Off you go... into the purple yonder!

junk mail from the bank

Posted on December 5, 2006 by ward

So, my bank sent me some real-world spam today. The seem to like to do that, trying to sell me all sorts of subscriptions to services I’m not interested in. Anyway. This letter was particularly cheeky, here’s how it began:
Dear Ward Vandewege,

As a great way to demonstrate the importance of your relationship, *name of my bank* has chose Elite Excursions to offer you the opportunity to participate in an important Consumer Opinion Poll. That way, you can share your experiences with leisure activities (good and bad) and have access to a discount network of leading hotels, cruise lines, vacation packages, and more.

At this point I was a bit confused. I have been offered the opportunity to fill out a survey? A Consumer Opinion Poll no less, note the capitalization? I should probably feel quite honored. I’m sure they don’t offer that oportunity to all their customers. My relationship with the bank must be quite something!

But I was still a bit confused as to how exactly filling out the survey would give me access to this discount network of vacation goodies. So a bit further down in the letter, this followed:

As a valued customer, you can also receive one month of no-cost access to Elite Excursions, compliments of *name of my bank*. This discount travel network can help save you money and worry, wherever you go.

Ah. This is just another sales ploy. Sure enough, the letter continues with an amazing offer for a free Portable DVD Player (again, note the capitalization – this thing must be quite something!) if I try the program, and then some fine print that states that after the first month, Elite Excursions seems to cost $19.99/month.

Yeah, right.

I wish they would stop sending me this sort of stuff. Each time they do, I think of them less as a bank and more as a bunch of sales droids. Bad branding, dear bank, I want you to act like a bank. You know, be all stylish and professional and polite, and radiate an air of trustworthiness. This junk mail gives me an impression of you that is quite the opposite of that.

Maybe it’s time to look for another bank.

Posted in Completely clueless | 1 Comment

bad start for Deval Patrick

Posted on November 29, 2006 by ward

I was pretty excited that Deval Patrick won the elections here in MA. It was high time to get rid of our current narrow-minded governor.

However, Mr. Patrick has made his first bad decision. He’s basically put a wolf in charge of guarding the sheep. The sheep, in this case, is MA’s progression towards the Open Document Format (ODF). Adopting this format will break Microsofts near-monopoly on office software by levelling the playing field for competing products. This will drive prices down and software quality and innovation up. This can only be good for the people and the state.

So what did Mr. Patrick do? He appointed Brian Burke to the technology transition team. Mr Burke is a Microsoft lobbyist who has been fighting tooth and nail against ODF because it will hurt Microsoft’s near-monopoly on office software. The technology transition team is going to advise the state in matters to do with technology. Including, of course, the transition to ODF.

Sound fishy to you? It sure does to me. Can you say ‘conflict of interest’? Right. I suggest you let Mr. Patrick know at his Patrick-Murray transition website, like I did. Thanks!

Posted in Open Standards, Politics | 1 Comment

6 new copyright exemptions

Posted on November 23, 2006 by ward

The US copyright office at the Library of Congress has issued 6 new copyright exemptions. Basically, there are 6 new (narrow) exemptions from the DMCA:

* anyone can now ‘unlock’ cell phones

* film professors can break CSS to make compilations of short clips from DVDs

* blind people can use software that circumvents DRM on e-books to allow them to use screen readers (I’m sure mr Sklyarov is happy about that one)

* if hardware is no longer available for legacy computer software and games bypassing the technological protection measures is allowed for archival

* if you have software that requires a dongle that can not be replaced, you are allowed to circumvent the dongle if it breaks

* researchers can do what they need to to test crippled audio CDs for security flaws

So, great, some small exceptions. But they don’t address the root of the problem – the DMCA is a bad piece of legislation that needs to be repealed. One comment on the Slashdot story summarizes the situation as follows:

I feel as if I got punched in the face and the LoC is passing by and helpfully giving me a tooth back. What about all the other missing teeth?

Amen. Congress needs to do something about the DMCA.

