It only supports a handful of character sets, such as ASCII, ISO8859-1, ISO8859-2 and a few Mac encodings. Obviously the developers of the product are unaware that there is any non-Latin character set. Since my existing source includes some Japanese, the IDE was completely unable to recognise the characters from UTF-8 files.

This hurdle stopped any possible testing, and has create an impression that the product should be called “JCreator very amateur“.

No military work

In the case of Dragon Thoughts, the ethics include not working for the military, or on projects that might assist any military organisation. Summed up as “we don’t kill people and we don’t help others to kill people“. This has led to turning down some potentially lucrative Ministry of Defence work in the past.

Small company policy

Other parts of the ethical stance have included charging smaller and similarly ethical companies such as “Vacuum Formers” and “Mr Pillow” lower fees.

Industrial Espionage

Dragon Thoughts has also turned down an industrial spying contract… but without the proof, I can’t write more on that subject.

White Hat

For security systems, such as internet banking, spam detection and anti-virus software, Dragon Thoughts has always worked to ensure the software if as difficult to break as possible, and as effective at ensuring data is kept private. This has also been the Dragon Thoughts approach to Search Engine Optimisation projects. In short, like the cowboy in an old Western film, Dragon Thoughts employees wear the White Hats, and don’t try to thinks that are wrong or may be deleterious to other ethical bodies.

Doing good

Dragon Thoughts likes to think of the business in terms of the Hippocratic oath of “do no harm”. However, Dragon Thoughts likes to take this one step further, and actually try to do good. For example, on this Blog, you will see various scams exposed, and information regarding the black hatted spammers.

Finance

Some financial institutions, have a bad record of supporting regimes that deny human rights, others have their own positive ethical policies. Dragon Thoughts tries to deal only with ethical financial institutions, such as the mutuality based building societies and the Co-operative bank group, which has its own, very strong ethical policy.

What next?

What else do you think Dragon Thoughts should add to its ethical policy? How do you think you would assess a company for its ethics.

In the post today, I received an unsolicited scam order form from the “European City Guide” asking for confirmation of my company’s details, which of course had a slight error. In the small print was the little line:

Please return this document with a signature in the appropriate box if you would like to place an order

The European City Guide form is laid out so it might appear that you are actually signing that the corrections are valid, not with the expectation that you will be ordering two successive copies of their “European City Guide” at €987 each, nor that you are signing a continuous re-order, which needs 3 months notice to cancel.
There is a web site called “Stop the European City Guide” and Richard Corbbet, a Yorkshire MEP has written extensively about this, and similar practices.
Richard Corbbet’s Blog suggests that several other scam organisations also have the same owner.

• UK Internet Register
• Construct Data
• Novachannel AG

The European City Guide’s web site has a code of conduct document that states:

In accordance with the legislation governing DISTANCE SALES, our
forms incorporate a coupon for termination of the contract, which is located on the
client’s copy of the form. If the client returns this completed, stamped and signed
coupon to us within the mentioned cooling-off period this will result in automatic
cancellation.

Strangely, the form which they sent to Dragon Thoughts, seems to have this cancellation coupon printed in extremely faint grey very small print, together with a raft of other almost unreadable terms and conditions. I wonder if it might be a printing error?

It made me so angry that I had to write this post about DRoA. The notice came by snail mail in an envelope with my correct name and address and included a return envelope for payment, although they expecte me to pay the postsage for their scam.

The notice looks like a bill and was written to scare me into changing my domain name registry: “You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current Registrar to the Domain Registry of America. Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identify…”

It promises dramatic improvements in speed, performance and memory usage.

New features are set to include:

• Enhanced security
  • - even safer to use than before and even further ahead of Internet Explorer
  • Additional anti-virus integration
  • Integration with Windows Vista Parental controls
• Easier to Use
  • Full page zoom of text and graphics - This was a feature that distinguished Opera
  • Better Integration with Windows and Apple Macintosh
  • Resumable downloads - no need to restart a large download because of a glitch in your connection.

They couldn’t tell me which competition I had won, but did tell me it was only open to Visa card and Mastercard holder. - I pointed out that this would apply to over 98% of the adult UK population.

They had my correct name and address.

The scammer had a heavy, possibly Indian or Chinese accent.

