somebody might be duping us to think that there is such a race. Of course, given that there isn’t enough evidence to conclude one way or another, I guess the best course of action would be to keep an open mind. The world we live in is a strange and wonderful place and as the not so sensational areas of cryptozoology has sometimes proven, there are still creatures in existence that we thought had long perished or we knew nothing about. But does that mean that the Loch Ness Monster is real? I really don’t know …