Posted in Copyright, patents, and trademarks | Leave a comment

total rip-off

Posted on November 22, 2006 by ward

While in Hamburg for the LinuxBIOS summit a couple weeks ago, I called home a couple times. The hotel had a helpful piece of paper stating ‘dial 777 for credit card calls’. Foolishly, I thought I’d better not use my cellphone ($1/minute), and that I should try this service.

A couple weeks later I received my visa statement – my two calls cost 77.46 Euro and 39.68 Euro respectively. The credit card statement read “CALL FRM GERMANY INFONW.COM – FR” in the description field for the charges. The http://www.infonw.com website basically seems to have the sole purpose of dealing with outraged customers. It provides contact information to ‘find more information about the charge made’.

So I called them. I was told by their representative ‘Kerry’ that the first call was 17 minutes long, and the second call 6 minutes long. I asked what the rates were on the calls. She stated that there was a 10 Euro connection fee, followed by a fee of 4.93 Euro per minute. Pretty outrageous, no?

When I complained that the rates were not advertised anywhere at the hotel, she said that the ‘live operator’ could have told me the rates. When I pointed out that there was no live operator – the operation was fully automatic, she said that the automated system could also provide that information, if you press 0. When I asked how I was supposed to know that (there was no voice prompt indicating that), she said it was ‘standard’.

This company is in the business of ripping people off through deceptive business practices. They operate under various different names, don’t advertise rates, and basically overcharge for their service by about 1,000 %. They seem to be successful at it – here’s a random selection of stories from other people that they have ripped off:

http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=4945
http://www.amcostarica.com/022806.htm
http://www.businessownersideacafe.com/cyberschmooz/eCommerce/1115.html
http://forum.virtualtourist.com/discussion-180317-1-1-Miscellaneous-0-0–discussion.html
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/business/story/6495398p-6347059c.html
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff211888.htm
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff186806.htm

The BBB of San Diego (that’s where they are) has a report on them that’s quite revealing.

Moral of the story: never, ever use a hotel phone unless you know exactly how much it is going to cost you. I’ve filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, but that went nowhere. I’ve also complained to the hotel, but they didn’t seem to think I was worthy of a response.

So, time to warn other people about these guys. Avoid “BBG Communications” aka “International Satellite Communications” aka “Call To International” aka http://infonw.com aka http://infonaa.com aka http://bbgcomm.com like the plague.

And do not use the hotel phones at the Baseler Hof in Hamburg. In fact, maybe you should consider another hotel if you’re going to Hamburg. I’m pretty sure they get a fairly significant cut of what BBG Communications charges. If you do pick another hotel, you may want to let Baseler Hof know that you’re not staying there because they deal with those fraudsters at BBG Communications. Maybe that will make them change their mind. It’s a shame, it’s a nice hotel otherwise.

Posted in Fraud | 4 Comments

newsweek on DRM and Defective by Design

Posted on November 21, 2006 by ward

Newsweek has a pretty good article on DRM that mentions the Defective by Design campaign. The only thing I don’t understand is this bit at the end:

Music industry observers agree that once the public catches on to the limits of DRM, it will either be abandoned or a dominant technology will emerge across all players; this is what happened when VHS beat out Betamax.

I believe that once the public understands what DRM is, it will go the way of the dodo. What I don’t understand is what this has to do with VHS vs. Betamax – that was a format war. Two things are muddled here – on the one hand the compatibility problem between the various DRM systems in existence today. On the other hand the general problem that DRM is completely against the interests of the consumer, and once the consumer catches on to that, it is pretty much doomed – unless we’re all completely locked in by that point.

On a semi-related note, it seems Microsoft’s Zune isn’t selling very well at all: it’s at position 53 in Amazon’s electronics sales rank. Two days ago, it was somewhere in the low thirties. Yawn.

