Image on Mr. Bass's business card found

Quote from IH Fanboy

Not going to share Jed? I think the forum should be informed of how you came across this link, which causes aggressive malware like activity. And even more so, why you posted it anyway?

I saw the same link, and followed it, and noticed nothing untoward, before Jed posted here. Looks like someone else passed this on to Jed.

Given this context, it is extremely unlikely that Jed was informed by the source of the malware, which probably was not specific about that image, if there is malware (there are false reports of such, caused participarly by viruses or installed malware browser extensions, etc.) "This forum" is not defined by IHFB.

A Google search for "16423-plants-in-japan-35-pics.html" turned up a link to E-Catworld.com. ECW is not structured to allow easily finding individual posts buried in long discussions. I did go down through many pages of "more comment," and did not find it. The Google cache of the hit was dated Aug 17, 2016 22:46:48 GMT. Jed posted here August 16th. However, That ECW discussion started August 6.

Anyone who took the image as presented in Rossi v. Darden and used Google image search would have found that image on acidcow. There is no mystery here.

The business card was a cheesy home-made card, obviously. It actually demonstrates almost nothing, because JM Products is acknowledged as a dummy company, i.e., even if it is real, even if there really was a Bass, as an engineer for JMP, this would not be the real employer, probably, but a "temporary assignment," and the card might be made for that. Why bother with a substantial printing?

Quote from IH Fanboy

Abd,

You are wonderful at downplaying. I'll give it to you.

Someone posted an image on acidcow. Clicking through to that image causes aggressive malware like activity. Someone provided that link to Jed. I follow this story as close as anyone, and never had seen such a link before elsewhere, including on ECW. Jed was given multiple opportunities to clarify the situation here on this thread, and he has chosen to remain silent. Dewey happened to drop by this same thread, after we hadn't heard from him in quite some time. I don't know if Dewey is Jed's friend. Nobody dare suppose that is the case. Probably just a coincidence.

IHFB is denying my report of having seen it before. I;d call that rude. This would not be mere inattention. When Jed put up his comment here, I already knew about it, I thought "that's old news!". I will be checking my mail system to see if it was an email, though I doubt it

[below, I report finding it as an email. From newvortex.

Researching this, I loaded the acidcow page. Then the doorbell rang and I had an appointment, so that acidcow page stayed loaded for maybe an hour. When I came back to the computer, I had three pop-ups from quickprivacycheck.com

This is definitely adware/malware. I had looked at the image before and had not seen this, so whatever it is, is not necessarily instant. Those passing on the link, then, may be completely unaware of the problem. However, the set of photos appears to have been uploaded in 2011, and there are many comments on them from 2011, and I doubt that the acidcow software would allow faking that. I thought It unlikely that that specific page is the source, I thought, it would be acidcow itself, either hosting malware deliberately or as hacked.

Possibly because of the delay, Google does not seem to have picked up the adware/malware, because they are continuing to link to the page. I have not yet determined if anything untoward has been installed in my system. Had I clicked on the invited "disable search tracking" link, I'd consider the risk very high.

I continued looking at the page. Other popups appeared. This is not from the individual image. It is from the overall acidcow.com/pics/16423-plants-in-japan-35-pics.html page. (Be aware that copying this into a browser address bar will normally load the page.)

I looked at another acidcow.com page. No pop-ups appeared from it. The pages I looked at had legit ads from major companies. I reloaded the refinery page. No popups this time. Something is not consistent.

I'm suspecting that an ad might have some javascript or the like in it. Now, could someone buy an ad on a page that contains malware? Probably. If it was done skillfully, might not be detected readily. However, how likely is it? And, in this case, how likely is it that whoever showed Jed the page knew about the malware? Someone who has more time could investigate this more deeply. It's basically irrelevant, what was important here was to warn people about the malware and for an admin to kill the link, which was done (i.e., to see the page, one now has to actively copy the URL information into a browser address far.)

A targeted ad could be placed that would allow IP information to be provided for whoever looked at the page, under some conditions. The popups were from the malware sites. Those sites would receive my IP and user agent string. From that and other information, they might be able to figure out who I am. The worst thing I have seen done with information like this has been to then spoof that user to get the user banned as a puppet master on, say, Quora. It appears that something like this happened. It worked, but then the user was unbanned; if the user had not been connected and generally trustworthy, they might have stayed banned.

