cars: more EV fiascos at Faraday, Nikola, and Canoo

I blogged about EV scam company Mullen Automotive and its bat-sh*t insane stock price shenanigans: a single $MULN share that today costs $3.64 was theoretically worth $1.926 billion dollars 12 years ago! There are other joke companies that are still riding the EV wave in their own toxic cesspool…

Faraday Future fakery

An earlier scam I followed with grim fascination was Faraday Future. Billionaire Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting wants to build his own revolutionary EV, so he hires top-notch talent from BMW and Silicon Valley. Except he only has a billion, and it’s not enough due to spage’s law (#4). Furthermore, the company wastes time, resources, and money on a ridiculous FFZERO1 single-seat concept race car and helping out on its Le’Eco car for the Chinese market, a billion-dollar gigafactory in Nevada that never happened. TheVerge had a series of masterful reports on the chicanery. Jia Yueting filed for personal bankruptcy. It did manage to make a prototype of its expensive fast FF91 SUV, but that’s not impressive because as Elon Musk has repeatedly said and tweeted “Prototypes are easy, production is hard” (also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard,” his succinct summary of spage’s law #4).

But $FFIE is still going! It merged with a SPAC, a sure sign that its stock was overvalued garbage. It has delivered a handful of the FF91s, but only to company friends and dealers. By not making more than a handful of cars, it can keep going for years, just like Mullen.

Nikola (not-Tesla) Motors, the name alone is suspicious

Next up is Nikola Motors

Utah scammer Trevor Milton (“it’s OK to scam non-believers for the greater glory of the Mormon church) pivoted from cheating his partners on a gas-turbine truck to making a hydrogen fuel cell truck. The chicken-and-egg problem with hydrogen is there are no hydrogen fuel stations, so nobody buys the vehicle, so there’s no demand for hydrogen fuel stations. (Unlike BEVs, which enjoyed an immediate market of millions of people who drive short distances and have an electrical socket in their garage.) Trevor Milton solved this with an audacious plan to build 600 truck stops each producing green hydrogen to refuel the Nikola fuel cell semi truck, and Nikola would include the cost of the truck and the fuel and servicing in a fixed-price lease; “Nikola plans to bill customers for its vehicles a flat rate of $0.95/mile over the life of the 7-year, 700,000 mile lease.” Brilliant, audacious, and requiring both billions of dollars and engineering breakthroughs. Nikola had neither.

Nikola's Power
because when you’re trying to build a hydrogen truck and its infrastructure, the most important thing is to announce a bunch of CGI renders of lifestyle vehicles.

Nikola built a fuel cell truck prototype and Milton claimed “this thing fully functions and works…this is a real truck”, but it quickly pivoted to a bunch of joke renders of hydrogen lifestyle vehicles from its Powersports division: the WAV watercraft, the NZT off-highway adventure vehicle, and the Reckless “military grade fully-electric tactical OHV.” Then it announced a fuel-cell pickup truck and in September 2020 a huge deal with GM where GM would supply hydrogen fuel cell tech, engineer and build the pickup truck, and get $2 billion in newly-issued $NKLA stock (a great deal for GM who had given up on hydrogen fuel cell cars and hoped to sell its fuel cell tech to anyone with a checkbook). But then Hindenburg Research (great name!) wrote the War & Peace of financial investigative reporting, Nikola: How to Parlay An Ocean of Lies Into a Partnership With the Largest Auto OEM in America and revealed an ocean of lies

  • the Nikola One prototype wasn’t operational
  • the parts in front of the truck were pilfered from the truck
  • Nikola claimed proprietary technology but had none. Some of the parts it claimed it built in-house parts were commercial parts with black tape over the manufacturer’s name.
  • Nikola’s video of it driving along a road was filmed on the longest straight continuous downhill road in Utah (they even bent a sign to preserve the illusion the road was flat
  • Nikola’s VP of hydrogen production was Trevor’s brother who had previously been paving driveways in Hawaii, and its head of building out the 700 hydrogen station network was formerly manager of a golf club.
  • Nikola had never made a single kg of hydrogen. It didn’t even have solar panels on its facilities.
  • etc., etc.

There is some justice that Trevor Milton was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison (he’s still appealing the sentence). But the people who were in on the con took over.

Nikola managed to convert Iveco’s European S-Way truck into the battery-electric Tre, and unlike most of the zombie EV wannabes, it actually did make hundreds of trucks and “sold” them to dealers (who parked them in front of their premises to look green). Alas, four batteries caught fire, so all the trucks were recalled and parked in the desert. It never did build the hydrogen truck stops or make any hydrogen, instead it has a “HYLA” subsidiary which sets up staffed hydrogen refueling locations by simply parking a truck trailer tank full of hydrogen that it ordered from… someone and having an full-time attendant operate the refueling. It has managed to make dozens of the fuel cell version of the Tre, but for those it has to provide hydrogen, so every truck that actually enters service represents huge losses. Unlike Mullen and Canoo Nikola has substantial cash, so it can probably make a hundred or so more trucks before it runs out of money.

Canoo, SOP lies are standard operating practice

Canoo was founded by executives who fled from Faraday Future’s insanity. They had a neat idea for a pill- (suppository?-) shaped EV on a platform that could easily support a commercial van design, a recreational van, a pickup truck. Not terrible, but almost every EV shares this “skateboard chassis” concept.

Promised (SOP) start of production in 2022, then 2023, then… never. And Canoo just announced a reverse stock split.

No cash no cars

These clown EV companies pretend that they can somehow produce cars despite having pathetically little cash, and suckers believe them. At June 30 2024 Canoo (GOEV) only had $4.5M in cash and cash equivalents, Workhorse only $5.3M, and the king[*] of scam reverse stock split hell (a single MULN share has “lost” $2 billion in value!) Mullen Automotive only $3.5M.

But FFIE takes the cake. Its Q2 2024 press release doesn’t mention cash at all, but I found its 10-Q: it went from having $17M in cash in June 2023 to just $793,000!!

Actual car makers like Rivian and Lucid can survive losing $50,000+ on each car they make because they have billion-dollar cash cushions. Now imagine what FFIE would lose making a $300,000 EV in tiny quantities. If it makes three cars it would immediately go bankrupt.

