The Phone Company Began as a Fraud

I am adding a new tag “Verizon Fraud” to label upcoming stories about Verizon and their various collection of frauds they perpetrate on unsuspecting consumers.

The Original Bell Telephone Company started off as a fraud. The various possibilities are detailed in the Wikipedia article Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy, where we read that patent examiner Zenas Wilber admitted in a sworn affidavit that he had taken a $100 bribe from Bell to falsely state that Bell’s patent application had arrived first. In addition, Wilber had shown details of Gray’s patent to Bell.

And so the Bell Company continued their fraudulently activities even being broken up in the various Baby Bells. Presently, Verizon perpetuates the fine tradition of screwing their customers.

This will the first in quite an extensive series of scams, frauds, cons, and grifts perpetrated by Verizon.

Some of us are familiar with the practice of slamming; according to Verizon’s own definition:

Slamming is an industry term for an unauthorized change in your choice of long distance company. Often this is accomplished when someone tries to sell you long distance service or you sign a piece of paper for a contest or other marketing promotion, without checking the fine print. Often your endorsement on a small prize check serves as the authorizing signature. The long distance company then tells your local phone provider they have formal authorization to switch you from your current long distance company.

Interestingly, Verizon does this to themselves. That’s right, they’ll slam you from their company to another company they own. Let me explain.

Years ago, a client of mine signed a contract with Verizon for 8 BRI lines to transmit digital video signals between a Newark court house and a New Jersey State prison so that inmates would not have to be transported from their cells to the court for hearings, re-sentencings and so on.

A few months ago, his bill ballooned from an average of $300.00 per month to more than ten times as much. What he discovered was that he was slammed. Verizon, without notifying him, decided it wanted to exit this line of business and transferred his account to MCI, another Verizon company. Unfortunately for him, he does not have a contract for data services with MCI, so they charged him at the highest non-contract rate for bytes transmitted.

In addition, the configuration of his lines have changed so the quality of service is so horrible he is unable to properly utilize the lines. This is what happens when you deal with a company that has nothing but contempt for its customers.

He has now been fighting for three months to get his bill readjusted and to get his service level back to where it was before the switch.

Unfortunately, the prison is afraid to switch from using ISDN lines to VPN over the Internet. They would save thousands of dollars a year, but sadly this is what happens when you have the government running what should be a business.

Further reading:

The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray-Alexander Bell Controversy and Its Many Players

The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret

What Happened to Technorati?

If you’ve been writing a blog for the past few years you probably used Technorati, either to try to gain some traffic for yourself or to find interesting articles written by other bloggers. Sadly, on 14 Oct 2009 Technorati fiddled with how its site operates and launched its new site while screwing with tens of thousands of smaller blogs by disabling widgets, its API, and RSS feeds.

In this new re-launch, Technorati will be concentrating more on the top 100 blogs. I don’t need Technorati to deliver me articles from the top 100 websites, I already subscribe to the feeds of the top websites, what I want to read are unknown, smaller bloggers from other countries with opinions different than the same-old same-old that Technorati will be delivering. I now use Global Voices to fill this particular gap left by Technorati.

In the past, Technorati’s search delivered the most recent results as opposed to what it now considers the best results. What this means for thousands and thousands of small bloggers is that it’s highly unlikely anyone will come across their articles. Bloggers joined Technorati because it was useful to them. But who needs Technorati now?

How to Kill your Brand – the LG Upgrade Fiasco

The original meaning of the word “brand” meant to burn (from the Old Norse brandr), referring to the practice of burning a mark (or brand) onto a product or animal.

Although a brand originally denoted ownership it now denotes a promise. When I buy a bottle of Coca Cola instead of Crapa Cola, it is because Coke made a promise to me that the flavor and quality would be exactly the same as I have come to expect from them.

If you bought an LG BD300 with HD Netflix support last Christmas, you probably received a notice a few months later that a new firmware update was available that would let you play YouTube videos on your TV [Engadget].

A few weeks later, an avalanche of users reported that their BD-300s were no longer able to play regular DVDs, only Blu-ray. Seems the upgrade physically destroyed the ability of the drive to play regular DVDs and downloading the old firmware didn’t solve the problem for those who tried to play a DVD after the upgrade. Those fortunate enough not to try to play a DVD after the youtube upgrade were in fact able to go back to the old firmware and return to DVD playing functionality.

