Month: April 2006

Comcast, in this case, but Verizon, Sprint, all the baby Bells, the power and water companies, and so many others do this crap that it’s really no surprise to us on the receiving end that people get upset with the hassle of get service from companies which are supposed to be in the service industry.  This lady’s tale at The Consumerist is quite a bit more extreme than what most people suffer through, but I doubt it’s so out there that many people are surprised.

I had cable and internet reinstalled back in March (I’m going through a divorce and I had to have a new account set up). It took a month to get a DVR and it hasn’t worked since I got it. In total, I have set up six appointments, five of which they have totally not shown up for. They are absolutely making me crazy.

My first appointment was from 2:00 – 5:00 on a Thursday. Took a half day off from work. Had a call at 5:30 that the technician was running late, and when he hadn’t shown up at 7:30 I called them. They apologized and rescheduled for that Saturday from 8:00 – 11:00.

After almost half a dozen more missed appointments, she gets to this.

That night it started crashing again. Last week, every single tv show I tried to watch crashed out. So I called AGAIN. And set up an appointment AGAIN, for this past Friday. I was going out of town for Easter, and really didn’t want to wait another week for a weekend appointment, so I decided to take a full day off Friday rather than a half day to fit in the appointment. It was scheduled for 11:00 – 2:00. Nothing. Finally at 3:00 I had to leave for my trip.

At 3:30 I got a call that the tech was in front of my house. I had to tell them I was about forty miles from my house at that point, so what the hell could I do about it? I rescheduled AGAIN for Tuesday (today), and they actually had a night appointment available, so I took that.

Amazingly, it’s not over.  But you have to read the full article to find out how much she has suffered through.

[tags]Consumer service woes, service companies suck[/tags]

(via boingboing)

Just like the former head of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) found out that DRM causes problems for perfectly legal uses of digital content, this copyright supporter found out that sometimes the content providers can take away your legally stored digital content if they decide they don’t want you to have it.

The problem is, we have been using the PVR to record 2 years worth of a Spanish language curriculum that is broadcast over an educational channel, and we’ve been using this content to teach our son Spanish. Now the curriculum is gone. It’s not like I’m just inconvenienced in not being able to watch my “24” episodes. An educational curriculum is lost.

For those who aren’t familiar with Mr. Giovanetti’s work, he’s a frequent and pugnacious commentator on intellectual property issues, and an avowed supporter of the DMCA and digital rights management technologies. He’s a frequent critic of “IP skeptics” and “commonists” who argue that copyright law–and the technological measures designed to protect copyright–have gone overboard.

Today he discovered that sometimes, technological measures designed to deter piracy are a pain in the ass for ordinary consumers–like him.

And because of the way the DMCA and other laws which favor businesses over consumers are written, his legal recourse is nil. Oops. That’s where you realize the dog you’re feeding just bit your hand.

[tags]Copyright, copyfight[/tags]

This is an old story in Internet time, but I marked it in my RSS reader (Bloglines) some time ago, intending to post it, and then never came back and put it on the site.  Tonight, I rectify that.  That said, here’s the story (brought over from an original post by the EFF).

Back during the MGM vs. Grokster case (where the music industry went after a popular peer to peer filesharing network), the recording industry’s lawyer said to the Supreme Court:

“The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.”

That seems fairly clear to me.  I read it as saying that the record companies believe we, as consumers, are legally allowed to rip CDs down to mp3/ogg/wma/whatever format to put on our portable music players for our own use.  Not to give to others.  Not to share with strangers.  But for personal use, it’s legal.  If I’m wrong, someone please let me know.

The reason for posting this story is the followup commentary from the music industry.  Recently, the following tidbit came from the recording industry  during the DMCA rule-making procedures:

“Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization. In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorization, not about fair use.”

That says, basically, that sure the recording industry has said in the past that you as a consumer are allowed to rip to your preferred format for portable playback device use later, but now the recording industry no longer thinks that’s OK, so you are not allowed to do it any more.  Priceless, I say.  There’s a reason I don’t like to buy CDs any more, but I can’t quite express why.  Anyone have any guesses?