[*] I lied, one share of Top Ships Inc (TOPS) has lost $1.014 trillion dollars from its theoretical peak pre-splits. So FFIE could keep this scam going for years.

spage’s law #4

EV startups can lose $millions a month promising to enter volume production “soon,” or they can actually start cranking out vehicles and immediately lose $100M+ a quarter.
Aptera, Canoo, Einride, ElectraMeccanica, Faraday Future, Mullen (total scammers), Nikola (back to promising HFC production after the battery Tre fiasco), Phoenix Motors, REE, XOS, etc. are all in this zombie state. Lucid and Rivian exited it, but they had $billions in cash. Fisker tried to avoid it by paying Magna to build cars but that didn’t work. RIP Arcimoto, Arrival, Bollinger, Coda (I have a long memory!), Electric Last Mile Solutions, Lightning eMotors, Lightyear, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Smith Electric, Sono, Volta, Workhorse Group, etc.; all bankrupt or have abandoned electric vehicle manufacturing, and of those I think only Proterra and Smith Electric manufactured hundreds of vehicles.

Posted in cars | Leave a comment

Mullen, the king of EV stock scams

I care about the environment, so I care about transportation, so I care about EVs (or better yet, not carting your sorry ass and a laptop and/or a few kilos of groceries around in a 2-ton manufactured product), so I care about new car companies that might move us off fossil fuels. But a lot of those car companies have turned into outright stock scams preying on clueless investors hoping to make a fortune on “the next Tesla.” Some day I’ll blog about Faraday Future’s doorless race car debacle, Canoo re-wrapping the same handful of prototypes with different potential customer’s logos, and Nikola (not-Tesla) Motors’ 600-station hydrogen trucking fantasy.

Enter Mullen

These EV companies circling the drain pale next to Mullen Automotive, the most extreme and audacious con going. Here is the stock price history for $MULN. It is bat-sh*t insane!

Mullen Automotive stock chart showing share price dropping $1.92 billion

Don’t glaze over! Look at the line starting 3.64 USD. That says the price of one share of Mullen today is $3.64. Then in red, it says that one share has dropped in price from $1.926 billion dollars (for one share!!), a loss of 100%.

The chicanery of reverse stock splits

Except one single share of this junk EV wannabe maker was obviously never worth $2 billion dollars. To remain listed on a “reputable” exchange like the NASDAQ, your stock has to trade for more than a dollar, otherwise it’s a penny stock. So Mullen repeatedly has reverse stock splits. This isn’t Nvidia saying “Our stock price has risen a lot but we want one share to cost around $200, so on Monday we’ll turn each share you own into 10 shares; you’re welcome” so after this 10→1 stock split the price per share on Monday drops to 1/10 what it was.  Instead Mullen says “You thought you owned 500 shares in us each only worth pennies, but ha-ha sucker, now you only own 20 shares” so in theory after this 25→1 reverse stock split each share is worth 25 times more and the share price briefly rises to a few dollars before continuing its decline. Both kinds of stock splits don’t change the size of the slice of the company that you own, but one direction hides the fact that you’re holding a slice of a s**t sandwich.

Mullen has literally done this six times. Ignoring the stock price graph, how is it doing? In its financial results for the quarter ending June 2024 it reported that it only has $4M cash in the bank, only made a measly $65,000 in revenue, unsurprisingly lost $91M on that pathetic revenue, yet it paid its CEO $47M in 2023. It keeps cranking out press releases touting orders for its EVs coming in from around the world and new dealers and overseas partners… and it’s all fake. In three months it got paid for one imported Chinese EV van.

spage’s law #4 and Elon Musk’s wisdom

People somehow get caught up in magical thinking. “I like the prototype, as do lots of other people, the company says they have thousands of orders/reservations/letters of intent… just make the cars and the money will roll in.” So why doesn’t Mullen actually make and sell some electric vehicles?

You can let Elon Musk explain it. He’s said and tweeted: “Prototypes are easy, production is hard”, also “Production with positive cash flow is extremely hard.” But people refuse to grasp the import of the latter seven words. As I’ve started posting when people gush over some cool prototype from a struggling EV maker,

spage’s law: EV startups can lose $millions a month promising to enter volume production “soon,” or they can actually start cranking out vehicles and immediately lose $100M+ a quarter.
Aptera, Canoo, Einride, ElectraMeccanica, Faraday Future, Mullen (total scammers), Nikola (back to promising HFC production after the battery Tre fiasco), Phoenix Motors, REE, XOS, etc. are all in this zombie state. Lucid and Rivian exited it, but they had $billions in cash. Fisker tried to avoid it by paying Magna to build cars but that didn’t work. RIP Arcimoto, Arrival, Bollinger, Coda (I have a long memory!), Electric Last Mile Solutions, Lightning eMotors, Lightyear, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Smith Electric, Sono, Volta, Workhorse Group, etc.; all bankrupt or have abandoned electric vehicle manufacturing, and of those I think only Proterra and Smith Electric manufactured hundreds of vehicles.

That “lose $100M” is real cold hard cash, not sequences of numbers in a financial report. You need to actually pay suppliers for the parts, and factory workers to screw them together into a vehicle, and someone to ship the vehicles to customers. If you don’t have cash to write those checks, you go bust. End of story. Yet company fans and the remaining abused stockholders continue to believe these zombie companies will sprout wings and fly: any day now they’ll put thousands of compelling vehicles into the hands of happy customers and start chasing Tesla, or at least Rivian. Nope. Not gonna happen!

Rubber-necking at a train wreck

The Tragic Downfall of Mullen Automotive is a grimly entertaining video on this ridiculous company. A plastic fake Ferrari, an ex-felon hawking a magic box with wires poking out that “increases range 60%!”, repeated failures to ever ship a car then getting sued by the latest Chinese partner that was going to build them, etc. It’s easy to laugh. But real people really did invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into the company because they liked the idea of EVs, and now have one share worth less than a Big Mac.

Edit: Top Ships lost a trillion quadrillion dollars per share

Apparently this insanity isn’t limited to wannabe EV companies. One share in Top Ships, “an international owner and operator of tanker vessels,” has “lost” $500 trillion since inception, and was briefly “worth” $1 quadrillion per share compared with its current stock price of $9.05. Spoiler: the entire company was never worth even a millionth of that much money, let alone a single share. Top Ships had so many reverse stock splits in 2017 they overlap on every historical graph that shows them.

