The Union Statesman

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Richard Koman, on behalf of ZDNet, attempts to argue in an article Thursday that Psystar is probably a phishing scam.  The readers at Gizmodo and others have done the same.  For those of you who haven’t heard, Psystar is a small computer shop that started promoting cloned Macintoshes this week.  They’ve built PC-looking boxes and loaded them with Mac’s operating system, OSX; which basically allows them to sell Macs for half the price of a Mac.  While most people assume they’ll be sued out of existence after a week, there is also a general excitement by Apple’s faithful and heretics alike that someone would dare challenge Apple’s “progressive” (meaning anticompetitive and arcane) business model, which disallows anyone to run their software on hardware that is not purchased from them.  That’s comparable to Ford actively prosecuting people for buying a Ford part to use in their Chevy (which they don’t, haven’t, and couldn’t get away with.)  But such is the religion of Apple–always too little, always too late, but always in style.  Remember, they buddied up to Disney for a reason: both companies believe that marketing is more important than quality.  And users are responding stereotypically, with a solid mix of either “finally I can afford a Mac!” or “why would I, a Macintosh user, want one of these machines, they’re ugly!”  Oh, and let’s not forget the “I’ve never bought a computer that lists specs, so I’ll just assume my iPowerPizazz with iHappiness Pro 4000 has better specs because it’s from Apple!”

The “phishing” agument goes along these lines.

1. The company has changed their address on their website three times since Monday, spanning a whole 200 street-numbers up the road.  Psystar claims that they’ve just never had the kind of volume that required them to list their proper address rather than their friendly address; and second, that they’ve successfully bought some warehouse space next door to fit this new volume.
2. The new street number doesn’t exist on Google maps. Okay, doesn’t bother me.  The place I’m sitting right now “doesn’t exist” on google maps.
3. The company has been addressing the public directly, rather than through lawyers. See, Richard Koman is a lawyer, or an attorney at least, and doesn’t think this is possible.  He’s apparently never had a job in the real world, because most companies, unless they’re super-huge, don’t talk through lawyers.  Most multi-million dollar companies don’t talk through lawyers.  And surely most nerds-in-a-garage companies, who aren’t trying to fight Apple in court but just to make a buck and possibly make a statement through their own simplified concept of the free market system, don’t talk through lawyers.
4. The company was cancelled by their merchant payment processor. This means their credit card company booted them the day after they really went public with their product, purportedly for selling illegal stuff (computers that publicly violate Mac’s license agreement.)
5. Being cancelled, the company is accepting credit card numbers but not processing any orders. Again, in a real corporation that’s probably illegal, or a violation of SarbOx; but standard practice in a nerds-who-hate-real-corporations company.
6. Here’s one Koman missed: some of the photos on their website are gleaned from other websites. Again, either a sign they’ve never built a computer, or a sign they can’t drop five grand on a photographer.  Which seems more likely to you?
   
7. The company owns multiple domains for multiple businesses. I own close to 20 domains personally each with its own business model.  While this is not normal for normal people, it’s perfectly normal for IT entrepreneurs.
8. Here’s one that really lost Koman’s credibility for me: one of these sites requires that you download an .exe file to talk to customer service. Koman makes all kinds of accusations that this is a scam while admitting that he never downloaded the files.  First off, that shows Koman’s not really very techie, since downloading a exe file without running it cannot hurt you.  I downloaded both files offered on floridatek.com and ran them both through a scanner.  Both came up clean, and both came up as plugins of a customer service company which is not registered to Psystar.  Again, maybe it’s an elaborate scam.  Truly, most supercorporations run their customer support solely on javascript and flash apps; but small companies are very prone to use 3rd party apps with 3rd party plugins.

Okay, stack all those up collectively and one could reasonably make an argument that the computer company never existed and was always a phishing scam.  I just think, in a raw law of parsimony / occam’s razor sense, that there’s a much easier solution: that these guys are just normal small business entrepreneurs.  If you already gave them your credit card numbers, sure, keep your guards up.  But I’d be alot more afraid that the jihadists of Apple will come after you than that Psystar will sell your info to Aruba (or that they are Aruba.)  I’m sure in the next week this whole thing will either come out as one big scam or be solved by VC money; I just believe the latter poses much greater odds.

Popularity: 29% [?]