The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win

One of my friends (a real one, not a FB one) saw an article on Reason.com and suggested that I read it. In today's political climate, which is at turns divisive, extremist, absolute and contrarian, the author of this article channels Jonathan Swift to warn us about something really important. The article is called The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win . I'm not going to post the text of the entire article here, because I'm hoping that after November 2, nobody will need to read it again. But it's really important, right now.

VirtualPilot3D: Not from Australia anymore

When I first started sniffing along the trail of ProFlightSimulator, it appeared to be "owned" by somebody in Australia, at a bogus address along the Sydney waterfront. My original "whois" on the URL showed it registered to a known Internet scammer in New Jersey. Now it points to an anonymous hosting service in Los Angeles, California

This latest version, VirtualPilot3D Tee Em, hides its tracks very well. A "whois" query points to a P.O. box in Denver, Colorado. The disclaimer claims that VirtualPilot3D is "governed by the laws of Sweden".

Never, ever, buy from anybody online if you don't know who they are, and where they are, in the Real World. (Especially if they claim to have FAA Certification.)

VirtualPilot3D is NOT "FAA Certified"

I may be going out on a limb here, but I really doubt it.

In my previous posting, I noted that VirtualPilot3D Tee Em claims to be
FAA Certified And Used As A LIVE Training Platform For Actual Pilots.
 It takes a lot of guts, or a startling absence of brains, to make a claim like that if it isn't true.

I searched online for VirtualPilot3D's FAA certification. Couldn't find it.

I searched online for "faa certified flight simulator". I found a lot of products out there, matching this description. One costed US $5995; another costed US$7500. Compare those prices with the US$289.95 price of VirtualPilot3D, and you start wondering what the catch is.

The catch is simple: it's not FAA Certified. They're lying.

How can I be so sure? It's simple. I went to the FAA's website and looked at National Simulator Program's list of certified Flight Training Simulation Devices. If you want to duplicate my research, you can start at http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/nsp/ .

If you want to see what a real FAA certified flight simulator looks like, have a look at this system from Elite. Note that I'm not endorsing Elite here; they just turned up on my Google search.

Look at the list of aircraft that the Elite system supports. Then look at the list of aircraft that VirtualPilot3D supports. I don't know why the FAA would certify any simulator that included "Santa's Sleigh" or a "Willys Jeep" in its list of supported aircraft.

For the sake of curiosity, scroll down to the bottom of the Elite page, and look at the heading "Compatible Software". Microsoft FS and X-Plane are both listed there, but as far as I've been able to determine, neither MS FS nor X-Plane claim to be FAA certified. They're compatible with Elite simulators, that's all.


(Yes, VirtualPlane3D really is $289.95. That's the full retail price for the VIP Premium Package. When you place an order, they'll start at $67.00 and work their way up.)

VirtualPilot3D: Same Scam as Before

Less than two months after they re-re-re-re-released their scam under the name "Real Airplane Simulator", the ProFlightSimulator people are back with "VirtualPilot3D™". I thought the was a particularly nice touch. It pretends to add credibility to the product. I mean, nobody would trademark a scam, right? That's right. They didn't trademark it. They just added the ™ to the name.

The VirtualPilot3D website looks just like all the other websites: bogus testimonials from people who don't really exist, screenshots swiped from FlightGear and other simulators; Ron-Popeil-worthy prose; a deeply discounted price (for free software published by somebody else and essentially stolen by these guys); a promise of free lifetime upgrades (which the free software also provides); and a 100% satisfaction guarantee which, according to the poor suckers who have tried to exercise it, isn't worth the paper it's (not) printed on. And just like all those other websites, it's a scam.

I've written about this scam several times on Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters. It's a pernicious thing that I know I won't be able to eradicate, but if I can save at least one person from being fooled and ripped off by these crooks, then it's worth the effort.

There's a flood of ads for VirtualPilot3D on Facebook. I encourage you to click on the "X" or "Hide this Ad" for each ad, and tell FB that it's "Misleading". FB hasn't figured out yet that it's a scam, but if they get enough feedback from their users, they might catch a clue.

In the meantime, if you click through on one of those ads, and end up buying VirtualPilot3D Tee Em, then good luck to you. I warned you.

UPDATE: I just reread the VirtualPilot3D webpage and noticed they're trumpeting the product as "FAA Certified." I'll be posting something else about that.

Flight Simulator Plus: Don't Waste Your Money

Don't fall for the scam that is Flight Simulator Plus.

Flight Simulator Plus is just ProFlightSimulator in a new dress - identical to the old dress, except that the tags have been cut out of the collar and new tags sewn in.

And it's still a SCAM.

