Lovely AT&T advertising e-mail

There are three sections highlighted in red there.

First, they claim, “Now it’s time to upgrade your phone”.  That implies they’re checking who’s eligible for upgrades… we’ll see that they’re not.

Second, they list the “number(s)” that they claim are eligible for an upgrade.  They list all five lines on the account.  Only one of those lines is actually eligible for an upgrade; the rest of us have upgraded within the last six months and are not eligible for an upgrade for another year at a minimum.

Third, at the bottom they say “Ask about offers for other lines on this account”.  Five is the maximum.  I couldn’t add another line if I wanted to.  They do this all the time.  I regularly get e-mails from AT&T telling me I can add another line.  When I log on to my account on their website, I get an “Add another line” link, even though I can’t actually add another line.  Next time I get an e-mail telling me to add another line, I should call and demand they let me do so, and threaten to sue them for false advertising if they refuse.

Is it really too much to ask that their advertising not feel rubber-stamped?

The problem is that this “zoom” button (which doesn’t actually zoom anything) is extremely inconsistent in behavior.  I draw these examples from my usage yesterday:

• Terminal and Xcode treat “zoom” as “maximize”.
• Safari tries to resize to fit content, but much of the time it’s wrong, and sometimes it fails entirely.  For example, on more than one website I clicked “zoom” and the window shrank, hiding even more content; clicking it again to try to toggle it back had no effect.  Safari seemed to do that a lot – the “zoom” button would simply do nothing, regardless of whether I had resized the window manually or not.
• iTunes treats it as a toggle between miniature mode and the user-defined size.  That’s hardly a “zoom”, now is it?

If you search the intertubes for “OSX maximize window”, you’ll find that pretty much every Mac-centric forum is populated entirely by people who believe nobody ever needs to maximize windows (never mind that some of Apple’s own apps do exactly that); the common reply to “I want to maximize this window” is “no, you don’t” and “just live without it, you’ll get used to it”.  (Yeah, because you have no choice…)

There’s something to be said for the fact that even if “maximize” is not strictly necessary, at least you always know what the button will do (speaking of the functionality in Windows and Linux).

I don’t want to argue about whether the whole UI paradigm of OSX is right or wrong, but at the very least it should be consistent…

Oh, and one other thing.  Apple, if you’re going to enforce a “no maximized windows” idea (by not supporting window maximization by default), you should at least enable snap-to-borders.

At 5 my realtor forwarded me an e-mail from the escrow company.  Apparently, the recording office rejected the Deed of Trust.  No, it wasn’t filled out wrong; the reason they gave was that the font is too small.

You read that right.  The font is too small.

This is absurd.  Looking at the Deed of Trust they copied for me, it appears to be a standard form; how did nobody know about this requirement?  How did none of the people processing the papers know about it?  How did none of them catch it?

This cannot seriously be the first time this has ever happened to this escrow company, can it?

If anyone out there is buying a house in King County, Washington, I suggest you make sure the escrow company processing your closing papers knows that there’s a minimum font size requirement for the Deed of Trust (and possibly other paperwork) and that they should make sure their paperwork meets those requirements.

He told me that the charge was added by Verisign – confirming my googled knowledge that Jamster is at least partially owned by Verisign.  So… yet another reason to dislike Verisign.

He also added a purchase control thingy to AT&T’s MediaNET to prevent anyone from charging my phone line again without my explicit approval.

I asked why that wasn’t the default – they should automatically verify that you want these kinds of things.  His answer?  “By law we have to allow people to buy things on their phone.”

Guess what?  Verification does not in any way negate the ability to buy things on one’s phone. It was an idiotic excuse, but I didn’t want to yell at him.  After all, there wasn’t anything this particular customer service agent could do about it.

Let me be clear, though: enabling verification by default would resolve the most glaring problems with the system, and if they do that I’ll be satisfied.

So anyway I asked who I can talk to about getting AT&T to stop this sort of thing from happening on a scale larger than “we’ll refund things for whoever happens to notice and complain”.  At first he said “we have no department for that”, but after I pressed him on the issue (there must be someone I could talk to) he directed me to the “Contact Us” section of AT&T Wireless’ website.

