Congress Declares War On P2P Services · Mon Nov 12, 09:11 AM by Martin H. Bosworth
You’d think with Iraq, Afghanistan, the crumbling economy, our failing health care system, and any one of the million other problems facing America today, that Congress would have plenty to keep it busy.
Not so! Many of our elected representatives are going above and beyond the call of duty to go after that vital threat to national security that is peer-to-peer file sharing programs.
We’ve already seen how the House Oversight Committee was pressuring the FTC to investigate P2P programs as a potential source for leaking government information (as opposed to a missing laptop or ticked-off insider). Last week Patrick Leahy—who’s normally much more savvy about identity theft and data breaches—co-sponsored a bill that would empower the Justice Department to file civil suits against people using P2P for copyright infringement.
And this weekend past, two House Democrats added a provision to an education bill that would not only require colleges and universities to emphasize the consequences of illegal file-sharing to students even more, but would tie eligibility of federal aid to providing fee-based music subscription services.
Put more simply, Congress is working with the recording industry to shake down colleges for new revenue or risk cutting off aid to students:
The prospect of losing a combined total of nearly $100 billion a year in federal financial aid, coupled with the possibility of overzealous copyright-bots limiting the sharing of legitimate content, has alarmed university officials. “Such an extraordinarily inappropriate and punitive outcome would result in all students on that campus losing their federal financial aid—including Pell grants and student loans that are essential to their ability to attend college, advance their education, and acquire the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century economy,” a letter from university officials to Congress written on Wednesday said. “Lower-income students, those most in need of federal financial aid, would be harmed most under the entertainment industry’s proposal.”
Cory Doctorow rightfully calls this for what it is: “pork-barrel politics” that combines greedy politicians looking to get money from the entertainment industry with said industry’s willingness to sidestep real competition and force the prime music-buying demographic into using services they clearly don’t want.
And these are Democrats, mind you. If this is their idea of proving their bona fides in the war on terror, that’s a pretty cracktastic way to go about it. Instead of cozying up to Big Media by putting the thumbscrews to college students, Democrats in Congress should be spending a little more time focusing on genuine threats to national security—and given that half of said threats (wiretapping, data mining, national security letters) come from the Justice Department itself, I would be loath to give that agency any more enforcement power until it’s proven capable of using the power it does have ethically once again.
The Return · Mon Nov 12, 07:50 AM by Martin H. Bosworth
It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you, without a dope blog to link to…
Seriously, I apologize for the long, long interval between posts, but personal crises and other professional obligations (like writing articles for this site) took precedence. But I’m back now, and I promise one post a day. Even if it’s just something like “Here, read this!”, I will be all up in it.
I’ll do my best to make this a blog worth reading again. Promise!
Comcast Pays Bloggers To Say Nice Things About Them · Fri Sep 21, 05:47 AM by Martin H. Bosworth
Bob Garfield’s one-man war against Comcast continues, and this time he’s gotten a look at the face of the enemy:
As word-of-mouth guru Andy Sernovitz has discovered, Comcast is so bereft it is paying bloggers to say nice things about its service…So sleazy, so pathetic and so unnecessary. If Comcast—or any other gigantic service provider—wants good buzz, it can get it in exponentially greater volume for for free. All they have to do is treat customers right.
Andy Sernovitz has the offending posts here. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch memorably summed up PayPerPost back in 2006.
To be clear, I’m not against being paid to blog at all, but if you do it, you should be straight up about who’s paying you and why, and let the reader judge if your sentiments are genuine or not. If, for example, you are a genuine Comcast user who actually likes their service, and you want to endorse them publicly, that’s fine. But don’t paint yourself as “just another satisfied customer” and not disclose that you’re getting money under the table.
And Garfield’s right—instead of spending bucks on fake astroturf PR initiatives, why not simply put that money towards paying your customer service reps to do a better job?
One Man's War Against Comcast · Thu Sep 13, 01:52 PM by Martin H. Bosworth
Ad Age’s Bob Garfield is mad as hell about Comcast, and he’s not going to take it anymore:
In any event, the damage has been done. They have ruined two weekends and screwed up half of my telecom services. I will shake them down for as much free service as I can get, then drop them at the first opportunity. And they deserve it. They deserve much worse.