When I confirmed that I did own appropriate credit cards, they tried to extract my credit card details - when I refused on the basis that this was probably a scam, they kept trying to get my credit card number out of me, assuring me that it was OK - apparently they’re FCCA registered, and because of that the details couldn’t be misused. - I countered that in fact, as my cards are issued on the UK and therefore FSA regulated and that f I was stupid enough to give it to cold callers, they could attempt to misuse it with a card not present transaction.
When I kept asking why they needed the credit card details, at first I was told that it was so that they could verify that I was a credit card holder. I pointed out that they called me so I was the person that needed to verify their credentials. Then he switched tack, and said that the would need my credit card details for a registration fee of around £250. I questioned this, pointing out that I had been offered a completely free holiday competition prize. He said “Nothing is free“.

They gave me a “Toll-free” number that I could call them back on. I pointed out that a phone number in the USA is not toll-free when called from the UK - It is an international call.

When I asked for their FCCA registration number, the caller evaded answering.
I kept leading him on for a while, to keep him from trying to scam others, and to research his web site and comments about the scam company. One particularly enlightening one was on 800notes.com

I asked him if he had heard of Perfect Travel Promotions Orlando - Which appears as the title on w*w.resortvacationsvip.com and has an identical web site at w*w.ptporlando.com. He claimed he hadn’t heard of PTP Orlando. They have the same phone number (1-877-727-7605) and email addresses of CustomerService@PTPorlando.com and sales@PTPorlando.com

When I kept asking him the name of the company he was working for he refused to give it then finally hung up.

In short, it had to be scam. What legitimate company employee would not know their own company’s name?

If you have similar experiences, or wish to comment on this, please do so.

Since there was none I had to go direct to the Sony Ericsson web site to download the newest update of the suite.

The instructions warn that you should (manually) unsinstall the older version of their PC-Suite. What they don’t tell you is that the uninstallation takes around 20 minutes on a 2.4 GHz Quad core PC running Windows Vista.

Then, it requires a reboot….

Installing version 3 of the PC-Suite seems interminable as it sits on a screen explaining that the drivers are being installed. It actually took around 35 minutes to install, and this time was capable of installation with Firefox as the default web browser.

Version 3 of Sony Ericsson’s PC-Suite does seem somewhat better than version 2.
It allows direct editing of the phone contents, such as the address book. It also recognises the Windows Vista Contacts and Windows Calender as legitimate sources of data for synchronisation. It does not however realise that bookmarks could be synchronised from Mozilla Firefox.

it is a definite improvement on version 2, as long as you have a spare hour or so for the installation process.

Amazingly, considering that they promise worldwide search engine optimization, Dr. Marc Schneider and his company Global Vibration Inc., can only be found as being mentioned on sites relating to spamming.

I am Dr. Marc Schneider and I work for Global Vibration Inc. in Washington DC ( Tel: 1 202-787-3989 ) - I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??

In fact, after visiting http://www.myclients.web.site.co.uk, I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.

Let us show you how to develop a presence on the multilingual web without having to translate your website: It is not necessary to translate your website in order to submit to foreign search engines, however, you need to have at least 1 page in Japanese optimized with Japanese keywords and meta tags in order to submit to Japanese search engines, at least 1 page in Spanish optimized with Spanish keywords in order to submit to Hispanic search engines and so on…

I strongly suggest that you watch our online presentation which will explains clearly how to get top rankings on foreign search engines with only 1 entry page per language (click on the following link or copy-paste it into your web browser): http://www.mplw.net/demo

From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, get users to find your website when searching with YOUR KEYWORDS in their Native language.

Please call me at 1 (202)-787-3989 or email me and let’s work on giving your website the true international exposure which it deserves to have with foreign native online users!!

Regards,

Marc Schneider, Ph.D.
Marcs@mplw.net
_____________________

GLOBAL VIBRATION INC.
1250 Connecticut Ave N.W. Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036 USA
TEL:1 (202)-787-3989 - FAX: 1 (202)-318-4779
http://www.mplw.net :
Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services since 1999.

They don’t seem to have a presence at all on Japanese google.

They claim to have been doing Multilingual Search Engine Promotion Services (SEO) since 1999, but a whois query of their domain mplw.net shows a creation date of 04 Aug 2007 16:13:29

Many other companies are receiving the same spam for example, see http://www.tmcowners.com

For such a multi-nationally aware company, sending spam to the UK, Global Vibration Inc. haven’t even been capable of putting their own phone number in the standard international format, presumably because they are not aware that anyone outside the USA has to dial in international number to reach them.

Associated with their domains are the following administrative email addresses

• urls@mseo.com
• mauispirit@gmail.com