The scammers are learning, though: the webpage http://www.flightsimulatorplus.org isn't three miles long like its predecessors, full of breathless Ron-Popeil-worthy prose. It's much shorter, and includes a few photos and videos.

(Ah, but the original three-mile-long page is still there, along with sock puppet "Huge Miller." ("Huge"? What kind of name is that?) You can see it by clicking on the "Discount" link on the FSP main page. It's fun reading. Just don't take any of it seriously.)

I haven't watched the videos. But the photos? Six of them say they're copyrighted by FSP:
- One is a photo of a real Boeing 747, taking off into a real sunset.
- One is a photo of a real sunset under the wing of a real airliner, taken from about row 34, back in the cheap seats.
- One is a photo of three real F-18s, taken from the deck of a real aircraft carrier.
- One is either a screen shot of a WWII fighter simulation game, not FSP, or the picture from the box the WWII fighter sim game came in.
- Two are views of runways, one on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They're clearly taken from Google Maps, Google Earth, or Mapquest, and not from any flight simulator.

While the photo taken from the cheap seats could be a legitimate photo owned by the purveyors of FSP, I think that FSP ripped off all six photos from somewhere else, and their copyright notice is bogus.

The other photos are all screenshots from FlightGear, X Plane, or MS Flight Simulator X, and have been previously posted on the Web. If you do an image search for "FlightGear," you will find every one of them - and more. The FSP guys just ripped them off.

The program itself is a rip-off.  FSP is a blatant copy of the free (and really, really good) flight simulator, FlightGear. Independent research has shown that they took all the FlightGear source code, and a lot of the copyrighted add-ons, edited them to try to hide the original authorship, repackaged the lot, and are selling it as their own work.

And they will rip you off, too. People who have bought it and then tried to return it under the warranty policy, have told their tales of woe here on Zyzmog Galactic HQ, the FlightGear forums, and elsewhere.

("They" remain carefully hidden, though. This version of the scam has no identifying information on the website at all. If that doesn't raise a red flag for you, the buyer, then you deserve to get scammed. NEVER buy anything online from a seller who isn't willing to reveal his or her true identity and contact information.)

Don't reward the scammers. Read everything that Zyzmog Galactic HQ has to say about this scam. Then go over to the FlightGear website, and download and enjoy The Real Thing. Or, if you can't stand to get something this good for free, and you're itching to spend real money, then buy XPlane or Microsoft Flight Simulator X instead. Both are very good, commercial flight simulators, and worth every penny. If you insist on buying FSP, then we'll be reading your regrets, here or on the FlightGear forums, in a little while.

But Flight Simulator Plus is a scam. Get it?

Postscript: You will find a lot of pages on the Web, insisting that FSP is not a scam. Go ahead and read a few of them. You will discover that they're all written by sock puppets, and most of them are poorly written. You will also find a lot of bogus "reviews" of FSP. They're all written by the same person (or persons), and posted under different names and using different URLs. For a scammer, URLs are cheap and disposable.

Postscript 2: I'm tickled that this article and its sequel are getting so many hits. I'm rather amused that so many of the hits come from Australia and New Zealand, whence the scam originates.

ProFlightSimulator revisited: still a scam

It's been over six months since I exposed ProFlightSimulator as a scam. Today, in a brief moment of boredom, I did a Google search for "ProFlightSimulator." Wow.

First of all, the entity behind PFS has snapped up the .org and .net domain names so that nobody else could use them, and has used them to push the product.

Second, they have created domain names like "proflightsimulatorreviews" and "proflightsimulatorreviewz", where they have posted bogus reviews from bogus users, in an effort to spoof the search engines' rating systems and boost their ratings.

Ah, but third, Web Of Trust has branded the main PFS site, and several of their shill sites, with their lowest rating: a red circle. PFS (and the entity behind it) is now officially a pariah.

Web Of Trust is a browser add-on which rates every web page you visit and every search engine entry on four characteristics: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety. If WOT gives a web site low marks or a red alert, that means it's a dangerous website, and you'd best stay away..

Granted, not everybody in the world uses (or even knows about) WOT. Most non-WOT users will blindly click on the links and get themselves in trouble. But WOT's ratings are based on user input, and therefore they represent a good cross-section of Web users; therefore, it's reasonable to conclude that most of the Web by now realizes that ProFlightSimulator and all of its bogus reviews are nothing but a load of kangaroo manure.

ProFlightSimulator: Get Scammed in Multiple Languages!

Right here on Blogspot, ProFlightSimulator has established an international presence. I just found a PFS webpage written entirely in Portugese. It's rich with screenshots and tutorial videos. I don't know whether the materials presented here are rip-offs of FlightGear, although I have my strong suspicions.