Garfield’s article got a lot of commiserating comments, and his follow-up
has more discussion about a company’s responsibility to its customers:
The fundamental blame belongs to Comcast—and Verizon and Time Warner and any telecom provider that gives employees incentives to sign up new customers and fill as many installation tickets as possible, and ZERO incentive to get it right. That is why they need to be made an example of.
Of course, Comcast horror stories are all too familiar to ConsumerAffairs.Com readers, but I’m glad to see someone like Garfield using his clout in the advertising/media world to shake the tree about how bad Comcast’s business practices are. It’s like I say—when you’re a monopoly, you can afford to treat your customers like crap. Who’s going to challenge you?
"Search Scrubbers" Take On Consumer Protection Sites · Wed Sep 12, 02:48 PM by Martin H. Bosworth
Yesterday, MSNBC’s venerable Bob Sullivan discussed the new phenomenon of search engine optimization (SEO) companies that are shilling themselves as corporate reputation defenders—mostly by filling up search results with custom-designed sites that will push complaint sites and consumer news sites—like this one—further down in search rankings:
“Our Search Engine Reputation Management strategy is very simple: Displace…the negative listings with favorable ones and ones that you can control or influence,” it says. “DONE! SEO helps make sure that your company and key executives are being portrayed favorably online by burying the negatives and maintaining a positive online image.”
DONE! SEO apparently considers ConsumerAffairs.Com a “problem site”, even though we’re one of the most highly regarded consumer news portals in the world. And come on, attacking Consumers’ Union? That’s just low.
Make no mistake, many complaints we receive—and other sites like ours do as well—are frivolous and silly. But just as many are serious, legitimate concerns about real problems at real companies, voiced by frustrated people who are tired of being treated like fools. These aren’t “bloggers,” but everyday people who write us asking for help and advice when they have no one else to turn.
Bob is too nice to say this, so I’ll say it: companies like this are deliberately gaming Google by filling up search results with fake sites that don’t have any useful content, but will appear first in search rankings. It’s really just a corporate version of Googlebombing, where groups will push keywords or sites higher in the rankings through heavy linkage. Remember the infamous “George Bush is a miserable failure” campaign? Same kind of thing.
The fact that the Google rep he spoke to wouldn’t go on the record is very telling—they know how easily their search algorithm can be messed with, but to admit that would open the chink in Google’s armor that competing search engines like Ask.com and Yahoo are ready to exploit. As far as DONE!SEO and its ilk, I can only say this—if companies spent as much time putting out good quality products and hiring good customer service personnel as they did on shady tricks to preserve their image, I’d be in a different line of work.
The "Deportee Revolving Door" Is Powered By Identity Theft · Thu Aug 30, 03:00 PM by Martin H. Bosworth
As I’ve discussed before, mass deportations of illegal immigration doesn’t do anything but scare people—it doesn’t stop the identity theft market, and it certainly doesn’t deter determined illegal workers from turning around and coming right back:
Although no records are kept of the numbers of deported immigrants sneaking back in to the country—as Arellano did to join her 8-year-old U.S.-born son Saul—anecdotal evidence suggests that it is widespread. “Deportation is a revolving door,” said Elias Bermudez, the founder of Immigrants Without Borders, an advocacy group which works with thousands of illegal immigrants in the border state of Arizona. “People are picked up at their homes and deported, and some of them are back in three or four days, so it is not an effective policy,” he added.
The question the Reuters article fails to ask is obvious: How is it that repeatedly-deported illegal aliens keep coming back and finding work so easily? The answer is simple—because there’s a vast underground economy that runs on black-market information trading and selling the data to people who need new identities—like, say, undocumented workers.
For a more in-depth look at how the counterfeit information trade enables both illegal immigration and threatens national security, check out Paper Weapons, recommended via Ed Dickson.
I keep saying this, and I’ll say it till someone listens: Until we address the black market of the information trade, we will never solve any of the related problems it feeds—immigration, identity theft, financial crimes, etc. The underground economy is at the heart of it all, and we’re wasting billions of dollars and thousands of lives on a pointless war instead of dealing with this.