[tags]RIAA, Record companies hate consumers[/tags]

If you have any interest in security – physical or virtual – you should be reading Bruce Schneier’s blog (and subscribing to his Crypto-gram newsletter, but there’s a fair bit of overlap sometimes) regularly. In the past few weeks, he has written a few articles about the current problems with the American government’s security spending. In particular, I liked his write-up on airport security screening. He points out how poorly we are spending our security dollars for very limited effect.

It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently (see also this), testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. It makes you wonder why we’re all putting our laptops in a separate bin and taking off our shoes. (Although we should all be glad that Richard Reid wasn’t the “underwear bomber.”)

This isn’t really surprising for a lot of folks, I suspect. I’ve seen similar results before, and most others reading this probably have as well. Bruce even continues by pointing out the fact that this really shouldn’t be unexpected.

The failure to detect bomb-making parts is easier to understand. Break up something into small enough parts, and it’s going to slip past the screeners pretty easily. The explosive material won’t show up on the metal detector, and the associated electronics can look benign when disassembled. This isn’t even a new problem.

In other words, take something we can recognize, break it into smaller pieces, and suddenly it is not so recognizable. Not that this explains the missed guns and knives, but it does explain a little of why security screening is a problem. Bruce writes more about the difficulty of doing the job well – for instance, it’s an issue of repetition and searching for potentially hard to find dangerous items in a mess of other similar looking but harmless items.

Further on in the article, he writes about the limited value in removing guns, knives, and other weapons:

And, as has been pointed out again and again in essays on the ludicrousness of post-9/11 airport security, improvised weapons are a huge problem. A rock, a battery for a laptop, a belt, the extension handle off a wheeled suitcase, fishing line, the bare hands of someone who knows karate … the list goes on and on.

And this is such a huge problem that no one making these silly security and screening rules wants to talk about. Too many people pretend that removing a certain category of weapons removes the threat.

Stopping box knives just means if (and let me interject here that I don’t believe airline hi-jacking is even a concern now, regardless of how much hype it still garners today) another 9/11-style were attempted, the terrorists would have to resort to things they can still assuredly get on board, like pens, laptop batteries, canes, umbrellas, and other seemingly harmless items for weapons. People forget a pen in the eye will still completely incapacitate an opponent. A laptop battery can smash a skull quite effectively, just as a cane can break a bone or an umbrella can be effective in gutting someone.

So how do we protect the planes if all these weapons are still available and feasably dangerous? Well, we don’t really – we need to focus on terrorism, not a single potential, unlikely, now low-risk target.

The terrorists’ goals have nothing to do with airplanes; their goals are to cause terror. Blowing up an airplane is just a particular attack designed to achieve that goal. Airplanes deserve some additional security because they have catastrophic failure properties: If there’s even a small explosion, everyone on the plane dies. But there’s a diminishing return on investments in airplane security. If the terrorists switch targets from airplanes to shopping malls, we haven’t really solved the problem.

I don’t hear a lot of people clamoring to protect our shopping malls. Sure, some people do, but so many people still focus on the old threat. Of course, that’s the American way, isn’t it? We have short attention spans and tend to focus on things that were problems in the past, rather than looking ahead to figure out what problems are likely in the future.

What that means is that a basic cursory screening is good enough. If I were investing in security, I would fund significant research into computer-assisted screening equipment for both checked and carry-on bags, but wouldn’t spend a lot of money on invasive screening procedures and secondary screening. I would much rather have well-trained security personnel wandering around the airport, both in and out of uniform, looking for suspicious actions.

When I travel in Europe, I never have to take my laptop out of its case or my shoes off my feet. Those governments have had far more experience with terrorism than the U.S. government, and they know when passenger screening has reached the point of diminishing returns. (They also implemented checked-baggage security measures decades before the United States did — again recognizing the real threat.)

Smart moves, smart comments. Too bad more people don’t pay attention to Bruce Schneier’s advice. We could stop wasting money on useless “protection” and put it to better use.

A lot of his article is quoted here, but there are still things I’ve left out. Head to his site and see what else Bruce says about all this. He’s a much better writer than I am.

[tags]Terrorism, Airport security, Security spending[/tags]