So off I go:

…

…

… HULK SMASH THINGS.

Looks like my next course of action is to track down some fraud department number on my own, or failing that, find a VP’s (or CEO’s) phone number and leave a message for them.

Back in August 2008 I upgraded my AT&T plan from a single line to a five-line family plan.  On my second bill (dated Oct 5, 2008), one of the lines showed a charge like this:

“Flycell”… Mblox… $10.66

I called up my sister-in-law and asked her whether she had solicited the purchase.  I didn’t care if she did, but if she had I wanted her to pay for it.  Turns out she hadn’t.

So, I called up AT&T and got them to reverse the charge.  They said they would, and that they had unsubscribed the line from that merchant’s service.

Sounds simple, right?  Well, look at the next bill, dated Nov 5, 2008:

“Flycell”… Mblox… -$10.66 (refund)

“Flycell”… Mblox… $10.66

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… $10.66

Well, this isn’t looking good.  They obviously didn’t cancel the subscription the first month, because it was charged again, and now there’s a *second* subscription!  What’s worse, the contact phone number for Mblox and OpenMarket are exactly the same, so it’s the same company.

So I called AT&T again, and they told me they’d refund it and it’d all be taken care of.

Here’s the next bill, dated Dec 5, 2008:

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… -$10.66 (refund)

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… -$10.66 (refund)

“Thumbplay”… OpenMarket… $10.66

Hmm.  Two refunds for Thumbplay and now two charges for Thumbplay.  Unfortunately at the time I didn’t realize that I never got the refund for the second Flycell charge.

Well, it appeared to have sorted itself out, and sure enough the Jan 5, 2009 bill had no charges from either company.

… and now we get to Jan 5, 2010, this time on my line:

“XXL: Mobile content”… Jamster… $10.67

$#@*&$(*@#%$

Note that neither of us ever solicited these subscriptions, neither of us ever gave out our numbers to those “get a free ringtone” websites, and neither of us have any affiliation with any of these companies in any way.

It is, quite simply, blatant theft.  Jamster and friends throw charges at people’s lines (using their established business relationship with various mobile carriers) and just hope they won’t notice.  Some quick googling (“jamster scam” and “mblox scam” both turn up some dirt) shows that this is not uncommon.  Yes, a lot of the people who fall victim to this scam have signed up for Jamster’s “free” ringtones; but a lot of them have not, and that’s where I fall.

The problem here is that AT&T does absolutely no verification to see whether the customer actually did subscribe to these things – for some unfathomable reason, they just trust Jamster.

Well, I’m going to call AT&T tomorrow morning and get them to rectify the situation yet again.  I’m also going to chase this up the org chart as high as I can to get something done about it.

So, have any of you experienced anything similar?

Edit: here’s part two.

I am writing to let you know that your marketing department needs to be kicked in the head.   You see, I just got this letter in the mail from you:

Dear Preferred Customer,

Because we value you as a customer, I have a great deal for you.  It starts with the opportunity to get a FREE 3G phone when you activate an additional line of service!

That’s right, you’re Pre-Approved to receive a FREE phone when you activate an additional line of service with a new two-year agreement.

[...]

What’s more, you’ll continue to receive special equipment offers, plus a monthly corporate service discount of up to 8% on qualified monthly charges.

There are a few problems with this “offer”, all of which prove that you do not in fact value me as a customer.

First: This was printed with a computer.  Would it really have been too difficult to put my name instead of “Preferred Customer”?  It’s printed one inch higher, where the address goes, so clearly you know who this particular piece of paper would get sent to.

Second: I could not add a sixth line to my account even if I wanted to, because five lines is the maximum.

Third: My account currently has a 12% monthly discount through my employer.  Am I supposed to feel good that you’re offering me a smaller discount?

Fourth: As a result of the second and third points, I must conclude that “Pre-Approved” is a complete fabrication.  If there is a pre-approval process, it’s being run by a small group of blind monkeys.