You can view many of the complaints at this forum and at Amazon. A petition asking LG to fix the problem for free can be found here.

At first LG support offered to fix the problem for $69.00. Then as the problem escalated, they announced they would fix it for free but only if you could produce a receipt that you purchased the player from an authorized dealer.

Note to LG: This is not how you handle a problem that you caused. Accidents happen, you did not intend for the upgrade to harm your products. However, how you treat your customers is not an accident. If you read the complaints you will notice that many of your customers are swearing not to buy any of your products again. The first thing you should have done after you charged $69 to fix a problem you caused should have been to publicly announce that you were returning the money – your customers should not have to pay for your ineptitude, nor should it go so far that they have to sign a petition asking you to make good. Next, you should have made a public apology vowing to fix the drives for free – no questions asked and no proof needed that the player had to have been purchased only at an authorized dealer.

You could have turned this fiasco into an opportunity to show everyone that your company is a world class manufacturer that stands fully behind its products.

You should be fixing the drives even if the players were stolen. Otherwise, the request for proof of purchase only looks like a ploy to limit the number of drives you have to replace. I estimate that only a few thousand customers downloaded the fatal software before the warning flag went up. I also estimate that, including shipping, it costs you at most $30.00 per unit to fix the problem. So what were you trying to save by asking for proof of purchase? Less than thirty thousand dollars?

Is that what your brand is worth? The LG brand stood for quality and service – something that takes years to burn into consumers’ minds, you’re willing to snuff out in an instant to save a few thousand dollars?

Stupid, stupid marketing and shame on you.

Making Money From Lazy MTA Riders

The Daily News reported last week that many riders don’t know what to do – or can’t be bothered – with small-change balances left on their MetroCards.

I know what you’re thinking: “So what?” Well, it seems that straphangers will leave more than $53 million on expired MetroCards this year. Most riders said they simply throw away cards with balances of five, 10 or 20 cents.

I don’t get it. If you use the subways and buses often then you have to buy another card. Why not simply hand in your old card and ask to add the balance? Personally, I use the automatic dispensers. It asks if I want a new card or add money to an existing card. Nothing could be simpler.

But fortunes are made off the stupidity or laziness of others.

Here’s a suggestion to panhandlers: instead of asking for donations on the subways, ask for old MetroCards. I am sure you are more likely to get a few cards with balances on them than trying to get cash. In addition, since you’re hanging around on subways a lot, pick up discarded cards lying about. Bring them to the MTA kiosks and have all the balances put on one card. Contact me when you have a bunch of cards with decent balances of $10 or more. I will buy them from you 60 cents on the dollar – cash. I won’t lie – I have someone who will buy them from me for 80 cents on the dollar. Hey, I gotta make something too.

One Mistake Rule Threatens All Our Electronic Freedoms

Here’s the problem: everyone over-reacts. One low-life kills a masseuse who advertised her services on Craigslist and Craigslist has to shut down an entire category of advertising [Read more CBSNews].

Yet for years when someone murdered a masseuse using the telephone and Yellow Pages, the phone company was not asked to stop taking ads for message parlors, nor did the government try to control the phone company.

Last year, a postal worker in Maryland recognized one single Operation Santa volunteer as a registered sex offender, and the Post Office summarily drops a popular national program begun in 1954 in the small Alaska town of North Pole, where volunteers open and respond to thousands of letters addressed to Santa each year [Read more CNews].

There is an element of risk to everything in life. Drowning Is the number one cause of death among children in Miami, Florida; does that mean we should close all pools, beaches, lakes and water parks? Or doesn’t it make more sense to educate the public and put in place better pool fencing in the case of pools, and to examine how the deaths occurred so as to prevent them?

A fourteen year old Texas girl and her mother sue MySpace because the young girl went out on a date with a 19 year old who, they claim, sexually assaulted her. Luckily for all of us, the suit was dismissed by a Federal Judge, but cases like this continue. This was never a MySpace problem, but a negligent mother problem.

One day, a woman will be buying a car she saw on eBay and will get murdered and the auction house will be pressured to close down that portion of its business.

When a plane crashes and people die, we do not ask that the entire airline industry stop doing business. The causes of the crash are investigated and the problem identified and improvements are made. As a consequence, airplane travel is one of the safest modes of getting from here to there in the world. That is the proper response to a problem, actually find the cause and fix it – don’t just shut it down.