Will Banks Use Interchange Fees To Bail Themselves Out? · Thu Aug 23, 12:27 PM by Martin H. Bosworth
Mitch Goldstone, owner of 30 Minute Photos and one of the leaders in the interchange fee lawsuits, sent me an intriguing Internet the other day:
We cannot help but wonder whether the banks will wield their unbridled power to tap their $40 billion annual merchant interchange fee windfall to help reduce their growing credit crisis. With the deepening mortgage meltdown, will the banks again storm their interchange vault. The credit card companies have been regularly hiking their interchange fees. But, with many financial institutions facing a credit shortage and onerous liquidity shortfalls, interchange fees might be one way to bail themselves out at the expense of their retail and cardholder customers. We certainly will not tolerate such a move.
That’s something I hadn’t considered, and it makes a lot of sense. Given the monopoly power Visa and MasterCard—and their partner banks—exert in setting fees for using plastic in transactions, it wouldn’t surprise me if hapless merchants suddenly saw their fees take another spike in order to ensure an available liquidity pool for banks.
Both Visa and MasterCard have already moved their IPOs into high gear in order to build war chests for their litigation costs, so this would be just another day at the office for them. This may be paranoid, but it’s also a perfectly valid reason why we need to end the collusive practices that set interchange fees so high in the first place.
If you’re interested in this issue, Mitch provides regular news and commentary on the interchange fee wars at his blog, WayTooHigh.com.
Ukranian Arrested As Seller Of Data From TJX Breach · Wed Aug 22, 01:11 PM by Martin H. Bosworth
Information Week has the scoop:
Doug Bem, an inspector with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, told InformationWeek that Maksym Yastremskiy, who is believed to be in his mid-20s, has been taken into custody in Turkey. “He’s an individual who a number of federal agencies have had on their radar screen for some time,” said Bem. “It appears he is the largest individual seller of card data that traces back to the TJX breach… This is a significant opportunity.” Bem added that they don’t have any information that leads them to believe Yastremskiy actually broke into the TJX network and stole the information himself. Yastremskiy allegedly was a major reseller.
Yastremskiy (assuming he is guilty) sounds like one of the many black-market data resellers who profit from the underground economy that trades in stolen data and information. How do you think it is that data stolen from Massachusetts ends up in the hands of a bunch of low-rent Florida fraudsters?
As long as there’s profit to be made from stealing and trading in personal data, and businesses can write off data breaches as a necessary expense, the situation will only get worse. This is why, despite dozens of reported data breaches, lawsuits, and cries for legislation, your data is less safe than ever. Until businesses and governments get wise and start applying security technology as a first principle, people like Yastremskiy will continue to get away with grand theft, if not murder.
AT&T Censors Pearl Jam Over Anti-Bush Lyrics · Thu Aug 9, 12:40 PM by Martin H. Bosworth
If you want a good example of what the Internet will look like if AT&T has its way, check out this story.
Save The Internet has more, and you can watch the video in question here:
This is exactly the kind of thing we need net neutrality to protect against. The Internet is not meant to be hostage to the capricious whims of corporations who are too afraid of losing their “favored nation” stance to risk offending a guy with a 28 percent approval rating.
Great Moments In Business History · Mon Aug 6, 05:11 PM by Martin H. Bosworth
Hey, here’s a great idea!
Let’s take the ex-CEO of a floundering home improvement company, who got to walk away with a $210 million severance package despite years of bad management and languishing stock prices, and make him the new head of a floundering car company!
It makes perfect sense when you consider that Cerberus’ chairman is none other than former (failed) Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose chief accomplishments in the position were failing to persuade China to spend more and save less, and bilked the government out of billions in tax dollars.
Given that, why else would you choose a guy like Nardelli (who has no experience in the auto industry, and whose management style can charitably be called “aggressive”) to run the show? Guys like Nardelli and Snow are the perfect examples of how modern American business works…not only does failing your investors and shareholders not prevent you from walking away a multimillionaire, but now you get an even more spectacular chance to fail again!
This has been today’s edition of “Great Moments In Business History.”
