Chris O.

I came to the site because I'd been out of touch with web activities for a long time, and needed a crash course in Twitter and iPhone apps and microblogging and all those things that everyone but me seemed to know everything about. It answered many of my information needs almost immediately and I've been returning to it ever since. One of the top sources for the would-be-web-savvy.

The role of the SETI institute is to research and educate about life in the universe, where it comes from, how it survives, and why, despite our spending the last 35 years transmitting the American Top 40 into the ether, nobody out there has got back to us.

The main work of the Institute revolves around developing new and better ways to search the universe for that elusive hint that we aren't alone. It supports research into how life formed here and how it might form elsewhere, in other environments. And in keeping with modern developments on Earth, it even has a Twitter account that you may use to post your message to aliens if and when we find any (http://twitter.com/SETiEarthSpeaks). It poses some challenging questions too: if we meet aliens, what do we say? How do we say it? What are they likely to understand? Will they be wearing digital watches?

The *******@home project, which many associate with the SETI Institute, is not actually an Institute project at all but one run out of the University of California at Berkeley. In brief, for the last ten years they've been encouraging home computer users to run some software in the background and when their machines are idle. That sofware searches radio telescope data, looking for signals from intelligent life.

Ironically, I used to run the *******@home software, back when it first started up and I had a comparatively slow machine (ahh... the good old days. A 386 cpu and an 80Mb hard drive and yes that's megabytes, not gigabytes, for all you young'uns out there). Now I have a machine faster than anyone's wildest dreams back then, but I haven't kept it up. Maybe because back then, there was a tantalizing possibility that someone was going to find the burst of narrow-band data that signaled the discovery of E. T, and it might well be ME. So the excitement was still there. Ten years on, the hope is the same but some of the glamor has gone out of it. Little men, green or otherwise, haven't sent us anything we can understand. Not yet. On the other hand, the populations of many local star systems have been receiving I Love Lucy for some time now, and they may be thinking exactly the same thing.

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Terrible spammers, this site and the many it spams the search engine listings with. But that doesn't necessarily mean the site itself won't deliver, in either sense of the word.

It openly sells what it calls, with refreshing openness, "cheap fakes" which are manufactured in China using Chinese, Japanese or Swiss movements, in order of quality and price. It makes the right claims - about weight, and how the bracelets are assembled, and what to expect in terms of waterproofing (nothing). Prices are on the high side, especially since it offers "Asian" movements which may be medium-quality Japanese or the much poorer quality Chinese. Swiss ETA movement watches will set you back around $300, give or take $100, and that's steep too, given the quality shown in a couple of the photo sets I looked at.

Moving on to the accuracy of the reproductions, one $300+ imitation Rolex was pictured with a dent in the bracelet, definitely not a good omen! And I looked at a "Submariner" which was on sale for $280 but which had an obvious telltale that identified it as a fake. All the watches I looked at were fairly obviously not the genuine articles, but at these prices, you wouldn't expect reproductions to be so obvious.

So even if the site is legitimate, in that it will deliver the watch you see in the photo, I would go elsewhere for a reproduction myself. I only looked at Rolex because that's the watch I know most about, but if the quality here is replicated in the other ranges, there are no bargains to be had from this dealer.

I was, let me see... about forty minutes into researching this one when it occurred to me that I'd completely forgotten what I was doing here in the first place. Oh yes. It was a requested review. Mesmerizing places, dating sites. It's like treasure hunting in a landfill, you know it's going to be nasty but you just can't stop yourself from having a poke. And the deeper you go, the harder it is to stop.

Right then, having taken a cleansing breath I'd say that some but not all of the chavettes on here are legitimate. They reappear on other dating sites, and I found only one who might have been in Chicago, USA or Hounslow, UK and capable of speaking in tongues. The rest seemed to be reassuringly fixed in place, age, language and sexual orientation.

I'd be condescending if I said this was all rather sad and squalid, and that I couldn't imagine any man really wanting to talk to these girls, let alone have unpredictable sex with them. In fact It's all rather sad and squalid but I can imagine a lot of men skipping the talk and going straight to the unpredictable sex part. In their dreams. And from some of the profiles and images here, I'd say some of those dreams must be w-e-i-r-d. Sorry, ladies, I've just never seen the attraction of a tattoo right there.

