The State of Thingiverse, End of 2019

In June 2016, I bought a 3D printer on a whim, I only had one real concrete idea for something useful to print. But no worries, because there proved to be a website containing a few millions of free 3D models. Granted, the vast majority of models posted on it proved to be useless junk, but some were either very cool or truly useful. That site was Thingiverse. It was, and still is, the de facto standard for 3D printable model sharing. At that time, the site worked pretty well and had a very active and mostly friendly community. Questions would most often be replied to with useful advice, and if there was a problem with the website, there would at least be an acknowledgement even if the problem was not soon fixed.

The Good

Thingiverse used to be one of the main things that kept feeding my interest in 3D printing. Not just because of the new models coming in every few minutes, but also because of the community, and because it was pretty easy to share my own models, many of which started out as improvements upon someone else's. I am now the co-author of the “Flexi Rex with stronger links,” one of the models a present-day buyer of a new 3D printer seems likely to print as one of their very first attempts. I never anticipated this, I only improved upon an existing model because it broke way too soon when my grandson was playing with it. This is what I like about this community, one can easily take an existing model and improve it, and share this improvement for everyone to enjoy.

The Bad

Today however, things have changed for the worse. The turning point was somewhere in 2017, when one of the main moderators of the website, called ‘glitchpudding’, suddenly left. After this, it became much harder to get any response from whomever was responsible for maintaining the site. At the increasingly rare times that there was some kind of announcement, each time it was from a different person I had never heard of before, as if the previous one had been fired. This would not have been that bad if the website would have maintained its same quality level, but it did not. All kinds of annoying issues started popping up, like the website becoming very slow at times or throwing 500, 501, 502, … HTTP errors at random moments.

Complaining about this seemed to be of no use, because only rarely would there be a response from what might either be a Thingiverse employee or maybe just some random joker — there was no way to verify that whoever was replying on the discussion forums, was an actual Thingiverse / Makerbot employee, it was often a different username, more often without than with the “Thingiverse” badge.

Then it got worse: apparently the nearly invisible Oompa-loompas now running the site, were trying to make certain changes for… reasons. One can only guess when something has changed, because there is barely any communication when this happens. The most obvious sign of a change is an increase in the number of issues. Suddenly all photo previews were broken. Then suddenly they worked again, but any photo that was not in a 4:3 aspect ratio, would be shown distorted. This was not the case before: photos used to be letterboxed and/or cropped in reasonable ways. What was the point of this change? It only made the user experience worse.

Now at the end of 2019, there are finally some advance warnings or notifications that some issue is being worked on. For instance in December there was a site-wide banner telling that there would be “maintenance”. One would expect that this maintenance was aimed at improving the state of the website, but instead when it had ended, we had an extra HTTP error in the 500 range and random 404 errors as well, even on the main page. A website gives a very bad impression if its main page throws a 404 error.

Overall the website in its current state gives a strong impression of lack of professionalism, sometimes downright amateurism. It seems that whoever is maintaining it, does no more effort in testing their changes than trying something once and then assuming it will always work. I wonder if they have a testing environment at all. Often it feels as if they make changes to the production servers directly. The changes give an impression of lack of skill in developing a modern cloud-based website, rather it looks like trendy hipster frameworks are just being thrown on top of a rickety organically grown base without much vision. I am not saying the (obviously few) developers working on the site are amateurs, but the end result does give that kind of impression. This is likely to be merely because management does not allow the developers to spend enough time to implement things properly, so they are forced to only quickly hack things together.

These are all ‘feelings’ and ‘impressions’ due to the total lack of communication. Only from the recent 504 error pages I could see for instance that they had either thrown ‘openresty’ into the mix, or had already been using it but had now broken something about it. There has been no announcement for this or an explanation why.

I have created my own issue tracker on GitHub just to make all the most obvious problems with the website more visible, in the hopes that this would help the maintainers to decide what to fix next, but it seems to be completely ignored.

The Ugly: my guess at what is going on here

In case you didn't already know, Thingiverse is owned by Makerbot and since 2013, Makerbot is a subsidiary of Stratasys, a company that already marketed 3D printers way before the big 3D printer boom started around the year 2010. Makerbot has changed from a small company selling affordable open source printers, to a big company selling rather expensive walled-garden machines aimed at the education market. I guess most of the original enthusiastic team wanting to change the world (like glitchpudding) have either been fired and replaced by people only interested in milking profits from whatever looks vaguely promising without actually caring about it, or they have transformed into such people themselves.