Posted in DRM | Leave a comment

broadband in the US sucks

Posted on November 10, 2006 by ward

I’ve said it for a long time, and it seems at least one person in the FCC is starting to speak up. Why is it that in the richest country of the world, in one of the major metropolitan areas of the country, the fastest broadband I can get today is 20 mbits/sec down and 2mbits/sec up, and it would cost me $80/month? And I’m lucky because I live in Somerville; if you look in Boston proper or Cambridge, the fastest you can get is 6 mbits/sec down, 768kbit/sec up. And that will cost you at least $50/month. Contrast that with South Korea or Japan, where the norm is 100mbits/sec for a fraction of what we pay here. Or with large parts of Europe where ADSL2 is being rolled out for under 20 Euros/month.

Broadband sucks in this country. We’re paying way too much for connections that are way too slow – particularly in the upload department. With the change of power in Congress, maybe something will finally be done about this. A good first step would be to unlock the final mile. Cable providers should be forced to open up and allow competitors to run data to their customers, much like is the case in the DSL world. And, more importantly, Verizon and SBC should be forced to open up the FIOS lines they are now rolling out so that some healthy competition can drive the prices down and the speeds up.

Secondly, municipalities need to be encouraged to roll out non-profit internet service, much like they provide electricity and water in large parts of the countries. Where laws have been passed prohibiting this – under heavy lobbying from the telcos and cable companies – these laws need to be repealed immediately, and some punishment for these companies is in order. Perhaps a new tax on their local presence for a couple of years, the proceeds of which can be used to build out the municipal networks.

Sure, the big telcos and cable companies won’t like it. But frankly, they can go to hell. They are the cause for all this stagnation – they are the reason that we are falling behind. They’ve been making billions for many years, charging us all through the nose. It’s time the government steps in and forces some more competition.

Posted in Completely useless | Leave a comment

gnewsense

Posted on November 3, 2006 by ward

Gnewsense 1.0 is out! At last we have a 100% Free, state of the art GNU/Linux distribution. The FSF press release can be found here.

For the curious – the FSF has contributed (a lot of) bandwidth and a high-end server to the project. It’s a Tyan S2882 based box with dual-dual core AMD Opteron CPUs and a load of RAM. And, it runs LinuxBIOS – no proprietary BIOS is involved in the serving of gnewsense to the masses.

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

the upgrade to edgy eft

Posted on October 28, 2006 by ward

I upgraded my laptop to Edgy Eft, which has many cool new features.

Nothing too serious broke for me, except maybe for this one: opening Gmail crashes Firefox 2, consistently. Apparently this is a consequence of this bug which is now triggered because X loads the Composite extension by default in Edgy, and my default colour depth is 16. The workaround is simple; add this line to /etc/firefox/firefoxrc:

export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1

The bug is in Launchpad (#14911) so I’m a little surprised that they shipped Edgy without the workaround. This one might affect a *lot* of people. Hmm, well, maybe most people have a default color depth of 24. The irony of all this is that it’s the chimes for gmail’s built-in IM client that are causing this – that’s the flash that’s being used. Did I mention that I’m not a fan of proprietary software? This bug is in the proprietary macromedia flash plugin. Gnash, we really need you!

The only other problem I’ve come across is that bbmail no longer works. Apparently it does not support compilation with gcc 4.1; the default package segfaults while starting up. I recompiled the source package with gcc 3.4 which resolves the segfaulting, but bbmail does not appear on the screen. Time to look for another mail notifier I think – if you have suggestions for something that works more or less like bbmail, let me know!

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

the Google trademark

Posted on October 27, 2006 by ward

Google’s trademark lawyers are obviously getting nervous: they want people to only use (variations of) the word ‘Google’ in relation to Google Inc or the services it provides.

I think this is probably a loosing battle – people ‘xerox’ things all the time using copiers not made by Xerox. That being said, for the time being the vast majority of googling is most definitely going to happen using the Google search engine. In the keyword search traffic to this site, Google’s market share is about 90%. Yahoo and MSN are roughly at 4% and 3% respectively, leaving the remainder for a couple of lesser known search engines.

Posted in Copyright, patents, and trademarks | Leave a comment

why I don’t use microsoft