I can't really recommend or discourage visits to this site; I think it is what it is, obviously you can't know that anything you see or read is true unless it's unappetizing anyway, and if you were posting yourself on a sex site you'd be economical with the truth too. If you're up for it, so to speak, you'll probably spend more money than you planned and get less than you hoped, but you already knew that, right?

This was a requested review, but it's awfully confusing. The site requested, ecomplanet.com, is on a domain owned by Verizon Business and is currently the homepage of ICDN.net, an internet service provider. So, not a site offering work-from-home opportunities, then.

An alternative would be web.ecomplanet.com, also known as myweb.ecomplanet.com, which is also not a site, it's a hosting service for user-maintained personal websites. The construction of the URL is:

web.ecomplanet.com/(user ID)

But even then, the page at web.ecomplanet.com itself is for a different site called SiouxlandFirst.com.

All in all, even if you do get the right url and find that work-from-home site, it's suspicious at least. I'd give this one a miss.

(If you find the site somewhere else, send me a message and I'll gladly go look there for you)

(Reviewed by request)
User "bob p" writes:

"I wanted to order some shoes that i can only find on this website. I just wanted to be sure it is a safe site to order from."

You need to make final decisions for yourself, because even if I'd had a good experience here, you might then not have. But bearing in mind that general observation, I'd say this one is OK. No suspicious listings appear on initial research, it all looks genuine and the company address in an industrial wasteland in Texas looks about right.

However, I would recommend that if you're still unsure, you buy from this company through their Amazon store: http://bit.ly/tbpRw as the condition of the item you buy and its timely delivery are guaranteed under the Amazon A-to-z Guarantee, over and above any guarantee offered by the merchant.

(Reviewed by request)

User "divalicious h" writes:

"is this safe to buy from"

Yes.
You can shop in confidence for Chinese fakes here, safe in the knowledge that there's no chance of you accidentally being sold something genuine. Hope that helps.

(Reviewed by request)

Looks OK to me, you have to hand it to them for a memorable page design if nothing else. Courageously different from general business practice even if it was a bit of an eye-popper.

I was initially suspicious of the occasional poor spelling, oddly placed commas and the frequent wandering apostrophes. None of these say "professional", and given that the site is going to be creating your header I assume you'd expect it to be spelled correctly. But I see one of the listed webmasters is French, so we'll blame him for that. Being English I blame the French wherever possible. It's a long story, we've been at it for centuries.

The best way to get a feel for a site which displays its portfolio is to look at the websites which it claims it has created original work for. I found that of a random sample of about half a dozen, one was there as stated but the rest were either different graphics, or no longer online, or I couldn't trace them at all. And none were high-profile sites, though you'd expect that from the prices these guys charge. Amateur or tight-budgeted sites would be their target market, given that the most they charge is $15.

If you want to use them, I'd email and make sure they're still there first. If you haven't got $15 to risk, you just might want to look around.

Rewritten JANUARY 27th 2010

I looked at this one again and I feel that given the number of "positive reviews" I need to make a point much more strongly:

This site sells nothing but fakes. It doesn't matter whether they're good fakes or bad fakes, they're still fakes. The operation is illegal and importing these products is also illegal, so you risk having your boots seized by Customs if they come across your box in a random search. You will not get them back and may be charged Customs Duty in addition to what you have already paid.

Fakes are not made in the same facilities as the genuine articles, and it's widely believed that child labor and maybe even slave labor is used to keep the costs down. It's also known that there are links with organized crime because compared to other kinds of crime, this is a very simple and secure way to make a great deal of money. If you doubt any of this, ask the FBI, which has been involved in catching some of the people involved in these types of online business.

If you get a pair of fakes that look identical to the real thing, you can still be sure that the quality of manufacture and materials will not have matched those in the facilities that make the genuine branded products. You may not find out until later on, when your boots don't wear as well or last as long as the genuine ones.

There are several "reviewers" here who are associated with this and other sites like it, and who will post only positive reviews and claims that the goods are genuine and the customer service is wonderful. The reviews given by such people are never true, but it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between a misguided but well-intentioned review and a deliberately fake one. You need to use due diligence and, at the very least, check with UGG® Australia to see if the site is an authorized one. In this case, it isn't, and therefore the goods are phony.