So AT&T, you know that database query that extracts a list of customers for the mailing?  Yeah, pull that out.  I’m going to tell you how to fix your problems right now.

See how it starts with SELECT, then lists a bunch of fields, then it says FROM and a table name, and then there’s a WHERE clause?

Add two more things to that WHERE clause:

WHERE [...] AND discount < 0.08 AND num_lines < 5

You see, this way, you’ll filter out the people who couldn’t use your offer even if they wanted to (and you won’t insult them by offering them a discount lower than their current discount).

It’s a five second modification.  Please do it.  You’ll save trees not printing so many offers, and you’ll save money on paper and ink and postage.

Which brings up one last problem with this letter:

Fifth: You’re mailing me a paper letter.  I had thought I asked for everything electronically; it turns out that paper mailings are specifically opt-out.  Well, now I’ve opted out.

I probably would not have done that if you had bothered filtering your mailings so you would actually be sending them to people who might care.

Thanks for your attention.

I have some specific problems with Bono’s statements, so I’m going to tackle them one by one.

the only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files.

This claim is so ridiculous it makes me wonder what pharmaceuticals Bono has begun mixing into his food.  File sizes may have been relevant five years ago, but in these days of commonplace multi-GB game downloads, file sizes are nowhere near the top of anyone’s concerns.

1. The newspaper business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all.  Their problems stem from declining classified ad revenue and the increased availability of free information.
2. The music business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all.  Their problems stem from pushing crappy, DRM-laden music on their customers, and their hesitance to embrace a business model that works well with modern technology.  (But despite this, Ars points out that EMI, for example, is actually doing very well with rising revenues.)
3. The movie business’ problems have nothing to do with file sizes at all.  Their problems stem from pushing crappy, DRM-laden movies on their customers.  I’m all for superhero movies, but did we really need to make 10,000 sequels last year?  (Ars points out that box office receipts have been rising over the last three years.)

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators

A decade’s worth of file-sharing has made it clear that the people hurting content creators are the publishers. Independent creators of music and games are finding that they can be far more profitable by distributing DRM-free content on their own and skipping the middleman.

In fact, publishers aren’t even necessary anymore.  It used to be that musicians couldn’t afford to edit and distribute their music without the support of a publisher willing to risk investing in them; nowadays, you can grab a cheap Mac that comes with the software you need to edit your music, and selling it yourself on the internet is essentially risk-free.

the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

… and yet again Bono exposes his ignorance.  ISPs don’t profit from music downloading.  If anything it costs them more, by having to support the bandwidth necessary to sustain it.  They certainly can’t advertise it.  At any rate, ISP profits certainly don’t “perfectly mirror” the lost receipts of the music business – especially because the music business isn’t actually losing money!

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.

It’s technically possible for ISPs to track connections and protocols (but not necessarily content).  However, there are several problems with his comparison:

1. The Post Office is also technically capable of monitoring the packages it processes; is Bono in favor of opening every piece of mail sent through the postal system on the off-chance an envelope contains child pornography?  I certainly hope not!  There’s a reason the post office doesn’t open packages.
2. It’s only technically possible to track unencrypted content.  It’s not feasible.  The trouble is, the solution isn’t to track it – it’s to identify what it is, and if it meets some arbitrary definition of “infringing”, to block it.  There could be no recourse for accidentally blocked connections – it wouldn’t be feasible.  That’s essentially arbitrary censorship.
3. Attempting to implement the system would be prohibitively expensive.  Customers won’t want to pay for it; media companies won’t either.  That leaves either the ISPs or the government shouldering the financial burden; either way, customers are going to end up footing the bill unwillingly.  This would end up being basically a mandatory “music tax” – and I can tell you right now, if they try this, they can be sure I’ll stop buying music to pay for the fees.  That won’t help their profit margin at all.
4. The trivial workaround for content filtering is encryption – it takes virtually no effort to enable SSL on peer-to-peer connections, but encryption makes content filtering irrelevant.  You can’t filter something you can’t read.