So someone who cared enough could obtain data this way that might identify the person. However, good luck as to damaging me this way, since I'm already a known person. A small nuisance could be created, that's all. If I can be induced to click on a link, though, far more damage is possible. Far, far more. On the other hand, if they are not shooting at you, maybe you are not doing anything worth wasting bullets on. I'm not bulletproof.

I just got another call, and again had the refinery photo page loaded. No popups for maybe an hour. Then when I clicked on the right slider to look down the images, an immediate pop-up.

There is no problem with the image itself. It appears to be that acidcow.com page.

Planet Rossi appears to be the the Planet of Insanely Stupid Conspiracy Theories.

Here are some more usages of this image.

From 2009: http://www.theatlantic.com/dai…auty-of-factories/205776/
Another usage from 2009, apparently, was at: izismile.com/2009/02/12/futuristic_japanese_plants_10_photos.html and I have broken the link because this site also generates similar pop-ups. The site is very similar to acidcow: lots of soft pornography, lots of clickbait.

I found where the information linking to acidcow came from, at least as to where I would have seen it: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/g…onversations/messages/826 ... August 7. 2016, from Alain Coetmeur. "Someone" found it, according to Alain. All "someone" had to do was to do a Google image search for the image, and one of the major hits would have been acidcow. Jed Rothwell may have seen it on newvortex or someone else picked it up. Jed is irrelevant to this.

And now, I found another mention of this image on E-Catworld:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2016…age-1/#comment-2825206500

Quote

Ged Obvious • 13 days ago
[link still live on ECW] acidcow.com/pics/16423-... looks like a vacation resort for Godzilla!

The timestamp is Sunday, August 7, 2016 9:37 AM.

This is early enough that it might have been the first mention. The newvortex post is timestamped Aug 7 6:05 PM , and I didn't actually receive the email until August 8.

So if this is suspicious, where would the finger of suspicion point? Who told Ged?

Obviously, this is a really devious plot. Suck a pro-Rossi fanatic into putting up the link!

Bwaahaahaahaahaa! Today we take over LENR, tomorrow Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream!

Quote from zeus46

You've got the basics right but you can do far more than collect ip addresses and serve pop-ups from a javascript attack ad

That's all I've got, the basics. Exploits are getting more and more sophisticated, and the public response is often feeble. These are often crimes committed in the commons, and if we seriously organized to stop it, we could. Cybercrime causes enormous damage.

Quote from IH Fanboy

Abd said:
"Planet Rossi appears to be the the Planet of Insanely Stupid Conspiracy Theories."

That's right. Nobody ever hacks anybody these days. These conspiracy theories are all insane and stupid.

I never said that, and, in fact, I even commented t hat someone could "poison" a page by buying advertising on it. What is Incredibly Stupid is believing that Industrial Heat is behind this, given the evidence. Above, I show that the first occurence I could find to the problematic acidcow page was by the Rossi supporter Ged on E-Catnews, but I'm not rushing into a conclusion that Ged did this, and I pointed out how it was possible to access the page and not see the problem. (I have seen no sign that this is some incredibly sophisticated hack).

Quote

Abd said:
"So if this is suspicious, where would the finger of suspicion point? Who told Ged?

Obviously, this is a really devious plot. Suck a pro-Rossi fanatic into putting up the link!"

When sound reasoning fails, resort to ad homs. Most handy tool in the Planet Zero toolkit.

That's a total misunderstanding. Who was attacked? Okay, I called Ged a "fanatic." But the point is that he is a strong Rossi supporter, "fanatic" conveys that. IHFB is here completely denying the facts and making up an ad-hominem attack himself:

The "Planet Zero toolkit." I.e, there is some, I'd guess, Zero-Heat Cult, and it's plotting to confuse the good people with, what, ad-hominem attacks that would be stupid on the face?

Basically, when IHFB thought it was Jed who had brought up this link, he jumped to it being some plot and Jed must reveal who told him. Which Jed will never do, unless it was a public disclosure.

Random internet trolls are not trusted with serious confidential information, so they hate it and attack it. Real people who develop expertise in a field begin to be trusted with information. And, yes, they (we) need to be careful about this. It can indeed be misinformation, but we develop a sense as well of the trustworthiness of informants. I now have quite a bit of information I consider reliable that I can't talk about, but sometimes I am pointed to something I can verify. Or sometimes I have permission to pass it on. When I do so, and if I have received it from an unverifiable source, I disclose that. As an example, with the Bo Hoistad fuel analysis document that revealed that the sample was from Rossi and dated it, I could not claim that the document was authentic, so I did not. However, Bo Hoistad could easily have denied it was from him. Rossi could have denied that he ever gave a sample to Bo. What Rossi actually did was issue a denial that did not actually deny giving the sample. Reading Rossi on this, one could see how Rossi manages plausible deniability, creating impressions he wants to create while having a back door.

