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Sunday, November 05, 2017

Greg Marino: Watch a forger at work

Friday, July 21, 2017

Photobucket... the land of broken images

The Photobucket image sure to work its way
 into negative memes for years to come.
Photobucket recently announced that they will no longer allow third party hosting of their images unless you purchase the $399/year plan. What that means is, photos hosted by Photobucket but linked to other sites -- like blogs or chatboards -- will now have the "Upgrade your account" image unless the owner subscribes to the $399/year plan.

Uh, no thanks.

For this reason, you may see some broken images in this blog, mostly dating 2012 and before.

I understand the realities of business and I'm not complaining because it's no longer free, but $399/year seems a bit extreme. How many hobbyists and casual bloggers are going to pay that much? Especially considering most platforms now have their own image upload and hosting capability... you really don't need Photobucket anymore.

It seems to me that if they priced it at $25 a year, they'd likely get 50 times more people to convert to a paid plan versus the $399/year.

Monday, March 06, 2017

Donald Trump Autographs... be very careful!

President Donald Trump autographs may be the hottest signature on the market right now, and also the most dangerous. His campaign trail scribbles are a forger's dream. It doesn't exactly take a master forger to imitate that style. My recommendation would be to focus on his older style signatures, which you have a reasonable chance to authenticate with some level of confidence.

To further complicate the matter, there are Autopen machine signatures in the 2016 Election Edition The Art of the Deal books that were sent to donors. They are NOT authentically hand-signed. eBay is full of these Autopen machine signed books with sellers asking $300 and up. As you can see in the graphic, the signature is exactly the same in all of the books... there is no doubt these were signed by an Autopen machine.

Autopen machine signatures in The Art of the Deal.