The easy, knee-jerk reaction by government to anything untoward on the Internet is to try to shut it down. In September of 2006 the FBI joined the Bush administration’s War on Porn and began looking for a few good agents for a new anti-obscenity squad. The new squad was to gather evidence against ‘manufacturers and purveyors’ of pornography — not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults [Read more Planck's Constant].

Closing down a Craigslist section does not make women safer from predators. One incident should not spell the end of our electronic freedoms.

Photo Credit: Buzzle.com

How to Get a Million Dollars of Free Press

Photo Credit: Turban Bomb

Here’s the deal: Mailorama.fr, a French Internet marketing company similar to fatwallet planned a great publicity gimmick to promote its website which offers cash-back to visitors who click through their site to make online purchases.

The idea was simple: drive around central Paris throwing cash in envelopes from the windows of a double-decker London bus. The plan was to distribute a total of 5,000 envelopes, each containing €5 to €500 ($7.50 to $750).

But the scheme went agley. Just before the event was to have started, the Gendarmes freaked out when they saw an unruly mob of 7,000 that had formed near the Eiffel Tower in search of free cash. As soon as the cops announced that the whole thing was being canceled, the crowd ran amok.

About a dozen people were arrested, store windows were broken, a car was overturned and at least one man (see photo above) was beaten by thugs. SWAT had to be called in to restore order.

Some of my readers may view this promotion as a flop; however, as the New York Times noted, “… the uproar brought the company notoriety beyond its wildest dreams.”

Fort Hood and the Tweeting of the News

Paul Carr at Tech Crunch believes that the news reporting of Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings is a perfect example of how social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency.

Paul notes that: “the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.”

The problem, Paul writes, is that her information was not accurate. But wait, Paul, neither is information that we get from the mainstream news. Reuters, the BBC, the New York Times have in the past not only misreported the news, but also have photoshopped their images to make them more newsworthy.

Paul castigated the soldier for tweeting instead of helping. We all have watched YouTube videos of kids getting the crap kicked out of them while no one steps in to help, instead making sure to focus their cellphones on the events unfolding before them. And while we may all tsk-tsk about how “citizen journalists” are more interested in boosting their own egos than calling 911 or actually stepping in and helping the victim, this is no different from real-live accredited journalists who report the news.

If a real news reporter from CNN or the BBC with a camera had been on the post, would Paul have criticized him for filming the images rather than putting down the camera and “helping” out? The truth is, any reporter doing so would have been fired by his bosses if he shut off his camera.

We also do not know what would have happened to the story if there were no tweets. Would this have ended up as just another training accident? We have a President who is actively trying to court the favor of Muslims throughout the world. Who knows how the story might have been reported by the military.

The American mainstream media actually lag behind blogs as to what is really happening. For example, from Debbie at the Right Truth, we are presented with links to other stories discussing in more detail Hasan’s links to terror organizations. At the Jawa Report we learn that a member of the Texas mosque (where Hasan was currently attending) not only refuses to condemn Hasan, but justifies their murder because “they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims”. Not something one will read in the New York Times.

I believe it is important for the news to come to us unfiltered by those with huge corporate advertising behind them, without pressure from the government, without the worry of political correctness. While political correctness may be an important social lubricant, it should be absolutely excluded from news reporting.

See this Flickr video.

How to be a Great Programmer

Photo Credit: Internet Annoyance Day

There are only three things you need in order to be a great programmer.

Before I list these, let me give you some background. I went to a hospital in Secaucus, New Jersey a few weeks ago for a sleep study; I have been waking up in the middle of the night and well, that’s not important. What I want to write is that I noticed that I had to repeat certain details, like my insurance ID, on different screens. Whoever wrote the software did not bother to carry the information over from the admitting page to the billing page. I asked the receptionist about this and she complained that it’s been like this for the past 30 years.

Every ten years or so, another company would be hired to update the hospital program and every time it would be abysmally horrid in the manner that it kept patient’s data. I’ve been programming since 1975 and I know what happened here. The hospital, without a clue as to what it really needed, gave out specs to a software company and that company put together a group of programmers (also clueless as to what was really needed) to fill out the order. When I asked her if any programmer ever came to interview her as to how to best design the system, she told me that no one, not even the hospital’s administration ever asked her for input.

So rule number one: talk to the people who are really going to use the program. When talking to company officials, administrators, IT personnel, just nod your head as if you are listening – then go talk to the secretary or warehouse worker who’s fingers will actually be punching in the data.

