Off you go… into the purple yonder!

One of my favorite meat-substitutes is Quorn. It can be hard to find in the US but we picked some up the other day, and today I noticed this bit of text on the packaging:

Happily, Quorn products not only contain mycoprotein, but also have that great taste you’re looking for. That’s why, in Europe, where people are rather peculiar about the way things taste, Quorn is the number one selling meat-free brand.

Not only does it taste great, Quorn even made me smile tonight

I’ve had a pretty serious dislike for Sony for a while. I feel Sony management is running the company in the ground by letting the (relatively tiny) content divisions of the Sony empire run the show. This leads to crippled hardware (Sony’s ‘mp3′ players, hah!), and is one of the main reasons why I refuse to buy anything made by Sony these days. I also really dislike the Sony tendency to launch proprietary, overpriced formats that nobody else supports (Memory Stick, Universal Media Disc, HAH!). That’s another reason why I don’t buy Sony.

So how nice it was to get some mail the other day from Sony, addressed to me (name misspelled), as ‘EDP Manager’ (what on earth is an ‘EDP’ Manager?) of a group I used to be a part of, addressed to my parent’s house. The only way they could have gotten this name/title/group/address combination is from the whois database, combined with an serious dose of imagination. Oh, yeah, they got the language wrong too – they sent it in French.
The domain name in question is a .org. This is what the .org WHOIS service says:

…
The data in this record is provided by Public Interest Registry
for informational purposes only, and Public Interest Registry does not guarantee its
accuracy. This service is intended only for query-based access. You agree
that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no
circumstances will you use this data to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise
support the transmission by e-mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass
unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than
the data recipient’s own existing customers; or (b) enable high volume,
automated, electronic processes that send queries or data to the systems of
Registry Operator or any ICANN-Accredited Registrar, except as reasonably
necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations. All
rights reserved. Public Interest Registry reserves the right to modify these terms at any
time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy.
…

We’ve established that I’m not a Sony customer. The mail they sent me is commercial bulk advertising. That means that Sony in is blatant breach of the Public Interest Registry whois policy. Either they got the data from the whois database themselves, or they bought my information from a sleazy company that did.
What a wonderful new reason to dislike Sony.