Thingiverse was part of the original vision of making 3D printing affordable for the home user, a vision that does not really fit with Stratasys, the company selling industrial machines at industrial prices. I guess that at every moment since 2013 when a decision about Thingiverse had to be made, the decision has been biased towards gradually sunsetting the website. Nobody at those companies seems to understand the value of this huge playground that encourages anyone to buy, experiment with, and get familiar with 3D printers. It doesn't matter that no beginner will immediately buy a horribly expensive Makerbot or Stratasys printer: the mere fact that there is a low threshold to gain experience with 3D printers, will increase the chance that these same tinkerers will later on generate profits for those companies. That however is probably way too much thinking-ahead for the average marketeer who has been brainwashed to always take greedy short-term decisions and lodge themselves into a cozy local optimum.

What Really Is Going On

Shortly after writing this article, someone notified me about this blog post: https://xyzdims.com/2019/11/21/misc-formnext-2019-aka-just-too-much-for-one-day/

It contains a part about Makerbot's presence on the Formnext 2019 exhibition. The author had the chance to talk to Jason Chan, who is responsible for Thingiverse. Many of my suspicions are confirmed: only two developers are assigned to the site (and I guess only part-time), and the company greatly underestimates the importance of Thingiverse. There seems to be some commitment to improve it, but again it looks as if the ones holding the bag of money do not share this commitment… Still no concrete indication of what will actually happen to the site.

“But it's free!”

Every time someone posts a complaint about the broken state of the website on the Thingiverse Group forums, there will be replies in the vein of: “but it is free, you have no right to complain.” I disagree. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everyone who uploads content to the website, somehow invests in it. Some more than others, depending on how much effort they put in crafting the presentation and documentation of their Things. I have invested quite a lot, with about 120 published Things, each with pictures and an extended description. What I am now getting in return, is a pile of issues that make it harder to upload and edit Things, and I have no idea where the site is heading because of the lack of communication from the part of the maintainers. This lack of communication and lack of care to properly test each change, feels very disrespectful, even though only in an indirect manner. It almost makes me feel like an idiot for having put all this effort in my uploads during the years I have been on the site.

There are a few particular users on the Thingiverse groups who will react religiously against any complaint, one of whom has a pretty apt username given his writing style, which makes it seem as if he is drunk (he probably just is). Ignore them, because they are either trolls feeding on the anger, Makerbot employees paid to hold a denial campaign, idiots, or all of the above. None of them upload much of anything, therefore they don't even have any ground to stand on with their claims that the site works perfectly fine.

The content creators are the only reason of existence for Thingiverse. These creators deserve a little more respect than being ignored and being handed increasingly cumbersome tools to upload their content, without any explanation of what is being changed about the website, when, and why. There is no excuse for such poor communication in this era with so many different digital communication methods (and no, Twitter is not really a good communication method). I know it can be done better, because I was pretty content with how the site was maintained and how changes were communicated when I joined it in 2016. I have the feeling that the main breaking point for the website, was when the aforementioned glitchpudding left somewhere in 2017. It seems to have gone downhill ever since. I am not the one who demands infinite progress in everything, but I do expect that when something is good, people do the effort to keep it good.

Solutions, alternatives?

Obviously any sane person witnessing such evolutions on a certain website, would start looking for an alternative. That however proves to be a big problem with Thingiverse: there is no real alternative. I have looked at some other sites, but Thingiverse's biggest trump card is its sheer library of things. No other site comes close to it, therefore it doesn't matter if Makerbot only keeps Thingiverse at a level where it is just usable enough, people will keep coming for the content.

YouMagine looks decent at a first glance: its interface is the most similar to Thingiverse's I have found so far. It is owned by Ultimaker, alhough this is not explicitly mentioned on the site's main page. After trying it out however, it is obvious that YouMagine suffers from the same lack of maintenance, or worse. The ‘blog’ part has not been updated in ages, the featured things remain the same for a very long time, and reporting spam is impossible because the ‘report’ link only points to a dead support e-mail address. The 3D model previews and the ‘assembled view’ feature are mostly broken. Links and bold text do not work in the description text, which is incredibly annoying (I can imagine that they disabled links due to the spam, but bold text: why?!)
The site still runs, but it looks like a ghost ship. Maybe the only good thing about this is that if nobody changes anything about it, they also cannot break anything about it…

There are other sites like MyMiniFactory, against which I have grown an aversion due to the apparent shills promoting it on Thingiverse groups as the best thing since sliced bread. There is also Cults3D but just as with MMF, I find that there is too much emphasis on hiding content behind a paywall.