You have all read that great programming requires inspiration which brings us to:

Rule number two: many programs in order to work efficiently require a certain amount of creativity. To foster creativity one needs to be cheerful. Cheerfulness fosters creativity. So put yourself into a happy mood. Watch a few youtube videos on cat antics, scarf down a few donuts, chew on a Snickers bar, and paste a happy smile on your face. Programming is an art. Loosen yourself.

Great programming also should be as error-free as possible, which brings us to:

Rule number three: once you have written your code, you will need to debug it. You will need to be attentive to details and think critically and carefully, not creatively. For this you should be grumpy. Professor Forgas, of the University of New South Wales, tells us that the grumpier we are, the more likely we are to get problems sorted out and make less errors. Watch a youtube video of children being whipped in Bangladesh, drink a bitter cup of coffee, better yet, spill it on your lap, put yourself into a foul and gloomy mood. Programming is a science. Focus.

This all assumes you already know a programming language and how to fashion an if-then clause.

Need Something to Help Waste your Time?

Take any youtube video URL, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiSWms6_SSk and substitute “warp.swf” for “watch” thus: http://www.youtube.com/warp.swf?v=xiSWms6_SSk and pop that puppy into your address bar to see a clever flash application take over.

Mouse over any button to form an new array of related videos displayed as buttons, each of which links to a youtube video. Click on a button to view the video.

Serendipity was never easier.

Laws in the Digital World

In the beginning there was one law: the Law of the Jungle. It was quite simple: “eat or get eaten”. About 3500 years ago Moses set down ten laws and ever since, laws have multiplied almost without number.

Go into any decent law library and you will wonder how it is possible for a modern American NOT to break any laws. In his new book “Three Felonies a Day,” Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate estimates the average American now unwittingly commits three felony crimes every day. Digital technology has become so complex that lawmakers are unable to write laws that are simple enough for anyone to understand, even prosecutors and judges.

As confusing as that may sound, consider the following:

L. GORDON CROVITZ in the WSJ, You Commit Three Felonies a Day

In 2001, a man named Bradford Councilman was charged in Massachusetts with violating the wiretap laws. He worked at a company that offered an online book-listing service and also acted as an Internet service provider to book dealers. As an ISP, the company routinely intercepted and copied emails as part of the process of shuttling them through the Web to recipients.

The federal wiretap laws, Mr. Silverglate writes, were “written before the dawn of the Internet, often amended, not always clear, and frequently lagging behind the whipcrack speed of technological change.” Prosecutors chose to interpret the ISP role of momentarily copying messages as they made their way through the system as akin to impermissibly listening in on communications. The case went through several rounds of litigation, with no judge making the obvious point that this is how ISPs operate. After six years, a jury found Mr. Councilman not guilty.

Patent Law as well has yet to catch up to new technology. There are now idiots who are getting patents for bogus “technology” because those who grant these patents have no expertise in the fields they are reviewing. Consider patent number 7,113,911 issued September 26, 2006:

Voice communication concerning a local entity , Abstract

A local entity without its own means of voice communication is provided with the semblance of having a voice interaction capability. This is done by providing a beacon device at or near the entity, the beacon device transmitting, over a short-range communication link, contact data identifying a voice service associated with, but hosted separately from, the entity. The transmitted contact data is picked up by equipment carried by a nearby person and used to contact the voice service over a wireless network. The person then interacts with the voice service, the latter acting as a voice proxy for the local entity. The contact data can be presented to the user in other ways, for example, by being inscribed on the local entity for scanning or user input into the equipment.

Photo: Many Worlds

This is so vague and so general that it can describe any number of possibilities: a text to speech browser that lets you text a webpage into your phone and reads the page back to you; or a system where you call a service in India and they read back the text of a webpage, or you place a speaker next to a dog and a dog translator interprets what the dog wishes to say to you, and so on.

Nonsense like this has enabled patent sharks like the extortion patent holding company NTP which sued BlackBerry maker Research in Motion in 2006 for violation of their supposed NTP “patents” which RIM settled for over $600 million even though those “patents” were later declared invalid.

I almost feel like trying to patent the ‘e’ key on the keyboard. I believe I might actually get a patent for it. This way, every time someone types the letters eBay, they’ll have to pay me 25 cents. I leave the other letters to others, after all, I’m not a greedy person.