 While procrastinating on an extremely awful task at work, I saw this boingboing post about a company called "steorn" in Ireland saying it has invented a perpetual motion machine.
What I find stunning about this isn't that it's clearly a fradulent claim, even though it is. What's stunning is how anyone would engage these claims at face value, when a 3 second look at their web site would tell you that the entire thing is a scam to get your email address. (I presume the ultimate motive is to launch a video game or something.)
Here are some clues:
- Why has the website only existed since 2004, and why does it look like a Web 2.0 portfolio showpiece?
- Why is the front page of the site and all of its supporting content geared around the product controversy, instead of the product?
- Why would a legitimate engineering company want your email address? Or take a poll of the public? Or have a forum filled with fake science debate? Or have a forum at all?
- Where are the company's other products?
- Given that the website was recently and professionally designed with state-of-art web standards that wouldn't be followed by some technology company's IT intern, where is the web designers' "Designed By" mark?
- Why is steorn.com a redirect, instead of the main site content, unless it's going to become something else after some kind of press hit?
(I'm not going to provide a link to their website, because I'm not interested in helping the pagerank of spammer/scammer/publicity stunt wankers.)
|