Top Ships stock chart showing share price dropping $1.92 billion

CompaniesMarketCap has a table of its stock splits. If you had one share of Top Ships at the start of March 2008, you would theoretically have 22 quadrillionths of a share now. If your holding in $TOPS back then was equivalent to a kilogram of beef, you would own much less than a single muscle cell now. But the company survives and has even made a profit in two of the last 15 years.

DateSplitMultipleCumulative multiple
2023-09-291:12x0.083333333333333x2.2045855379189E-14
2022-09-231:20x0.05x2.6455026455026E-13
2020-08-101:25x0.04x5.2910052910053E-12
2019-08-221:20x0.05x1.3227513227513E-10
2018-03-261:10x0.1x2.6455026455026E-9
2017-10-061:2x0.5x2.6455026455026E-8
2017-08-031:30x0.033333333333333x5.2910052910053E-8
2017-06-231:15x0.066666666666667x1.5873015873016E-6
2017-05-111:20x0.05x2.3809523809524E-5
2016-02-221:10x0.1x0.00047619047619048
2014-04-211:7x0.14285714285714x0.0047619047619048
2011-06-241:10x0.1x0.033333333333333
2008-03-201:3x0.33333333333333x0.33333333333333

Edit #2: apparently $CEI/CEIN is another crazy stock.

Posted in cars, eco, laws | Tagged , | Leave a comment

web: let me link to a song, not a service!

I blog a lot about music. I want you to be able to play the songs I write about. You probably pay for a music streaming service that has millions of songs on it including the ones I discuss; you might even have a downloaded .mp3 file of the song on your computer. But I can’t put a “Listen to this track” link on a web page 😢😠.

The obvious thing to do is have a standard music intent on web pages: ⏵click to listen to “the song ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’ from the Japanese 2008 reissue of the 10cc album How Dare You” and the song starts playing in your music system of choice. The same way I can put a tel:+1-212-555-1234 link in a web page and if you click it your smartphone offers to make the telephone call.

But there’s no such thing. The best I can do is embed a YouTube player featuring some rendition of the song that I found on YouTube. In cases where the artist doesn’t have an official presence on YouTube, I’ll link to the most popular video uploaded by some random fan, that doesn’t have too pointless a “video” feed of album covers and random pictures, and hope that their video remains online.

Considerations

As my example suggests, I might want to feature a very specific instance of the recording. YouTube Music irritatingly seems to pick the most recent version of the track, often from a compilation, that has been remastered (damn loudness war). It would be nice if your music streamer could say “I don’t have the particular version, but I have an edited version from the 1970s Go Pop compilation”.

I need to be able to control the playback, to say “Listen to the harmonies at 1:28 in ‘I’m Mandy, Fly Me’.” (This shades into the issue that videos and web pages are poor multimedia experiences, which I blogged about.)

What’s a suitable ID?

Wikidata Q number for a track?

Wikidata actually has an item for the song “I’m Mandy Fly Me,” Q12317871, which links to the song’s ID on Discogs, Freebase, and MusicBrainz. So maybe just have a play-music:Q12317871 intent and make streaming services look this up when the user’s browser starts it and hands it this URL. But I think Wikidata only covers songs that have an article on some Wikipedia, it doesn’t have items for all of the millions of songs uploaded every year. It seems (see “nerd alert” below) that Wikidata only has items for either 30,000 or 670,000 music tracks, a tiny amount . Maybe Bandcamp could take this on, but not all musicians are on Bandcamp.

ISRC?

Eventually Claude.ai suggested I look at ISRC (International Standard Recording Code). I don’t know how many codes this has, but a search for the song by 10cc returned 41 results, one of which might be the right one So maybe play-music:GBF087500011 is the right link (Wikidata doesn’t have any ISRC for “I’m Mandy Fly Me”).

Discogs or MusicBrainz ID?

Discogs and MusicBrainz also have IDs for lots of tracks. Discogs (a great resource for credits) seems more for collectors tracking down different physical recordings of a song; Wikidata says “I’m Mandy Fly me”’s Discogs “master ID” is 280200 which brings up 22 different versions of the 45 RPM single. I think MusicBrainz is for fingerprinting different versions of a track; Wikidata says the song’s MusicBrainz “work ID” is 9812b3a5-68f6-4c62-b5a9-72b55c5e062c and it brings up dozens of versions of the song from different compilation albums, with slightly different lengths.

Song information matters

Another benefit of a play-music:songTrackID link is the site(s) that maintain the information for songTrackID independent of a particular streaming platform could also provide all the song credit information that is so sadly lacking when you just stream or click play on a song. If there isn’t a Wikipedia article about the song or album, how do you learn who sang the backing vocals or where it was recorded? (Macy Gray’s version of “Tuesday Heartbreak,” I’m looking at you!) Roon (not a streaming service, but excellent software for organizing and playing back your own digital music files) has fantastic metadata for millions of songs so you can explore other songs featuring the same drummer or produced by the same producer, but this information arguably should go with the song, not be dependent on a third party.

Wikidata has a whole data model for this, for example there’s a producer property and a performer property, as you can see for the track Imagine. Ignore the very dry data-centric presentation on the Wikidata site, and imagine this tuned specifically for information about a song. The data model does propose adding Amazon/Deezer/Melon/Shazam/Spotify/Tidal track IDs for tracks, but I don’t think this has happened yet. Wikidata doesn’t include lyrics, undoubtedly due to murky copyright considerations, but many streaming music players now show them so lyrics can be left to the user’s music player.