The problem then becomes (again as Ars points out) that would-be filterers will then begin filtering based on protocol rather than content.  That’s akin to trying to filter out swear words by banning the entire English language.  It doesn’t succeed at its goal (you can still swear in other languages), and it has huge, unpleasant side effects (we still need English).

In other words, if you block one protocol, another will pop up; and inevitably ISPs will find themselves blocking protocols that have many legitimate uses.  (World of Warcraft comes to mind; it uses peer-to-peer file transfers to speed up patch downloads.  This undoubtedly saves Blizzard gobs and gobs of money on server bandwidth.)

Now, I’ll admit; I didn’t actually read the rest of Bono’s article.  It’s a set of ten unrelated ideas, each independently digestible.  It happens that this one is the only one I care about.

So perhaps you can see why I said Bono is a complete moron – he points out a goal (“save the media industry”) ignoring the evidence that it doesn’t need saving, and then lays out a plan that will do far more damage to society than peer-to-peer ever did to media – not to mention that the plan wouldn’t even increase media companies’ revenue.  And to top it off, he makes a self-defeating comparison with the post office (unless he really is in favor of the post office opening our mail).

It’s almost like he doesn’t know how the internet works.

(If you didn’t read my comments on net neutrality a few months ago, it’s a closely related subject and you should read it now.)

Friday morning at 7:15 am (when I needed as much sleep as possible because I was about to drive 850 miles), my cell phone rang.  It was Komodo, wanting to get me to buy an SSL certificate from them instead of from GoDaddy.

They must have some crawler out there, trawling the web for sites with nearly expired SSL certificates.  When the crawler finds one, it does a WHOIS lookup on the domain, looks up the administrative contact for the domain, and adds that contact to their call list.

Unfortunately, they have two problems:

1. They didn’t verify either my area code (mountain time zone) or my address (pacific time zone) to make sure they wouldn’t be calling so early in the morning.  (The sales guy told me their system is only supposed to give them east coast numbers.)
2. They didn’t try to find out if my number is a cell phone.  It’s illegal to cold-call cell phones; the only reason the call lasted as long as it did is that for a while I wasn’t sure whether Komodo was a subsidiary of GoDaddy or a competitor (they’re the latter).  A cell phone number being publicly available (in my case, in my domains’ WHOIS info) does not make it legal to cold-call the number for marketing purposes.

I’m going to file an FCC complaint; maybe lighting a fire under them will get them to fix their system.

… but I’m beginning to wonder.  Today, he posted a blog entry in which he claims the following:

The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town’s municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA’s spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts).

That sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?  To read that summary, you’d think that these facts were true:

• The town runs a municipal wireless network providing internet access to its thousands of residents.
• The MPAA initiated a lawsuit which resulted in the network being forcibly shut down, preventing thousands of people from accessing the internet.
• The MPAA took the opportunity to whine about lost profits.
• The MPAA was thus violating the Geneva Conventions.

As it turns out, none of those things are true.  Doctorow actually links to his original source, though he apparently didn’t read it.  I’ll summarize the sequence of events for you:

1. A free wireless access point is set up at the county courthouse.  It covers a one block area.  Regular users number in the dozens.
2. A user used the free connection to download a copyrighted movie, and the MPAA noticed.
3. The MPAA notified the ISP.
4. The ISP notified the county.
5. The county shut down the free access point.
6. The MPAA, when asked to comment, said that piracy is something the movie industry fights every day, and that it’s a common occurrence in towns big and small; the spokesperson never mentions profits one way or another.

Even a cursory reading of the Coshocton Tribune article would have shown Doctorow that his summary was a) grossly inaccurate and b) highly inflammatory.

I realize that he has a great desire to fight the MPAA and RIAA’s lawsuit-happy copyright enforcement tactics.  I do too.  But flooding the internet with deliberate misinformation doesn’t help anyone.

And to the Slashdot editors – come on, guys, can’t you even do thirty seconds of fact checking before you post articles?  It’s so common for you to post articles without fact-checking nowadays that I don’t believe anything I read on Slashdot until I read the source articles myself.  It’s almost to the point that I may as well stop reading Slashdot entirely.

This is exactly what bugs me about the TSA’s “security” these days.