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« Preaching Abstinence Won't Help The RantsLeave it to Beaver »

SciFi Channel is More "Fi" Than "Sci"
2004.12.01 (Wed) 16:41

In James Randi's weekly wrap-up, Guy Matthews of the UK writes in to tell us about what the SciFi channel did to Merrye Olde Englande.

In 2001 Sci-Fi UK announced they were going to be setting up shop in the Maze House, an allegedly haunted locale. They'd set up proper surveillance and EM [electro-magnetic] monitors, bring in psychics and investigators, broadcast live from the house on a daily basis, set up chat forums, and have live Q&A answers online. Now of course this was all a scam, nothing live ever happened and everything caught on tape was staged, the live chats were just text being played out according to a script, no real questions from the public were ever aired.

You think that's bad? That's NOTHING, I've saved the worst for last. Sci-Fi claimed that the data from their EM sensors was being collected and would be analyzed by a distributed computing project a la SETI@Home. That's right. As the entire thing was a scam they in fact got their viewers to download Trojans masquerading as dcomp clients. A Trojan horse program is defined as a program that entices people to download and install it by claiming and appearing to perform one function while actually being intended to perform an entirely different function. This is a criminal offence today, though as I recall, UK cybercrimes legislation didn't cover the matter at the time, so I didn't get very far when I contacted the police about it back then.

Y'see this now falls into my professional qualifications. I'm a senior network security administrator. I was one of the first to realize that the program was nothing but a looped animation, and I was definitely the first to start publishing warnings about this on the forums. The program consumed significant CPU resources (a constant 25% load on my fairly powerful rig) at all times for no reason at all, and worse, it dialed home disclosing information on the user's machine to sci-fi. Finally, it was so poorly coded that uninstalling it DID severely damage Windows on a number of machines I'm personally aware of, I being the one who had to fix the damage.

All right, now, this is getting ridiculous. The SciFi channel was actually a purveyor of malware. This is inexcusable behavior, and the fact that British legislation (like American legislation) is lagging far behind technology is the only reason why they got away with it. They got away with permanently altering the structure and functionality of countless computer users' systems.

Matthews continues:

Sci-fi was unfortunately never brought to charges on this as far as I know, they've never commented on the matter in any way, ignored e-mails I'd sent at the time, and have since very carefully purged the relevant website, forums, and all other material they had control over from the web. The archives services, however still have some traces of the original site: http://web.archive.org/web/20020628120240/www.themazehouse.com/index.jsp provides a vague admission to the hoax, with no mention or apology for the damage done to computers throughout the nation.

The sad truth, however, is that this is just one of many problems with the SciFi channel. By promoting bullshit shows like Proof Positive and Ghost Hunters (not to mention the gone and hopefully soon forgotten Crossing Over with John Edward), they are adding to the credulity and ignorance running rampant in the world.

What in the world is SciFi thinking? The majority of fans of science fiction are extremely intelligent, rational types, quite the opposite of the type of person who would enjoy or believe in any of these pseudo-scientific television shows. They are alienating their core audience — or what is supposed to be their core audience — by resorting to broadcasting this pure bullshit in an effort to emulate the "reality TV" craze that dominates every channel these days.

Note to SciFi: "reality" is precisely what science fiction fans are NOT looking for on the only channel devoted to science fiction.

A friend of the Two Percent Company recently asked us, upon noting our love of science fiction films and stories, why such carefully skeptical intellectuals would be interested in pure fantasy. The answer is quite simple: enjoying the ideas presented in extraordinary fiction does not mean that we must believe that those ideas, or any other extraordinary possibilities, might be a reality.

In fact, this goes to the heart of a very unfounded argument that the fundies and true believers like to thrust upon skeptics and non-believers; they claim that we don't believe in their god (or fairies, or magical pink unicorns, or whatever) because we do not want to believe. This is patently absurd. As imaginative, creative, intelligent people, we would certainly be fascinated and entertained by the supernatural or paranormal, if they existed. We would love to believe! The fact that we weigh the evidence, make note of our observations, and come to the conclusion that such phenomena do not exist is a testament to our rationality and devotion to the scientific method, rather than a result of a desire to disbelieve. Whereas the true believers are clearly wanting to believe so strongly that they ignore the facts in evidence just to keep believing.

So the question comes right back at them: who is letting their emotions and desires supersede their logic and reason? We'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count.

As for SciFi — with the exception of the occasional 2AM Quantum Leap re-run or a good old-fashioned science fiction flick, we'll be avoiding that channel until they regain a grasp of what their target audience really wants.


— • —
[  Filed under: % Bullshit  % Media & Censorship  ]

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