A company dubbed Open Tech announced this week that it would follow in the erroneous foot steps of Mac Clone maker Psystar. Upon browsing the company’s website, I was intrigued to see a .tk domain extension. Out of natural curiosity I set out find find out what country this belonged to. After a few minutes of searching, my question was answered, and to my surprise, if found that .tk represents Tokelau. Thats right, what the %$#! is Tokelau I asked myself. I tend to pride myself on my geographic knowledge so never hearing of it instinctively told me of its seemingly insignificant stature.
Well it turns out that Tokelau is a small island nation located north of Samoa, in the middle of nowhere (literally). After Google mapping it, I couldn’t even zoom out enough to put it in relation to anything while still being visible. The place holds a population of less that 1,500, and boats a GDP of a whopping $1.5 million. In fact, the mere addition of gaining the .tk TLD boosted up their GDP by 10%. So what the hell is going on here?
The website states that, “Open Tech is proud to announce a desktop lineup that are fully capable of running many operating systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X Leopard, and Ubuntu 8.04. The Open Tech Computer and Open Tech XT are meant to be open, you can choose want you want it to run. Since the Open Tech Computer is fully customizable, you can customize the RAM, Hard-drive, and the video card.”
Upon review of Open Tech’s offerings, they are displaying two systems, the Open Tech Computer 1.0 and the Open Tech XT, which are going for $620 USD and $1200 USD respectively. Additionally there is a store that would appear as though you can purchase direct from the site, yet nothing is currently available.
Quite obviously Open Tech cannot be manufacturing or operating out of a place that is so far removed from anything that there is not even a capitol city. Upon even further research, .tk extensions have been notoriously connected to scams. Gee, did anyone actually think this was legit? I do not think that there should be a doubt in anyone’s mind that there is something fishy going on here.
3 Comments to “Off-shore Mac Clones are seriously off-shore”
Don’t be a wuss, this guy looks legit.
*picture of a creepy pedophile van labeled “Free Mac clones”*
Reply
.tk domains are/were given away by the island for free in order to gain exposure. I haven’t heard abything about it in a few years, but I set up a site with a .tk domain but now it has been taken down. While it was up it was cool though.
Reply
Am i the only one who knows about this??
it isnt a country… it is sorta a tiny-url thing
http://www.dot.tk/en/index.html?lang=en
Reply