Counterfeit information for the UGG® Australia brand may be found at:
http://www.uggaustralia.com/retailStores/counterfeit.aspx

The site looks OK and a Google search doesn't turn up the kind of material I'd expect if this was a known scam. But having read other reviews and being curious, I took a look at the onsite FAQ and as far as I can see it does explain exactly what the bidding and credits procedures are.

I also checked out the claim that the owner and location of the business weren't known and maybe impossible to find. That's incorrect and it only took a few minutes to locate the information that's available.

There's more than one founder to the business, but the only one coming forward in public is Lael Sturm, who is something of a business celebrity in San Francisco. There are photos of him around the web, easy enough to find. The business phone number reveals that you are calling San Francisco, and again that takes only a moment to check out.

The corporate office address is across the country, in Florida, in a very green and pleasant upmarket residential street in Miami (thank you, Google Streetview). But the business seems to run out of SF.

The man himself can be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/laels, and on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/people/Lael-Sturm/*******.

The information about the company and its co-founder is easily located. The bidding mechanism is where you'd expect it, in the site FAQ. You can send a tweet to the man who runs the operation. There really aren't any closely guarded secrets there.

None of this detracts from anything other reviewers have written about lousy customer service. But if we're demanding transparency from the websites we review, we owe it to them to get our own facts right and publish the truth when we have it. In this case, the most important things that people would want to know are right there to be found.

I thought the age of Playboy was coming to an end, but it seems there's life in the old dog-eared girly magazine idea, yet. Why? Beats me. Something to titillate Silicon Valley investors, who don't usually get the opportunity to browse the top shelves, so to speak, in public. It must do something for them, they've already sunk millions into the venture; perhaps they're aroused by thoughts of all the subscriptions that are expected to pour in once this comes out of beta.

However you polish up and present the concept in a favorable light, it's still making money from women stripping off for the camera. Didn't we ever get past that one being a cool idea? Haven't we all - everyone from about 14 years old upwards - seen all that and a good deal more on the web already? And being able to rub... er... shoulders with the models themselves, isn't that moving into the seedy side of the flesh business? No? Maybe it's just me. I just don't see the point.

Now this one is cool. Or neat, or dope, or whatever teens are using these days to mean jolly good. So much so that I had to try it out for myself, and it's so easy that it's compelling. Early days yet, that's clear, with only a handful of templates and no monetization, but that'll come later (oddly, the Firefox spell checker has "demonetization" but no "monetization". Must have been written when the dot com boom was going bust).

The core idea here is being able to post by email, simply attaching whatever files you want in your blog, and then leaving it to a spot of Web 2.0 magic to grab that and post it up on your page with the appropriate players or galleries automatically generated for you. And for good measure, another wave of the wand will post it all to Twitter, Facebook, or one or more of many other social networking services.

Whether I'll continue to post now I've made one effort, is another matter, because for some reason it's harder to keep going once you've started, regardless of the laws of physics which claim otherwise. But if I do post anywhere, and as long as I'm able to post there, I'll post there. The place has a good feel to it so far, and if they can keep the phentramin-d and affiliate marketing people out it should do really well.

For some reason it's never occurred to me to look for NPR online. I guess not being American by birth, NPR isn't an institution that I've grown up with and I don't appreciate it enough. I watch public TV but don't pay much attention to the radio. So having read the other review here I had to go look and this really is an important find and one you should really visit if you have any interest at all in any kind of music. It's full of free-to-listen recordings, news, features, sessions, interviews... you get the idea. And all highly polished and professionally presented. My only nitpick is that the stand-alone player, though producing quality streaming music, would stop about fifteen seconds into the track and had to be restarted. Every single time. And somewhat disconcertingly, the player presented a message encouraging me to find out all I need to know about swine flu vaccine, while the tracks played.

The site is only one section of the parent NPR site at www.npr.org, but I'll leave the review of that one to someone else. Just now, I want to sit and listen to some music...

Up to you to decide if this is a safe and reliable site. But just so you know, it's owned by a guy named Amarjeet Singh, and he also runs gasandelectricity.me.uk, and www.samedayloansforunemployed.org.uk. You could always drop him a line and ask, he's at 14, Canal Colony, Jagadhri Haryana *******.
In India.

(Reviewed by request)

Funnily enough I just had to deal with a clogged drain, which reminded me that someone had asked for this site to be reviewed.