My two favorite images on the page are under the heading "Textura fotorealistica Lufthansa 747 PMDG FS9/FSX" (that's "Photorealistic texture ..." for you anglophones), showing off a downloadable skin for the 747 model. If you look closely at the picture, you'll see that it's a very realistic depiction of a 747 in Lufthansa livery. In fact, the backgrounds are so realistic that -- WAIT A MINUTE, THOSE ARE REAL PHOTOGRAPHS!

These people are liars. They're using real photographs to misrepresent their "product." FlightGear is good, but even FlightGear doesn't have a ground-level view of an airport terminal building that looks as realistic as the one in these photos. And the grime on the aircraft body? And the reflection highlight on the top of the APU's nacelle? No way. It's a photo of a real airplane.

Of course, PFS and their shills never did have a reputation for "truth in advertising."

See it for yourself: http://proflightsimulator.blogspot.com/ Remember, though, it's just a scam. Don't be tempted to buy it. Instead, go to http://www.flightgear.org/ for the real thing. For free.

ProFlightSimulator: Where the reviews come from

ProFlightSimulator has an "affiliates" page for those who are interested in selling PFS. Here's an interesting excerpt from that page:

5. Review Articles:

Product reviews are one of the most powerful ways to "warm up" your visitors before getting them into buying mood. Most reviews you see online are BLATANTLY one-side, showing only the good points.

If you want to MAXIMIZE your sales, you need to give a real, balanced review - showing BOTH PROs and CONs. This way your review will come across as genuine and honest.

Put yourself in the shoes of a buyer. When you read a review, you want the honest truth - so do the same for your visitors and subscribers. Use this pre-written review or modify it to suit your needs:

Click Here to view this sample pre-written review

(I don't know how long those links will be valid. Probably not very long, now that I've posted them here.)

So Michael and Eriz have been busy copy-and-pasting these reviews all over the Web. They've never really played the game, and they don't care about the game. They're in it to make money. What they're doing may or may not be illegal, but it's still a scam.

ProFlightSimulator: an old scam is new again

Well, the flight simulator fans at http://www.flightsim.com/ weren't fooled by ProFlightSimulator. They report under their "News" headline that it's just a reincarnation of an earlier scam, called "Flight Pro Sim."

The forums at FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org/forums/) while not exactly abuzz about PFS, are certainly aware of it, and are consoling PFS customers who wasted good money buying an old and obsolete version of FG.

Finally, the Flight Pro Sim website is still alive, and it looks remarkably similar to the PFS website. The two main differences are:

(1) The ersatz proprietor of Flight Pro Sim is "Charlie Taylor," while the sock puppet of ProFlightSimulator is "Dan Freeman."

(2) Flight Pro Sim is selling for $47, while PFS is selling for $49.98 - no wait, it's down to $49.

(3) They may or may not be two different (obsolete) versions of FlightGear.

Many of the online reviews are written by "Michael Ortiz." I think that Charlie, Dan and Michael are all the same guy. One review was written by "Eriz Cremonti", which is almost an anagram of "Michael Ortiz."

ProFlightSimulator: Bogus testimonials!

If you act now, you can see this picture on the ProFlightSimulator webpage! In two different places! As two different people!

The PFS main webpage includes a number of testimonials. One could assume that these testimonials are from beta testers, since a project this big would need lots and lots of beta testers. So this guy shows up twice: once as "Ed Dale - Compton, CA" and once as "Wayne Mayer - Durham, UK." Let's hear what they have to say!

First, Ed:

Then, Wayne:

I was once part of a startup that did some underhanded stuff like using bogus testimonials to promote their product. Bogus testimonials are easy to spot. Using photos of long-lost twin brothers like this makes it even easier.

p.s. I hope the PFS creators aren't too upset at me for posting this. Look at all the free advertising they're getting!
p.p.s. Remember, if you like PFS, you'll love FlightGear. Same planes, same scenery, same gameplay, for $49.98 less than PFS. You can even get the same 4 DVDs, if you want.

ProFlightSimulator: something just doesn't smell right

I saw an ad on the side of my FB page today for a new flight simulator game called ProFlightSimulator. I clicked on the link and read about it, a new product just released (today!) by what looks like a one-man company in Australia.

At first, I thought "more power to him." I still like to believe that indie game developers can make it big in a world dominated by EA, Vivendi, and their ilk.

However, there's just something about PFS that makes me more than a little suspicious.

When you click on the link in FB, it takes you to (how's this for free advertising? You're welcome, Dan.) http://www.proflightsimulator.com/index2.html, an incredibly long-winded advertisement for PFS: page after endless page of screenshots and hype about it. Lots of hype. It's like watching one of those Veg-o-matic infomercials on TV. It has all the sales tricks, like "Used by the pros!" and "But wait! There's more!" and "Now how much would you pay?" and "... all for the low, low price of ..." and "But you have to ACT NOW, or you'll forfeit this opportunity!"