I have no concrete ideas for a solution. The best thing would be if a new website would be constructed by a community that does care about it, not tied to one particular manufacturer, and with a strategy to keep the community and website alive in the long term. Ideally, somehow the Thingiverse library would then be migrated to this site, but that is optional. I have made backups of all my uploaded models and their descriptions and photos, and I will happily re-upload them to a new website that is worth it. Maybe it would be better this way because to be honest, I estimate 80% of all Thingiverse models to be junk that would better be garbage collected. Starting from a clean slate might be better…

A ‘solar’ USB power bank with a fake solar panel, really?

A while ago I bought a ‘solar USB power bank’ from an eBay seller, with the idea that this thing would charge itself by merely sitting on a windowsill, at least cutting down on the time to recharge it.

When I received it, I immediately got a bad feeling about it. The solar panel looked weird. However, an LED on the power bank did react to the amount of incoming light, so I assumed it was just a strange new manufacturing process for solar panels. It did however not take long before I took the whole thing apart and found out that it was actually an elaborate scam: the panel was fake, just a piece of plastic with a sensor in it.

On my main website I explain in detail how this scam is designed, how you can recognise it if you suspect you also have a fake solar power bank in your hands, and how I eventually converted this scam into a real working solar power bank by adding a real solar panel and the necessary components. Buyer beware!

Read the full article

Een ‘solar’ USB powerbank met namaak zonnecel, echt?

Een tijdje geleden kocht ik een ‘solar USB powerbank’ van een eBay-verkoper, met de idee dat dit ding zichzelf zou opladen door louter op een vensterbank te liggen, en zo op zijn minst de tijd zou verkorten om hem helemaal op te laden.

Toen ik het ding ontvangen had, had ik meteen in de mot dat er iets niet pluis was. Het zonnepaneel zag er vreemd uit. Echter, een LED op de powerbank reageerde netjes op de hoeveelheid binnenkomend licht, dus nam ik aan dat het gewoon een vreemd nieuw fabricageproces voor zonnepanelen was. Het duurde echter niet lang eer ik het ganse ding toch uiteenhaalde, en erachter kwam dat het inderdaad een hoop vernuftig bedrog was: het paneel was namaak, gewoon een stuk plastiek met een lichtsensor erin.

Op mijn website beschrijf ik in detail hoe dit bedrog ontworpen was, hoe u het kan herkennen als u vermoedt dat u ook zo'n namaak powerbank op zonne-energie in handen heeft, en hoe ik uiteindelijk dit stuk bedrog omgetoverd heb tot een echte powerbank op zonne-energie, door een echt zonnepaneel en de nodige componenten toe te voegen. Caveat emptor!

Lees het volledige artikel (Engels)

Google Chrome ignores ‘enter’ keypresses within 3 seconds after clicking the address bar

To reload a page in a web browser, I often click the address bar and then press the enter key, for two reasons: first, I prefer this over clicking the ‘reload’ button because it guarantees that I won't re-submit form data. It is the best way to cleanly reload a page. Second, the cursor is usually very near to this bar anyway, and my hands are much nearer to the enter key than F5, and I'm of course way too lazy to press ctrl-R or command-R.

Since several years however, Google Chrome has started to sabotage this behaviour in a very annoying way. I noticed that my first enter keypress was often totally ignored. A while later I noticed the second press was also becoming ignored. This only got worse, now usually I have to press the key 4 times before the page is reloaded. The more it annoyed me, the worse it got.

Finally someone else also brought up this issue on SuperUser.com. It was still a mystery why the first presses were ignored and why there is variation in the number of presses before Chrome finally responds. The only reasonable explanation is that there must be a deliberate delay programmed in Chrome that ignores enter keypresses within a certain time period after clicking the address bar, unless something has been typed. Experiments have confirmed this, and the delay seems to be exactly 3 seconds in the current version of Chrome. This explains why the more one becomes aware of this issue, the worse it becomes: pressing Enter at a faster rate only results in more ignored keypresses. The only solution is to do absolutely nothing within 3 seconds after clicking the address bar. Of course it then becomes quicker to use one of the other reload methods, but only in a backwards kind of way because the most efficient method has been sabotaged. And if you need to use this method to reload a page without re-sending any POST data, then waiting the full 3 seconds is the only option.