So, now that it is known (at least so far) that it was Ged on E-Catworld who first linked, suddenly the big story here is, what? That I called Ged a fanatic Rossi supporter? If Ged protests, I'll take it back. Oh, before I found the Ged link, I noted that Alain had posted the link to newvortex. These were long before Jed llinked to the page. So what happened to the IH conspiracy? What was Jed being badgered?

This was a Stupid Conspiracy Theory. And I showed that, so who votes it down (so far)? IHFB, of course, I'll claim he doesn't "like" seeing the truth, he has no respect for the time it took to find what I found and reported. (Including the risk of infection.)

Planet Rossi is crumbling as people are starting to wake up, to see how they have been hoodwinked.

Those left are pissed and want to blame someone. (The sane among them will recognize that conditions make Rossi look like a fraud and that, as Mats Lewan pointed out in his book, Rossi may be doing this deliberately, so they will understand why many people will think he is a fraud!)

There will continue to be die-hards, it can be predicted. There are still people supporting flat earth theories, and the Keely motor still has supporters a century later. Papp is a more difficult case, though almost certainly fraudulent.

There is a simple standard that separates "fringe claims" from emerging science, and that is independent replication. The lack of independent confirmation does not disprove any claim, but it is a situation that does not allow acceptance, either.

Unless Rossi announces it, there is probably no way that it could ever be proven that he never had any heat. Rossi v. Darden is not going to resolve that issue. (A real inventor with real results can also commit fraud through misrepresenting them.) What Rossi v. Darden is showing is that there is no independent confirmation. Until the lawsuit was filed, it looked like there was (weak) independent confirmation, i.e., responsible investors, careful, supporting Rossi. Rossi demolished that. IH is, now, simply defending themselves, and effectively, as expected.

Quote from IH Fanboy

Alan Smith

Who knows. But you must admit, it is a bit odd that it is attached to the one pic/URL at the center of a high stakes dispute, and then distributed to high-profile LENR individuals.

First to Ged? High-profile? On what Planet?

That picture is hosted in many places on the internet, the acidcow place is not the first put up by far. I found two of those places throwing up pop ups soliciting clicks to fix alleged problems. There may be more. Without much more research, I can't tell. I found reference to acidcow and popup problems, years back, and the owner of acidcow said he was removing those ads. But he may have failed to find all of them.

The picture is not the "center of a dispute." It is incidental. It will attract mild curiosity.

This is the sequence we have: the image was used by James A. Bass, allegedly of JM Products, in 2015 or so, on a business card. IH published the card in the Answer, as an exhibit. They did not link to the image.

However, anyone given to internet search would look for the image source, so someone did. As I pointed out, popups did not pop up routinely, I had looked without seeing them. If I lingered long on the acidcow page, they then tended to show. Someone could easily find the page, see all the great photos of chemical plants (they really are beautiful), and then link to the page. I found that it's possible to link to the image itself, which is not hazardous, apparently, but nobody bothered to do that, I think, at least not at first.

There is actually nothing particularly odd here, just a very minor coincidence, the kind that happen all the time. People given to conspiracy theories find this and other such, and accumulate a great pile of "isn't it odd that?" As if odd = my theory is true.

One way to look at this is that setting up that trap would take money, so who would spend the money and for what gain? Planet Rossi thinks there is a campaign to discredit Rossi, funded by IH, using APCO (another extremely weak conspiracy theory), when I H gains nothing from Rossi being publicly discredited, it has zero effect on them. They are not selling anything to the public.

Dewey Weaver posted because he has been amused by all the attachment and denial, and maybe personally pissed about Rossi wasting so much money and time, but not to make money. Conspiracy theorists usually don't understand ordinary business, and imagine that the world runs in very odd ways.

Yes. There are conspiracies. Just because it's a conspiracy theory does not make it wrong. But what I've been calling "conspiracy theory" is not the kind of work that will expose real and dangerous conspiracies. That actually takes much more than the sweaty belief that one has found a smoking gun when someone tossed a cigarette on the ground. It takes patience and determination and courage, because those real conspiracies will be defended by people who won't hesitate to get rid of whatever and whoever they think is standing in their way.