Then, when you get to the bottom, you find out that you're getting $530 worth of material, including a full-sized book, for $49.99. Do you know what they say about something that sounds too good to be true?

Yeah. So then you start wondering about system performance and hardware/software requirements. The FAQ on the PFS webpages lists some very modest system requirements, but for performance like what is advertised, that doesn't seem like enough. The FAQ doesn't say anything about performance. I've developed computer games, and I've played a lot of different flight sims, first-person shooters, role-playing adventures and other game genres that really push the hardware, and I know what it takes to make something like this look good - and play well.

The Jane's flight simulators, for one example, are visually exquisite, and masterpieces of execution, as long as you install them on the recommended minimum hardware and not the acceptable minimum hardware. On the acceptable minimum hardware, they are slow and choppy and tearfully frustrating. This is something you really, really want to know before you buy - even with a 60-day warranty.

I never buy anything anymore without looking at the online reviews first. I pull up my favorite search engine and search for "proflightsimulator review." Surprise, surprise: I find a lot of them out there, and they're all dated November 15, and they're all written (if they have a byline) by the same person. This is a variant of the "blogging for dollars" practice I wrote about in June 2009.

None of the reviews are real, objective reviews. They're just shills. They all have the same, Billy Mays-ish breathless tone of someone reading directly from the marketing literature. They pretend to be objective by listing a couple of negative points of the software, but even these negatives are spun: when the review says "There is quite a lot of data to be downloaded. The main game itself is already 300 megabytes," and suggests that you order the 4 DVDs, the average user thinks, "Wow! I get over 300 MB of stuff! And enough extra stuff to fit on 4 DVDs! What a deal!"

There is an alternative to PFS and all other commercial flight sims: it's a very capable, absolutely free and public-domain, downloadable package called FlightGear. FlightGear is a lot of fun, and a simulator that I've played with, on and off, for years. If you start reading up on FG, either on its own webpage or on Wikipedia, you'll begin to notice a lot of similarities between FG and PFS.

Uh-oh.

A lot of similarities. The list of available aircraft for PFS is a subset of those available on the FG website. Both lists include such off-the-wall flying objects as Santa's sleigh and a Willys Jeep. I don't think that's a coincidence.

And then you see this picture in the Wikipedia article on FG:


This same picture appeared in the advertising for PFS.

Uh-oh times two.

Then you go back and click the "Screenshots" link on the PFS webpage, and a lot of those screenshots appear to have been ripped directly from the FlightGear pages over the years. Anybody who's played FG for more than a day will recognize the yellow helicopter with the medical symbol on the side.

Uh-oh times three.

No wonder PFS is so generous with their licensing. Their webpage says that you can buy one copy and install it on as many computers as you like. And that you get "100% free updates/upgrades for life." That's because you can install FlightGear on as many computers as you like, and FlightGear gives you 100% free updates/upgrades for life. These guys are just selling FlightGear.

Like I said at the beginning, I'm all for indie developers going up against the big boys and winning - Marble Blast, for one notable example. (You can buy Marble Blast here, or you can download it for your iPod/iPhone/iPad from the App Store.) But I'm not too keen on entrepreneurs taking free and open source software, wrapping it up in a package and selling it as their own work.

Nice try. You almost got me.

Blogging for Dollars

It's recently become common knowledge (which means that before now, it was uncommon knowledge, also known as "duh, obvious to anyone with more brains than a turnip") that an increasing number of bloggers are shills. That is, they get paid to write blog entries promoting products or services that someone else is trying to sell.

(Go look it up: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/shill)

Personally, I see nothing wrong with that. However, I will never do that at Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters.

I would love to get paid to do product reviews for computer hardware and software, backpacking equipment, or books. When I get to that point, I'll set up another blog, and point to it from Zyzmog Galactic HQ, but this site will not change. I like this site just the way it is: independent, honest, unsolicited, and not for sale.

And eclectic.

I guess my readers like it, too. According to MapLoco, my readership is constantly increasing, and I have regular readers from all over the world. That's gratifying. I'm glad that you find my words worth reading. If you like what you read, please pass this site's URL on to your friends.

Okay, yes, I do have Google Adsense ads on my site. These ads are part of an experiment I'm trying. As far as I know, the ads contain nothing objectionable and are based solely on the content of my blog postings. I'm interested in seeing what they come up with. Please, feel free to click on the ads if they interest you.

Some of the matches Adsense comes up with are pretty funny. One time I posted about "clogging" and Adsense put up an ad for drain cleaner. Another time I wrote about the recent downfall of Detroit and the car companies, and how it's their own fault, and Adsense put up an ad for the Ford F-250 pickup truck.