My question is: why on earth was this implemented? What is the motivation? I cannot think of any good reason. Some developer must have spent time on implementing this and I have no clue why. The 3-second ignore period does not exist when bashing random keys immediately after clicking the bar—why would it need to exist when nothing has been typed? The only effect this has is to annoy people. Maybe it is yet another side effect of some change that caters for smartphones and tablets, because obviously laptops and desktop computers are totally identical to those devices [/sarcasm].
Please Google remove this “feature.”

Enhancing headphones or earphones with Audio Hijack 3

Long ago there was an awesome audio enhancer for Mac OS X that could improve system-wide audio in various ways. It started out as ‘OSS 3D’ by Subband Technologies, later on it was bought by Joesoft and rebranded to ‘Hear,’ and it eventually migrated to the Prosoft brand name. This program offered various effects like 3D audio, a straightforward equalizer, a virtual subwoofer, and various other things that were both useful and gimmicky. Everything was fine until the program became unable to enhance audio coming from iTunes, arguably its most important target. Prosoft was never able to fix this and eventually the program stopped working altogether with the latest major OS X updates. Rest in peace, Hear.

I have been looking for a way to simulate at least part of Hear's functionality. I especially relied on it to obtain a more natural listening experience with headphones. If you have ever listened to e.g. Beatles songs on headphones, you will have noticed first-hand that headphones do not offer the same listening experience as loudspeakers. With loudspeakers, sound from the left speaker will not only reach your left ear but your right ear as well and vice versa, both directly and indirectly through reflections. With head- or earphones however, the left and right channels are fed strictly to the respective ear only. If the music was mixed with sound coming only from either left or right (as was often the case with the first stereo recordings like from the Beatles), this offers an unnatural experience. Even today a lot of music is mixed with loudspeakers in mind and will not sound ‘right’ when listening with headphones.

A good solution is to preprocess the music before sending it to the headphones, simulating it being played on loudspeakers. The most basic way to do this is to mix a bit of the right channel into the left and vice versa. This already makes Beatles songs less awkward to listen to but it's not quite it. To add more realism, the tiny delay caused by the longer audio path from the left loudspeaker to the right ear and vice versa must also be taken into account. From my DSP courses I remember that a realistic delay is 390µs (this can be derived from the geometry of a typical stereo setup and the shape of a human head). To further increase realism, there must be some low-pass filtering as well because higher frequencies will have a harder time reaching the opposite ear. And finally to get the sensation of listening in a real room, some reverb can be added.

This idea can be implemented with Audio Hijack from Rogue Amoeba Software. It is not for free but is well worth its price for anyone who needs to do more with audio than merely playing some music. So let's see how we can implement our fancy headphone enhancer with Audio Hijack.

The above image shows the setup. The upper part is the one that simulates a room. A slight reduction in volume is applied to compensate for the fact that we will be adding a cross-mix of the channels later on. A reverb effect makes the sound less ‘dry’ by simulating it bouncing off walls, floors and ceiling. The configuration of the reverb unit is a matter of personal taste. I started out with the defaults of the Matrix Reverb and reduced the ‘large’ parameters to have a faster drop-off.

The lower part is the most important one, it represents the cross-mix between loudspeakers and ears, the extra delay due to the longer audio path, and the attenuation of high frequencies. The 390µs delay cannot be obtained with the standard effects available in Audio Hijack, a custom plug-in is needed. I've found this free sound delay audio unit from Voxengo to be adequate. You need to reboot after installing the AU plugin to make it available in Audio Hijack. Enter a value of 0.39 msec in the effect configuration. People with really fat heads might try a larger value but it should never deviate much from this.

The exact value for the low-pass filter isn't crucial. This filter has two purposes: first, simulate the actual attenuation of higher frequencies that would occur in the situation depicted above, which is difficult to quantify anyway. Second, avoid interference between trebles in the original audio and the delayed copy. Without the low-pass filtering, there would be a comb filter effect that can make some trebles sound weird. If you still notice this, you may want to use a lower frequency than the 6 kHz I used here.

After mixing everything together, there is another volume control and an equalizer. These are optional but unless you have extremely high-end headphones, a little extra EQ can get that bit of extra fidelity out of them. The reason why you may need to precede the EQ with a volume reduction is that if you need a considerable bass boost, you'll need to attenuate the input to avoid sending the audio into overdrive. You may add other effects to your liking, e.g. a dynamic range compressor in case you're listening in a noisy environment (although a lot of modern music has no dynamic range to begin with…)

Entering your EV Nova registration code is still possible

In a nutshell: if you have a registration key for EV Nova and still know the moment when Ambrosia sent you this key (within an accuracy of a few days), you can still register new installs of the game if you set your computer's clock to a time just after that moment. You only need to do this for the registration, after that you can set your clock back to normal. It may be necessary to disconnect all networks to disable additional attempts of the registration app to check the time.