In the drain snake league, this is down at the bottom end but still useful even so. The major drawback will be the length, only sufficient to reach the first "U" bend in the pipe. Next up would be more professional metal snakes, which are much longer, and the ultimate is probably the snake on a reel which is powered by an electric drill. But you're looking at an investment of $200 or so there, and the turbosnake is only $15 for two at Amazon. And you get what you pay for.

All snakes work the same way, by inserting and twisting a head designed to grab at the clog and not let go as you pull the snake back out. It's not high technology and I suspect they all do about as good a job as each other. If you've had to call in a plumber in the past, because you don't have the tools or you don't know how to disconnect and reconnect the waste trap, then any snake will be a godsend to you IF your problem is right there at the trap. And many times, that's exactly where it is and the snake will be well worthwhile.

I'd definitely keep one or two of these handy, they should last you for a couple of years of clogs and you'll recover your small investment with just one successful job. But just bear in mind that they can only reach so far, and therefore cannot be 100 percent guaranteed to reach the blockage every time.

I think that's just about plumbed the depths of that one.

After ten attempts I was, on average, more than 4000 kilometres off target. On the one hand this suggests that I should be deeply embarrassed at having no clue whatsoever about what lies beyond my own doorstep. On the other hand, it demonstrates that I am, my American home notwithstanding, a True Englishman; we've never cared for foreigners that much and aside from commiserating with them over their unfortunate foreignness, never taken much interest in where they are unless they have something we need. A pleasurable few minutes spent, though I doubt I will accept the challenge of a head-to-head with another visitor. Unless they're English, of course.

No site that reviews anything will be 100% reliable, since the business or service that is being reviewed may immediately change its method of operation and invalidate the reviews to date. Even if the business doesn't change, the existing reviews may be accidentally or intentionally biased, entirely or partially dishonest, tainted by bribes or persuasion and all manner of other outside interference.

Nobody is responsible for what I believe, except me. If I choose to accept and act on the advice of someone I've never met and am never likely to meet, that's down to me. If I have grave doubts about the honesty of a review, it's up to me to stop reading the thing and go elsewhere.

Having said all that, I use Yelp almost every time I'm about to use a new business or service or I'm looking for something local. It's currently the best model of a reviewer-driven site that I know, and one that I imagine other, similar sites look to for ideas. It's imperfect. Deal with it. Sometimes even imperfect is better than nothing at all. If you believe it's useless, don't use it. But if it works for you, give it the credit it deserves. It's always worked for me, so far, and remains one of my most useful bookmarks.

Awww, I so wanted to do better than a MEH. But as far as I can see, the core idea of Tumblr is that bloggers are encouraged to help themselves to other people's online material and copy it over to the Tumblr servers. Making this copying of other people's stuff as easy as possible is what Tumblr is all about.

I dutifully went to Google to take a look at a few sample blogs here, and frankly, I thought they were duller than the average blog as they just copied other people's stuff and (sometimes) commented on it. Worst case in my brief exploration was an article that had been "reblogged" from another Tumblr blog that had already reblogged it from yet another. Well I'm sorry, guys. Just looking at a bunch of material you've taken from other people's sites is not turning me on, and I can't imagine why you'd want to keep on doing it for very long. There's nothing definitively wrong about it (international and national copyright and intellectual property laws notwithstanding), it's just dull and repetitive. See, it's cool if you find something interesting now and then and post it on Twitter, or any of a bunch of sites that store your lucky finds, and it turns out to be interesting to lots of other people too. But whole pages of your found material and nothing else? Nope, not for me, and like I say, I'm sorry about that.

Maybe it was an unlucky choice too, but the first blog I visited had photographs weighing in at around a half-megabyte each, and I couldn't be bothered to wait for the huge page to load fully. Now this is not the fault of the blogger, who most likely hasn't yet learned how to compress images for the web. He just doesn't know any better. But the fact that the platform software is content to allow him to live in ignorance of the loss of some of his audience, which couldn't wait while several megabytes of images downloaded, I think that's poor. Although some bloggers might complain at any file size limits, given that modern storage is so cheap, a sensible limit imposed solely to keep pages loading smoothly and reasonably quickly can only be a good thing for everyone.