Also playlists

After you’ve read my words of wisdom, you might want to access a playlist of all the songs I’ve written about. This is especially important for long pieces or interviews that mention dozens of songs. But the best they can do is embed a Spotify or Apple Music songlist player, ignoring everyone paying for Amazon Music, Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal, YouTube Music, etc. Here’s what NPR does:

screenshot of the two playlist widgets on an NPR web page, one for Spotify and the other for Apple Music
sucks to be you if you don’t pay for Spotify or Apple

NPR also has a “Here’s the song, you figure it out” approach. If you click (⏵) View the Tony Bennett show playlist on its Tony Bennett Profile , you get a static text list:

screenshot of a static window listing songs played on an NPR show
Here’s the information, you figure out how to locate and play the songs

Third-party solutions abound

I DuckDuckGo’d and found web pages like “14 Best Music Smart Links in 2024” and “Your Ultimate Guide to Music Links: Accessing Key Music Resources.” From the former

Smart music links can be created using a music url generator, such as SoundLink, Linkfire, Linktree, ToneDen, Hypeddit, Soundplate, Songwhip, Feature.fm …, and many more. Users can use these services to create custom landing pages for their music, where they can choose which platforms to include and customize the page’s look and user experience.

The landing page these services provide looks something like this:

screenshot of Soundiiz landing page for a sample track, with its links to play it on a few music streaming services
No, I want a playlist on my web site that works with the user’s music player

But this is the wrong approach. I don’t want to involve a third-party “music link platform” that provides a separate landing page that figures out links while also tracking my users; I want my reader’s computer to resolve a music intent link to play a song or load a playlist.

There are all kinds of “schemes” you can put in a URL (or a URN? a URI? I can never remember the difference); IANA has a list of official ones and Wikipedia lists some of the unofficial but common ones. There’s no sign of a play-music: scheme.

Efforts to solve this

Tomahawk resolver

Tomahawk (archived site) got some press back in 2013 when it tried to come up with a standard player for music.

Tomahawk is a free multi-source and cross-platform music player. An application that can play not only your local files, but also stream from services like Spotify, Beats, SoundCloud, Google Music, YouTube and many others. You can even connect with your friends’ Tomahawks, share your musical gems or listen along with them. Let the music play!

but the startup went nowhere and the player hasn’t been updated for years. It’s a shame because “In short, given the name of a song and artist, Tomahawk will find the right source, for the right user at the right time” is close to what I want. This is implemented by Tomahawk’s separate resolver code (likewise code that hasn’t been updated for 6 years) which figures out how to locate the track on dozens of music services: “Given a tuple of Artist,Track (or a triple Artist,Album,Track) return a stream URL (and some metadata about it) so that one can play this track.” Great idea. Maybe a triple is better than a single ID for every track, although it doesn’t specify a particular version of the song. The resolver can also open an artist URL, an album URL, or a playlist. Tomahawk also came up with a bookmarklet that “can generate playlists from within web pages. So, if you’re browsing on a site like NPR’s All Songs Considered, and find a song you like, just click the bookmarklet and Tomahawk automatically searches for all the songs listed on the page.” But, again, why involve a third party? I should be able to have a service-independent playlist on my web page, and my reader’s computer should hand it to her chosen music streaming service. And Tomahawk’s demise shows how crazy it is to leave this functionality in the hands of a single third party.

Data Transfer Initiative’s playlist transfer

The Data Transfer Initiative works on policy and technology to empower users to transfer data from one online service to another. One specific example of this is a playlist transfer tool that “allows users of Apple Music and YouTube Music to transfer music streaming playlists between the two services.” Neat, but they don’t seem to be promoting a standard representation of a playlist that I can put into a web page that “just works” in my reader’s music player.

Nerd alert: how many tracks are on Wikidata?

I asked claude.ai to help me count the number of items that are “audio tracks” in Wikidata. It gave me the query to use

SELECT (COUNT(?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q7302866.
}

and the Wikidata Query Service returned count 7524.

But when dealing with ontologies and knowledge graphs you’re in a maze of has parts and subclasses and such. I asked “Does this include subclasses of a track like a single or a song?” and Claude replied

That’s a great question. The query I provided earlier does not include subclasses of audio tracks. It only counts entities that are directly instances of “audio track” (Q7302866). To include subclasses like singles or songs, we need to modify our query. Let’s create an updated version that includes subclasses.

SELECT DISTINCT ?subclass ?subclassLabel WHERE {
  ?subclass wdt:P279* wd:Q7302866.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

but that resulted in a list of 43 things related to an audio track, like “instrumental cover,” “bonus track,” “re-recording,” etc. Eventually Claude came up with a query that includes subclasses of “audio track”:

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
?item wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q7302866.
}

and this returned count 31056. Then it suggested a query for Q2188189 (musical work):

SELECT (COUNT(DISTINCT ?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q2188189.
}

which returned count 674057. Again, I suspect these are mostly items created from Wikipedia articles about significant musical works (I’m Mandy Fly Me has its own article). Considering that the big music streaming services each have over 100 million tracks on them, and 120,000 new tracks are uploaded to them every day (!!), Wikidata currently falls far short as a comprehensive repository of audio track information. It’s nothing that a bulk upload couldn’t fix.

Posted in music, web | Leave a comment

software: preserving the pen-based computing past

I’m fortunate to have been a minor supporting character to some some ground-breaking software that failed in the marketplace: the PenPoint operating system from GO Corporation, the NeWS network/extensible window system from Sun Microsystems, ingenious forward quadratic texture mapping from Nvidia (when it was struggling), and the Shockwave interactive multimedia platform from Macromedia. The tragedy is these efforts preceded digital cameras, PDFs, .png screenshots, hardware emulators, and other affordances that make it easy to preserve these great software efforts. So the Wikipedia pages I linked above for those software projects are sorely lacking in screenshots of the software.

The hardware exists…

Someone recently auctioned off a bunch of PenPoint hardware and software.

photo of GO's prototype pen computer hardware, electronic styli, battery packs, floppy drives and the EO 440 Personal Communicator
prototype GO pen computer hardware and EO 440 communicator
photo by Ed Devinney
photo of floppy disks and manuals for PenPoint software development kit
I wrote some of that SDK and made an early version of that class diagram in Aldus FreeHand!
photo by Ed Devinney

With permission I added the photo of GO’s “Lombard” prototype 286 pen computer “slate” hardware (as in “after holding it for a while and trying to handprint flawless letters with a stylus, you feel like you’re holding up a solid piece of slate”) to Wikimedia Commons and added it to the English Wikipedia GO Corporation article.

The software must be out there…

All this reminded me of the lack of pictures for this interesting footnote in personal computer history. Here are my notes on where pieces of the software and documentation are available online and where I can contribute (should I ever catch up on my other TODOs…).