However, given that Ambrosia is now defunct and getting the game to run properly nowadays is a hassle, a better option is to just back the Cosmic Frontier Kickstarter campaign, and wait for the game to be finished. I'm pretty sure there will be a way to load the EVN scenario into this new game engine.

The long story:

Escape Velocity Nova, or EV Nova in short, was one of the most iconic games from the now defunct Ambrosia Software. Their website is still online at the time of this writing but buying anything would be a bad idea because their registration service is dead. Not that you would want to buy much of their catalogue because most of it is too outdated to run on modern systems.

Recently the GPU in my early 2011 MacBook Pro had self-destructed and I decided to buy a new MacBook Pro. While waiting for it to arrive, I could still use my old MBP by forcibly disabling the discrete GPU. Of course this meant I couldn't play any games needing the GPU, hence I started playing EV Nova again. Everything was fine until I finally got my new MacBook Pro and wanted to continue the storyline I was in. Two problems:

1. EV Nova simply does not work anymore in OS X Mojave. It seems some are able to run it, but for me neither copying the binary from my old MBP to the new one, nor reinstalling it and re-applying the RyuKorijo patch helped.
2. Entering my registration code in any newly installed copies was impossible because the code has expired and there is no way to obtain a new one, moreover Ambrosia's licensing server is dead anyway.

Problem 2 proved relatively easy to solve. The registration system will accept codes if they are not older than a certain number of days. This means you can still register the game if you turn back your computer's clock to e.g. 1 day after the buying date. Not sure how many days of margin one gets, but luckily I keep all my mails (and I really mean all) so I knew exactly when I had been issued my old registration code and I set the clock to 1 day after. Normally the game also does an online check of the code but that can of course be easily sabotaged by disconnecting all networks. With the Ambrosia servers offline however, even that is now unnecessary. Still, when trying it in Mac OS 9, the app seemed to somehow check the time online so I had to disconnect the network after all.

I still haven't solved problem 1 however. Others have managed to get EVN running in OS X Mojave but for some reason it keeps failing on my system. I have opened a new issue on the RyuKorijo GitHub in the hopes of getting some help. Given that there are rumours 32-bit application support will be entirely dropped in one of the upcoming major OS X updates though, trying to keep EVN running in OS X feels like a futile exercise anyway. I've tried running the game on two different platforms instead.

First in SheepShaver, because that would be the most convenient. I got the game to launch but the menu buttons lack their labels and do not work. Luckily the functions of the buttons can also be accessed by pressing certain keys: N for new pilot, O to open one, E to enter the game, P for preferences, Q to quit, and A for about (there's also an easter egg key by the way). There are some other minor problems like EVN sometimes crashing at startup and the target cursor not being visible which makes it difficult to select planets or ships. A plus however is that pilot files are interchangeable with the OS X version.

Next, in Windows 10 under Boot camp. Slightly annoying but I reboot for other games anyhow. I used all the tweaks found here and the game works, but it is only really playable in windowed mode. In full-screen the graphics are extremely jittery. I had to use these values in the resolution patcher to get the window take up almost the entire screen of my 15" MacBook Pro: 1600, 992, 1600, 800, 1280 (only the first two matter probably). A big drawback is that I can't port any pilot files from the Mac to the Windows version and there are some things off about the Windows version, like sound quality, readability of text, and the graphics are still jittery at times. And obviously it feels wrong to have to resort to Windows in order to play one of the most iconic Mac games!

In the end I prefer SheepShaver in spite of the issues it has, and I now play EVN inside it because the game just feels much smoother than in Windows and I can continue with my existing pilots. If the remaining issues in SheepShaver can be solved, I think it will end up the best long-term solution to keep playing EVN.

Update 2020/05: Cosmic Frontier: Override

A Kickstarter campaign has been launched to remake the Escape Velocity: Override game engine for modern operating systems. Although it isn't clear yet whether it will be possible to run the EV Nova scenario in this engine, playing the previous EV instalments with improved graphics and UI will become considerably easier. The kickstarter ends on Tue, May 26 2020 7:23 PM UTC, so head over to the campaign page and contribute if you want this to succeed!