I can see this is a simple service to use, no coding skills needed, and the templates are neat enough to please most people. It's going to work for beginners and more experienced bloggers alike. I'd have no problem setting up here and blogging away, myself. The thing is, I can already do that at any number of existing venues. What's exceptional about Tumblr, to me, is also its major failing: promoting the use of other people's content and the further recycling of that content from blog to blog.

Mind you, one really surprising and most welcome feature of Tumblr - out of their thousands of blogs, only two selling Phentramin-D. Now that's a major achievement for any blogging platform! If they can package their anti-spam technology and sell it, they'll make more bloggers happy than Tumblr itself could ever do.

This is a search engine indexing Megaupload, a very popular file host amongst file sharers. And if that was all it was, it would be fine. But the searches I made at random also displayed links to "related" files which weren't related at all - they were porn. And each returns page also lists the latest downloaded files, which inevitably are also largely porn.

There is a bunch of ways to search MegaUpload already, no need to support this slightly sleazy one. In fact you can do it with Google:

"[Query term] intext: megaupload.com/?" without the speech marks and brackets will return pages listing your query term that also include links to the MegaUpload service.

Such pages are normally not, in themselves, illegal as they are merely listing files that already exist on another website. Nevertheless not all such file sharing sites are entirely safe, and I strongly recommend both a personal firewall and a good anti-virus and anti-spyware/malware application before you venture into this corner of the web.

Here we go then:

1) The "About Us" has been lifted entirely from another company, The Best Guard, which is a security company based in Canada. Nothing at all to do with retail electronics. This site has simply removed references to security and replaced them with references to electronics.

2) It has some awful reviews already:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/www-stopandshopdigital-com-brooklyn
http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/*******102

3) Chunks of the Privacy Policy have been lifted from a variety of other websites (maybe all of it, I didn't have time to check it all).

4) The Better Business Bureau processed 66 complaints against this company this year.

5) It has an appalling track record at Reseller Ratings:
http://www.resellerratings.com/store/Stop_and_Shop_Digital

6) It's listed at Ripoff Report:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/Bait-and-Switch/Stop-Shop-Digital/stop-shop-digital-never-do-b-bpd5p.htm

And at Scam Found:
http://www.scamfound.com/f2/scam-report-stop-shop-digital-*******.html

7) The site doesn't have a Buyers Guide, though it declares, on the About Us page:

"With the Buyer's Guide we've sought to make our site accessible not only to the technically savvy, but also to individuals interested in upgrading for the first time. Even if you are experienced, the Buyer's Guide is still a great resource."

This was copied wholesale from another site, who would have guessed?

8) The shipping terms seem to be a cut-and-paste from a choice of not one but many other online camera stores, several of which are known to have bad reputations, warnings from the BBB and so on. They even copied the typo.

9) They claim to be the recipient of the 2009 Gold Award at everyprice.com. Oddly, they don't show up as one of the merchants that site recommends.

10) Just to pick a product at random, a Canon EOS Digital Rebel xSi EOS450D, 12.2 Megapixel, SLR Digital Camera Body Silver, is being offered here at $119. The lowest price you'll find this at, from a known reputable dealer, is more than four times that amount. Generally, anything being offered this cheaply is likely to be a fake, if it exists at all.

What I found in the course of a little research is a surprisingly large number of sites selling digital cameras and accessories. Some are poorly designed and obviously shady, but some are very convincing and use highly polished business design ideas to convey a sense of trust and authority. The only conclusion I can reach is to recommend you to do business with truly well known, well respected and widely reviewed sources, even if you do have to pay the going rate. And if you need to research the product, go to one of the top camera review sites, make your choice there based not on price but on what you need, and then use one of the merchants that they recommend. And please don't be motivated by greed, because that low, low price is likely to end up being bad, bad news.

P.S. A couple more thoughts:-

Be careful of any site that put's the apostrophes' in the wrong place's. I'm not going to hand out an English lesson here because I'd be doing these guys a favor, but you can go look it up. A properly designed site should have been proofread and the apostrophes should largely be in the right places, but people for whom the English language is a challenge are prone to wandering apostrophes.

A site that has a "5 Star Rating" has nothing unless they can show you who rated them and when. Likewise awards, high ratings from top sites etc., are useless unless they link to the site that gave the award and the page from which the award or rating was given. A site may post many pretty images and claim all sorts of awards and trophies, but that's all they are, a claim, unless they can be proved. Please, don't believe everything you see.