PenPoint resources

  • Internet Archive has a scan (in which you can select text) of PenPoint Development Tools Jun92 , also available at ohlandi.ipv7.net
    • PDF page 31 lists contents of the SDK
    • Chapter 3 (PDF page 34) describes running PenPoint on a PC
  • There’s a PenBasedComputing history site
  • bitsavers has a PenPoint_SDK set of disk images at https://bitsavers.org/bits/Go/PENPOINT_SDK/.
    • The zip file Unpacked which is presumably all the floppies unpacked into a PENPOINT directory, but then that has a PENPOINT.ZIP in it that seems to have the same files but lowercase. The other difference is the top-level PENPOINT has a \_SERVICE directory which has DEBUG versions of the same system services in \SERVICE.
      • This is probably PenPoint 1.0a, because Unpacked.zip has \PENPOINT\BOOT\ENVIRON.INI with
           ## Version string used by Preferences
           Version=PenPoint|Version 1.0a|Copyright c 1992, GO Corporation|All Rights Reserved
        .
  • khnsky wrote qemu-penpointos, a step-by-step guide to running PenPoint in QEMU.
    • N.B. the code for this is in the default “penpoint” branch of https://github.com/khnsky/qemu-penpointos , but the source for the GitHub pages site (and the floppies) is in a separate “gh-pages” branch.egapFeds
      • khnsky’s gh-pages floppies includes “GOODIES.img” … I think this is probably PPSDK_9.ZIP from Bitsavers
  • https://github.com/BOOtak/PenPoint-Virtualbox is a a pre-made PenPoint-Virtualbox image.

My TODOs

  • Try to find PenPoint 1.01 SDK floppy set. I have the PenPoint SDK_1_01_PATCH2 file set for this and the floppies for various x86 hardware devices.
  • Upload the combined set of files to Internet Archive
  • Upload my floppies of some third-party software for PenPoint to Internet Archive
  • Try both the DOSBox and emulator image to run PenPoint, make notes on running them. Install the third-party software to it and create a more interesting software image.
  • Take lots of screenshots, especially of document embedding and the impressive third-party software!
    • There was a S-Shot accessory tool in the SDK described on p. 184 of the PenPoint Development Tools PDF, and/or there’s surely an easy way in DOSBox and QEMU to take a snapshot of the running software.
Posted in software | Leave a comment

music: Phil Collins drums way Beyond the Lines

YouTube decided to feature a couple of overlong videos about the legendary drum fill in “In the Air Tonight.” (I’m not linking to them, because the same information is in its Wikipedia article, and just because YouTube pushes people to make 20-minute-long videos so it can cram in more advertisements, that is not a good enough reason for video creators to pad their videos. Your time and mine is valuable.)

What a drum fill! 1980s 4evar!

Anyway, a bunch of killjoys said “It’s not even a drum solo, it’s just a drum fill. There are plenty of drummers much better than Phil Collins.” Yes, yes, and yes, but it’s unarguably iconic and legendary. It’s not simply those eleven tom-tom hits, it’s the sound, the build-up in the song, the engineering that make it so.

Beyond the drum fill

That drum fill doesn’t make Phil Collins a great drummer. What ensures his greatness is another song on Face Value, “Behind the Lines.” I knew and loved it for decades as the irrepressibly funky R&B workout with Phil Collins nailing that disco-ish hi-hat plus finger snaps backbeat, with some explosive yet bouncy fills.

Then I learned from a YouTube comment that it’s a remake of a Genesis song off their Duke albume. WTH?? The original is pop-prog-rock: energetic yet lugubrious, and keyboard-centric. Still with great drumming.

The fact that it’s THE SAME DRUMMER makes Phil Collins one of the all-time greats. The fills, the timing, the way in the instrumental bridge of the song he hits a drum just as he closes the hi-hat, they’re different in the two songs, and it’s all masterful.

Which Brand X?

I liked the Genesis singles in the 1980s and “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight” in a beer ad, but I had a bad experience buying the Genesis album on the strength of the singles “That’s All” and the wistfully great “Taking It All Too Hard”; I was disappointed by the other songs, so I never bought Duke and most Genesis albums. Likewise I knew Phil Collins was in the well-reviewed 1970s jazz fusion band Brand X, but I never heard any of the songs on the radio and I certainly wasn’t going to take a chance buying an album.

Now that I can listen to almost any song for free, a few years ago I checked out Brand X’s albums, and some of the drumming is great, a third confident style from Phil Collins. But I can’t remember which songs I liked! They’re instrumentals so there’s nothing to tie them to a title. And when %$#@! YouTube Music shows me Brand X Top Songs or Brand X album tracks, it doesn’t indicate which ones I gave a thumbs up to.

Painfully liked music

When you give a thumbs up to a song on YouTube Music it adds it to your “Liked Music” auto-playlist. So I should be able to download the list (currently 1,872 songs that I liked) and search it for BrandX songs. I just viewed my “Liked Music” playlist and clicked 🡳 download… and the fans on this laptop quickly turned on. YouTube Music seems to be downloading an image for every single song in that list. It’s been going for 25 minutes at 130% of my CPU! I think it’s actually downloading all the songs… somewhere. Eventually Firefox hung and I had to restart it. ??! I guess I’ll never know which Brand X songs I liked.

A Frank Zappa connection

One comment claimed that Chester Thompson’s repeated drum fill on Frank Zappa’s “More Trouble Every Day” on Roxy & Elsewhere was the inspiration for the “In the Air Tonight” fill. It certainly sounds similar but then another commenter said no, Phil Collins reused that drum fill on the live version of the Genesis song “Afterglow” (and the Wikipedia article agrees).

Posted in music | Leave a comment

eco: it’s not easy telling the gas company to shove it

We have electric radiant floor heating and electric domestic hot water (after an expensive failed Rube Goldberg attempt years ago at solar thermal tubes with air-water heat pump backup that I still need to blog about), and an excellent Mitsubishi ductless mini-split to heat or cool most of our second floor. But we still have the bad (un)”natural” gas supply for our gas cooktop and a gas dryer. Let’s kick it to the curb! How hard can it be?

unwanted (un)natural gas hookup and meter, with censored foul language annotations
Noble aim, expensive statement

A gas cooktop is so bad!

