Many scammers now use a faked Elon Musk picture to sell junk. Here he is selling trashy heaters made in China.
Posted on 08/11/2025 1:35:57 PM PDT by Twotone
At the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, the exhibits chart how technology got to where it is today. And there could be no better guide to this history than Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.
In 1976, Wozniak built the Apple 1, and from that he and Steve Jobs built a company. "Incredible times," said Wozniak. "Just came on down wanting to build a neat product."
Wozniak was the inventor, Jobs was the master salesman; and when Wozniak created the Apple II, Jobs had something new to sell: the first personal computer to display color. "That was the machine that really made personal computers go, because it was so fun," Wozniak said. "So many breakthroughs in there that are just so far out-of-the-box."
I asked, "You helped start the computer revolution that brought us where we are today – good or bad?"
"Well, it was good," Wozniak replied, "until the internet came and it offered new business models, you know, ways to have power over other people and control a lot of customers. That's when some of the bad started happening."
And some of that "bad" has happened to Steve Wozniak, when a scam on YouTube was using his image to steal bitcoin.
Wozniak's wife, Janet, learned of it from one of the victims. "I got an email on our web server, and it said, 'When are you gonna send me my money?' And I wrote back and I said, 'What are you talking about?'"
The scammers had taken video of Wozniak talking about bitcoin. "And then, they put a nice frame around it with a Bitcoin address, [saying] that if you sent him any amount of bitcoin, he would send you double that back," said Janet. "Of course it's fraud."
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
The incredible thing is that Wozniak designed and built the entire Apple II himself, including firmware, and invented a new way of displaying color on monitors in the process.
The Apple III was a disaster because it was designed and built by accountants and marketers.
Many scammers now use a faked Elon Musk picture to sell junk. Here he is selling trashy heaters made in China.
“Well, it was good,” Wozniak replied, “until the internet came and it offered new business models, you know, ways to have power over other people and control a lot of customers. That’s when some of the bad started happening.”
Yep, Commercialism took over and completely ruined it...
There really is no excuse for letting fake ads be up on any platform. What’s so annoying is that any complaint against a conservative for saying basically rational stuff was acted on immediately, but the criminal fraud stuff stays up with no action taken.
And it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get to a real human at Google.
This lawsuit should result in YouTube & the rest making all of these people whole again.
Programmers apparently never found a way to make money off of stopping cybercrime, so they did nothing.
Well, they get direct revenue from the ads, but only views from the user-supplied content. You can always get more content, but cash is valuable!
Wozniak also invented the variable speed floppy disk drive in a hotel in Atlantic City in one day. Genius
Yeah, that's garbage.
There is however, a device out there that mines bitcoin and acts as a space heater. It still uses a lot of electricity, but at least it comes up with the occasional bitcoin. Or bits of a bitcoin, I should say.
And warms the room.
Might pay its own way. I think they're still around a thousand bucks.
But it wasn’t very useful when all we had was Webcrawler and Gopher.
GEMINI
Reaching a live person at Google can be difficult as they primarily use online support for most products. For general issues, visit the Google Help Center for the specific product you need help with and follow the troubleshooting steps or use the “Contact Us” options if available. Google One members have 24/7 access to live chat and phone support. Some specific products like Google Workspace and Google Fi also have dedicated support channels with phone numbers.
But they are happy to respond to complaints against conservatives.
If you’ve been notified that there is a scam being propagated on your platform, you have a responsibility to act.
“But it wasn’t very useful when all we had was Webcrawler and Gopher.”
Well that is debatable... It all depended on how much effort folks put into loading data on their site. Some folks had them chocked full of files like car manuals, instructions, articles, literary works, Etc. Along with the BBS news boards it was full of stuff and only lacked the fancy graphics.
It was cool because everything was lightweight and minimal and mostly text with no flare. I am all in for that again. I think many of us would be in for a no nonsense minimal internet with mostly text sites and data. In fact.... I have been playing with some protocols that are retro like that with some modern features that handle inline images and Audio-video players.
Couple of them are pretty cool. One is an upgrade of and based on Gopher. It is called Geminispace. It is ultrasecure, decentralized, and Peer to Peer just like Gopher. It is a whole underground internet away from the normal net. None of the centralized top level controls are present. You can build a site and publish it without needing domain names and such. and you can use address URLs based on “custom protocol identifier/@username”.
https://gemini.flounder.online/docs/
You can make anything you want. BBS, image site, video site, Blog, Etc. And they have search engines within the network, email servers, site directories, Etc. It really is pretty cool stuff and the software is completely free to use as you like. You can literally use it to build your own whole custom internet network if you like. It uses Peer to Peer desktop clients and so no browser is even needed.
Check it out... Here is a “portal” that will forward you from the HTTP/HTTPS/WWW top level domain we are in to the Geminispace internet so you can see what the website pages look like. It is seriously retro and I love it, simple like it was back in the day:
https://www.obsessivefacts.com/gemini-proxy
Just “clear the URL address bar” and then copy and paste any one of these Gemini links in for some examples. And some of the links in the directories will forward to more sites also. If the site doesn’t load it is because it is now gone or because you do not have a client and certificate when using this portal site. Everything in Geminispace uses TLS certificates for secure connections.
gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/
gemini://skyjake.fi/~Cosmos/
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/feeds.txt
gemini://cdg.thegonz.net/
Another alternet Peer to Peer for private networks is “Retroshare”:
And another is “Zeronet”:
And there are a dozen other protocols that can create a whole alternative network pretty easy and free.
Let me put it this way, is the FR any less useful because it is simple plain text without all the fancy window dressing graphics?
Wozniak created a lot of breakthrough designs on the Apple II. The switching power supply was one, very compact. It was copied by so many other companies. I bought one of the early models in late 1977, and still have it, and it still works. I immediately began modifying it, and got tips from Andy Hertzfeld (as members of the SF Apple Corps club). Andy is co-inventor of the Macintosh. I modified it with my own eprom chips, lower-case board, and talking chips, and later with SDRAM chips holding over 5,000 programs. The Apple II was an amazing computer for its time.
Yes, the Apple III was a disaster. Much of the design by Steve Jobs. I own one of those, as well as a Lisa.
#14 I wish Steve Wozniak would create an Edit button for Free Free Republic.... : )
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