Is ETCV (Ethereum Classic Vision) a scam or not?

There is quite a bit of FUD about the upcoming Ethereum fork, called Ethereum Classic Vision (exchange token ETCV) being a scam like Ethereum Nowa. This Dutch website for instance tries to give some evidence of this claim.

If ETCV is a scam indeed, the authors sure have done a lot of effort to make it less obvious than with Nowa, whose site has spelling errors and makes ridiculous claims about the forked cryptocurrency. The biggest warning light for Nowa is the procedure to supposedly obtain free ‘ETN’ (which by the way is an already existing token for Electroneum, another fact that makes Nowa extremely suspect). They outright ask you to transfer your ETH to their address and those who are even more gullible than that, can even make it worse by sending them their private keys as well. First rule of cryptocurrencies: never give anyone your private key. Second rule… never give anyone your private key!

The Classic Vision website on the other hand looks a lot more legit. It seems the ‘scam’ claims for ETCV are mainly based on two things:

1. Confusion between the supposed Nowa fork and the ETCV fork. The aforementioned article mentions some facts that appear to originate from the news about Nowa, like the photo models story. This confusion is understandable because the (supposed) dates for these two forks are only 1 day apart.
2. The idea that you are supposed to enter your ETH wallet private key to claim ETCV. There is some truth about this because there are only two ways to view an ETCV wallet on their website: either through a keystore or by directly entering the private key. Even though the latter seems to violate the First Rule, in this embryonic stage of the new currency with no third-party support yet, it makes some sense that these are the only options. Obviously the smarter option is to use the keystore but when following proper crypto hygiene, there is no risk with directly using the PK either as I will explain below.

The other suspect facts mentioned are that the website lacks certain information like the exact block number for the fork (which is true and pretty annoying), or obvious contact information for the authors. I don't know about you but in this day and age no sane person would spread all their personal details on a website. There seem to be enough contact methods albeit not very direct.

Proper Forking Hygiene

This leaves the private key issue as the only big source for concern and until I have actually seen the fork happen, I cannot tell whether this concern is warranted. It is perfectly possible they will indeed use any wallet credentials you enter on their website to plunder your ETH wallet instead of handing you free ETCV. However if you treat the fork as follows, there is zero risk of your ETH being stolen:

1. Create an entirely new ETH wallet using MyEtherWallet or a similar service. You will never use this wallet for anything else than the ETCV claim.
2. Transfer as much ETH to this wallet as you want to be replicated into 3 times the amount of ETCV (as they promise).
3. Leave the ETH on this wallet until you're certain the ETCV fork has happened.
4. Before doing anything else, withdraw all your ETH from the wallet to another wallet.
5. Now claim the ETCV using the wallet address from step 1.

If this is a true fork, what will happen is that the entire ETH chain state is duplicated into the new ETCV branch. This means any existing wallet addresses that exist for ETH at that point will also be valid wallet addresses for ETCV. Anything that happens with ETH after the fork will have no effect on the ETCV branch and vice versa because they each go entirely their own ways. Hence if you withdraw the ETH from your wallet with private key abc123, the ETCV wallet with the same private key will still contain the amount of coin that existed at the time of the fork (which in this case will be multiplied by 3). And of course if the whole thing was a scam after all and someone obtains your private key after you have emptied your ETH wallet, they cannot steal anything.

Update: It's (Most Likely) a Scam Alright!

Now the fork is supposed to have been performed, how do things look? Pretty bad:

• Their website has been suspended
• Before the site disappeared, a highly suspect prompt was added to it to ‘buy’ ETCV by sending ETH directly to a certain address. This prompt contained conflicting information that the ratio of obtained ETCV would be both 50:1 and 1:1. This looks just like a desperate attempt to grab some more ETH before their whole façade collapses.
• Their wallet site is suspended
• Their twitter account is suspended
• News articles about ETCV being a scam are popping up

Although all this is not 100% irrefutable evidence that it's a scam, let's say it is 99.9% evidence. I have to hand it to them, they were a lot more crafty than the Nowa people. They did a lot more effort to make their scheme appear legit. On BitcoinTalk they managed to gather a considerable following and it seems there still are some believers at this moment.

However, I have lost nothing because I have followed the above procedure even though I haven't executed the last step. I'll keep the wallet address just in case we are in that 0.1% and ETCV exists after all, but I don't hold my hopes up high.