The harmful effects of gas stoves on health are now undeniable, maybe that will encourage even knuckle-dragging global warming deniers to switch to better induction cooktops. Plus the ease of cleaning a single tempered sheet of glass. If you remodel or build new and hook up a gas supply, you’re crazy.

We tried to get an estimate of how much it would cost to switch to an induction cooktop, and the appliance installers couldn’t even figure out how to remove our Miele gas cooktop, and weren’t sure if we would need an additional 240 Volt 40 amp outlet (we already have an electric oven) and/or an electric panel upgrade. All that on top of the cost of Consumer Reports’ recommended Bosch NIT8660UC induction cooktop.

Occasionally drying clothes

We would have similar problems ditching our gas clothes dryer for an electric or heat pump dryer. (We mostly air dry for a few minutes to collect lint then hang clothes inside, and sometimes point a fan at them to dry quicker, which also cools the house.) We’d need a new electric outlet, the new dryer wouldn’t fit next to our 20-year-old unbreakable Kenmore Elite HE3t washer, and wouldn’t stack on our existing pedestal to provide a shelf in the utility room.

Decades-old Kenmore Elite HE3t washer next to unwanted Kenmore gas dryer
A perfect fit is hard to find

Making a statement while barely making a dent

Much as I’d love to tell PG&E to rip out our gas connection, spending $4,000+ for the satisfaction of telling the (un)”natural” gas company to f*** off, when we use less than 1 therm a month for $5, is a pretty expensive performative statement!

Posted in eco | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

art: Jhane Barnes greatness

boring shirts go in a closet

Jhane Barnes‘ legendary shirts are just too beautiful to hide in a closet. I need a glassed-in mobile of shifting shirts that move close and recede. Failing that, after I wear one I leave it out to catch my eye and enjoy. (Now that she has has walked away from her canvas of the human form I don’t want to wear out my preciouses by over-laundering them.)

Insanely great, to touch to feel is to love

These are some of the artist’s more elaborate woven shirts. After seeing from a distance, these textiles are amazing to examine close-up and touch (ask first, her fans are usually happy to share); levels of detail tuned to your distance from the lucky wearer. The variations in the patterns evoke the imperfection in Agnes Martin’s hand-drawn pencil abstractions, but here they arise from being constructed in 3-D in the real world by Japanese master fabric weavers.

detail of Falling Blue by Agnes Martin, 1963
They give delight and hurt not (The Tempest)

These are less elaborate textiles, with no loss of artistry. Again, the closer you look, the more you see. When Cézanne saw the shirt at the bottom of this photo, he said “That’s it, I’m out,” and took up snail racing instead.

Seated Man by Paul Cézanne, 1905-1906

I have 35 more of her artworks. (A fraction of her œuvre, she created four to six collections a year of multiple shirt designs for decades.) Jhane Barnes is simply the greatest abstract geometric artist and although she’s still making great designs for carpeting and signage in textiles and resin, there’s something magic when the art is something you wear about in the world.

Lovely, but you can’t wear it!
Posted in art, design | Tagged | Leave a comment

skiing: RIP Dr. Ruth Westheimer, 1928-2024

Dr. Ruth and her ski instructor at the former Squaw Valley USA with Lake Tahoe visible
Dr. Ruth Westheimer and random ski instructor with Lake Tahoe in the distance

RIP Dr. Ruth Westheimer, sex therapist and author! I was her ski instructor in 1999 when she came to Squaw Valley USA (now renamed Palisades Tahoe) age 70 for a celebrity ski “race.” The good ski instructors weren’t interested because it was unpaid but I was happy to volunteer for a few days. She was tiny, so she rented kid skis, kid boots, and kid poles; I took her up the cable car to cruise around the beginner area. She had no interest in my cerebral info-dense “counter-rotate your upper body to move your weight over the new outside ski as you press your big toe and pinky toe and angulate to get on matched edges” instruction, so we just made a few runs each day before hitting the sundeck for some après ski.

ski instructor and Dr. Ruth Westheimer at Squaw Valley USA with "black diamond" ski sign
spoiler: we did not ski the black diamond run in front of us

It was great to see all the maximum-gnar ski dudes genuinely psyched to see her. “Whoa! Dr. Ruth! The ‘good sex’ doctor! Awesome!” She was gracious and interested in everyone who stopped by. Privately she confessed to being lonely and hoped to meet someone (her husband Fred had died in 1996 after 36 years of marriage).

Dr. Ruth Westheimer poses with anonymous recently married couple in ski gear at the Resort at Squaw Creek
Random newly-wedded couple who celebrated on skis rewarded with celebrity photo op

As spoken of on TV

Days later I was immortalized in Dr. Ruth’s appearance on the short-lived daytime talk show The Howie Mandel Show on January 15th 1999 (I was teaching when it aired but ordered a VHS tape of the episode). Howie Mandel asked her about the celebrity ski event and she meticulously said something like “I had a handsome ski instructor. His name was ‘S’. I skied behind him as he wiggled his behind.” This left poor Howie visibly wondering “What the hell? What kind of an unfunny pointless anecdote is this?”; I thus contributed to his show’s cancellation a few months later. The “race”itself might have been televised early some Sunday morning.

The scam of celebrity events

These celebrity events always claim to benefit local charities, but I have my doubts. Even back in 1999, a decade before influencers on Instagram, the celebrities got free cosmetics, wine, and other goodies from the sponsors, which the sponsors claimed as a tax deduction along with the hotel providing the facilities, etc. Dr. Ruth offered me some of these goodies. I declined; I said the only gift I wanted was a signed copy of her Sex for Dummies book, an extension of the successful “for Dummies” series of books that started with computer guides. Sadly, I never received one.

cover of Sex for Dummies book
Originally for computers….

As I recall the big celebrity in the “race” was Ian Ziering of Beverly Hills 90210 (yeah, me neither). I found another photo that shows Muhammad Ali was there, at the time the most famous person in the world.

Muhammed Ali surrounded by fans at Squaw Valley USA

tech: Where’s the AI for faded photos?

