Dear AT&T,

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.

Yeah, that Bono.  This has nothing to do with his music which is, generally speaking, decent.  No, my assertion is based on comments he made in the New York Times (which I first saw on Ars Technica).

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.)

… regardless of whether they’re a good deal, their marketing tactics leave much to be desired.

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.

Cory Doctorow is a popular blogger.  xkcd refers to him often (usually wearing goggles and a cape and riding a hot-air balloon in the blogosphere).  He’s fairly intelligent when it comes to technology, or so I am led to believe…

… 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.

From xkcd, number 651:

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