The faded top image in this post is a scan of a framed enlargement I ordered at the time. Of course when I got the negative enlarged I misplaced it and the original print. Those faded lifeless colors are as good as I could get the scanned enlargement after futzing around with white balance, color histograms, color levels, auto saturation, etc., etc. tools in the GIMP photo editing program for 20 minutes. What is so frustrating is we humans can recognize that a photo has faded; I can even tell without checking whether it’s Kodacolor (reds stay, blues and greens fade and blur, light areas go all-white) or Fujicolor (greens stay vibrant, reds fade). So where’s the tool that lets me tell it “This is a Kodak print of a 25-year old Kodacolor 35mm negative that’s been exposed to bright indoor light for years” and it automatically corrects the color fade?! Or at least, “make the colors in this photo match the less-faded ones in this other photo”? Come on, AI, do your thing!

The otherwise excellent “Enhance” and “Dynamic” buttons in the photo editing software on phones doesn’t work because that software is optimized to correct digital images taken by the phone’s camera hardware, not 30-year-old photochemical artifacts.

Posted in AI, skiing | 1 Comment

art: Charles Schulz and Christo

photo of Christo's wrapped Snoopy doghouse at Charles M. Shulz museum

Charles Schulz is very much conventional decent middle-America (with a side of deep bitter existential distress underlying his Peanuts cartoons). Yet, as I learned on a return visit to his museum, it turns out “Sparky” was a big supporter of Christo and Jean-Claude’s toweringly great “Running Fence”, the 1976 conceptual land artwork running across Sonoma and Marin counties and into the sea. Schulz made a delightful Peanuts cartoon about Christo’s work that ended with a wrapped Snoopy doghouse; Christo repaid the friendship by actually constructing it 😍! Read Schulz’s widow’s lovely blog post.

Peanuts comic strip featuring Snoopy, the artist Christo, and Snoopy's doghouse
Peanuts © 1978 Peanuts Worldwide LLC

Running Fence gone but indelible

photo of Christo and Jean-Claude's artwork "Running Fence" weaving through the landscape
there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst

I never saw “Running Fence” in situ, but I was knocked out by the documentary by the Maysles about the process Christo and Jeanne-Claud went through to get it built and the incomparable results. I need to get the Maysles’ “5 Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude”. Something so big, so evocative, so influential that’s gone forever is melancholic. It’s reminiscent of Rachel Whiteread’s “House”, another masterpice that vanished in weeks, leaving only pictures and a great documentary. So different from Richard Serra’s works that should last for centuries.

Peanuts forever

The museum was gratifyingly well-attended when I returned. Peanuts’ cultural impact will surely fade, but the evergreen Peanuts animated specials and Vince Guaraldi’s excellent music will keep it alive.

Earlier I wrote about a previous trip to the Charles M. Schulz museum, and the greatest comic strip ever.

Posted in art | Leave a comment

software: sneaky “gnihctamsim” phishing

I got an e-mail asking for my bank details.

From: Michael Doyle <ventas@farbiq.com.ar>
To: undisclosed recipients:;
Reply to: logistica.industrialparts@gmail.com
Subject: Re: URGENT PROFORMA INVOICE

Hello Dear, Greetings

Our company has approved the attached purchase order. Please review the purchase order list, and return to us proforma invoice with your receiving bank account for payment.

I wait for your reply.

Thanks

Michael L. Doyle
President
Direct: +1 978.834.0505 x12
Email: md@ppsystems.com

with an attached file PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST sxlx..zip , a compressed “zip” archive file that suggests it’s a Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet. This is a scam! Bad writing, it’s not specifically addressed to me, the three e-mail addresses don’t match, I’ve never heard of the company, and there’s no reason to compress a real Office.xlsx (or .docx, etc.) file, which is already compressed. If you get something like this, mark it as junk/spam, and if it claims to be from a legit company do a web search for “company name report phishing e-mail” and forward it to the e-mail address any good company should provide.

Excel? XL SX? sxlx?

But for fun let’s investigate what’s going on. First, save the attachment to a temporary folder. The part of the filename before the extension in PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST sxlx..zip implies it contains an Excel spreadsheet (the Excel file extension is .xlsx), but in reality it is meaningless; the zip file could contain any set of files with any names. I’m on Linux, so start a terminal and type some commands to examine the zip file. (There might be Windows or Mac equivalents to these commands; on Windows you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux for maximum geekery.) To start let’s test and list (using -tv options) its contents.

% unzip -tv /tmp/PURCHASE\ QUOTATION\ LIST\ sxlx..zip 
Archive:  /tmp/PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST sxlx..zip
PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST‮s͏x͏l͏x͏..exe:  mismatching "local" filename (PURCHASE QUOTATION LISTтАоs═Пx═Пl═Пx═П..exe),
         continuing with "central" filename version
    testing: PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST‮s͏x͏l͏x͏..exe   OK
At least one warning-error was detected in /tmp/PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST sxlx..zip.

Notice there’s a reversed message from the unzip program here. The name of the one file in the zip archive very likely has some special character codes in it that changes text display into right-to-left mode (for languages such as Hebrew), and they spill over into the display of the message, making it hard to read and importantly, obscuring the order of the letters in the file’s name. If you copy and paste only the word “gnihctamsim” above and paste it somewhere else the letters appear the right way round, because you probably didn’t copy the character code that flips the order of the visible letters; and if you click at the start of the message and drag to the right to select it you’ll see the selection highlight jump around as the selection feedback tries to show you selecting the end of the text and then less and less of the backwards text. (The details of how this blog post appears depend on how your browser handles special characters – download Firefox!) The warning message is mismatching “local” filename :exe..xlxs , warning that the file extension doesn’t match what it appears to be, and I think that triggers the final “At least one warning-error was detected…” message. In Windows, a file with a .exe extension can be an executable file, a binary program of computer instructions that can literally do anything: show a fun game, forward your sensitive documents to a foreign computer, encrypt all your files and demand a ransom, install malware that will forever mine Bitcoins or spy on you, and worse! Here the exe part seems to come before the ending ..xlxs and it’s the “final” dot-whatever that influences how the operating system treats the file. But because the text has gone into right-to-left mode, it looks like blab blah exe blah.xlxs, which almost looks like the file extension for a spreadsheet so maybe people will ignore the warning, assuming it even shows up on Windows built-in zip file handling. (I don’t know what the point of the weird characters TтАоs═Пx═Пl═Пx═П in the file are before/after the right-to-left “TSIL”/LIST.)

Let’s actually use the unzip utility to uncompress the zip file it into a temporary subfolder. This would be risky on Windows, but I’m on Linux and I don’t think I have any Windows emulators or WINE (“Wine Is Not an Emulator”) that can actually run the file, and I’ll be careful not to accidentally run or “double-click” it.

% mkdir /tmp/PURCHASE_QUOTATION_quarantine
% cd /tmp/PURCHASE_QUOTATION_quarantine
% unzip ../PURCHASE\ QUOTATION\ LIST\ sxlx..zip 
Archive:  ../PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST sxlx..zip
PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST‮s͏x͏l͏x͏..exe:  mismatching "local" filename (PURCHASE QUOTATION LISTтАоs═Пx═Пl═Пx═П..exe),
         continuing with "central" filename version
  inflating: PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST‮s͏x͏l͏x͏..exe  

That looks OK, because it looks like it ends in “.xlsx”. But with all the right-to-left and mirror writing crap going on, does it really?

What’s really at the end? What is the end in the middle?

Let’s try to get a listing of the one file we uncompressed:

% ls --size
appears to my eyes as 2396 'PURCHASE QUOTATIONLISTsxlx..exe'
pastes here as 2396 'PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST‮s͏x͏l͏x͏..exe'
% type *.exe[Tab]
expands to % PURCHASE\ QUOTATION\ LIST<202e>s<034f>x<034f>l<034f>x<034f>..exe

Here’s where it gets extra weird. The one file in the archive uncompressed into a 2,396 kilobyte (2 Megabytes or so) file. What I see in the terminal is ‘PURCHASE QUOTATION LISTsxlx..exe, which is BAD, it’s an executable. But when I copy-pasted it into the paragraph above, it appears backwards with .xlxs on the end. It’s only when I expand the filename on the command line by pressing [Tab] or when I view the directory contents in my editor (vim) that I see the escape codes messing this up. And I’m now in a mess of what’s actually in the file name versus the terminal escape codes that tell the terminal to display things in bold and go into reverse mode and such. I wasted time trying to find a set of arguments to utilities hexdump, od, and strings that would print the regular letters and reveal the Unicode code points (or terminal escape characters?), e.g.

% ls *.exe | strings --unicode=x 
PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST<0xe280ae>s<0xcd8f>x<0xcd8f>l<0xcd8f>x<0xcd8f>..exe

I even asked ChatGPT to write a program to get the filename in the directory and print it out using Unicode escapes for the code points. After some coaxing it politely and helpfully wrote a 30-line Python program that when run prints:

% python3 ~/bin/dirlist_codepoints.py 
Original: PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST‮s͏x͏l͏x͏..exe
Code Points: PURCHASE QUOTATION\u0020LIST\u00e2\u0080\u00aes\u00cd\u008fx\u00cd\u008fl\u00cd\u008fx\u00cd\u008f..exe

How come none of these agree? Is it really that complicated? (Yes, it is.)

Careful with that tfeL-ot-thgiR

What is the 202e when the file name first starts to display weird? Most sequences of text these days use Unicode to represent regular “typewriter” characters, accented characters, symbols, hieroglyphs, Asian logographs, emoji, and the thousands of other “characters” we now put in text. A DuckDuckGo web search for “unicode \202e” reveals

U+202E RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE – Unicode Explorer
The Right-To-Left Override character can be used to force a right-to-left direction withing a text. This is often abused by hackers to disguise file extensions: when using it in the file name my-text.’U+202E’cod.exe, the file name is actually displayed as my-text.exe.doc – so it seems to be a .doc file while in reality it is an .exe file. There’s even an xkcd comic for this character!

So that’s the explanation for the start of the problem and why part of the filename and text nearby appear reversed. I’ll leave the decoding of the rest of the weird characters to actual security and Unicode professionals.

Danger nerd humor alert

What’s extreme nerd humor is many of the search results are from useless web sites that try to appear high in search results with computer-generated web pages for every possible Unicode character, like “Unicode Character 💌 (U+1F48C) is ‘LOVE LETTER’…” (together with a bunch of ads and privacy-sucking JavaScript tracking). But when the page “shows” the Right-to-Left Override “character,” the snippet in search results (and the web site’s page, but don’t go there) appears in reverse.

screenshot showing reversed text in search results for RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE Unicode code point
Naively print out a direction change “character” and you’re gonna have a bad time

🤖 ha. ha. ha. 😆

What is the executable?

Let’s not run it!, even under Linux.Instead use the file utility to see what kind of file it is.

% file PURCHASE\ QUOTATION\ LIST<202e>s<034f>x<034f>l<034f>x<034f>..exe
PURCHASE QUOTATION LIST‮s͏x͏l͏x͏..exe: PE32+ executable (GUI) x86-64 Mono/.Net assembly, for MS Windows, 2 sections

Any utility that displays the file’s name without extreme care is going to have reversed output, and file does too. The right-to-left text is telling us it’s an assembly, for MS Windows, 2 sections sxlx..exe: PE32+ executable (GUI) x86-64 Mono/.Net. You can write a 2 MB standalone program that does a hell of a lot of bad stuff, but who knows what the executable section would do. I wonder if there’s actually a spreadsheet in there as well as computer code. For fun let’s see what strings of characters are in it.

% strings *.exe | less
!This program cannot be run in DOS mode.
.text
...
oT8=
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
  <assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0" name="MyApplication.app"/>
  <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2">
    <security>
      <requestedPrivileges xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
        <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"/>
      </requestedPrivileges>
    </security>
  </trustInfo>
</assembly>
xkcva2wfKaiDsaDdws,
...
%xkcva2wfKaiDsaDdwsPAPADDINGXXPAPADDINGXXPAPADDINGXX...PADDINGXX repeated thousands of times sover and over and over...PADDINGXXPAPADDIN
(END)

So there is some kind of program in there announcing that it wants to run with my privileges, which when I boot into Windows is an administrator with lots of rights.

scary stuff!

Posted in search, software | Leave a comment