I pose that question for a couple of reasons. But they are all wrapped around security and the sanctity of your personal information. –

Researchers at VeriSign’s iDefense division tracking the digital underworld say bogus and stolen accounts on the Facebook are now on sale in high volume on the black market. Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, the social networking site that says it has sophisticated ways to defeat fake accounts.

During several weeks in February, iDefense tracked an effort to sell log-in data for 1.5 million Facebook accounts on several online criminal marketplaces, including one called Carder.su.

That hacker, who used the screen name “kirllos” and appears to deal only in Facebook accounts, offered to sell bundles of 1,000 accounts with 10 or fewer friends for $25 and with more than 10 friends for $45, says Rick Howard, iDefense’s director of cyber intelligence.

Source

and…

MINNEAPOLIS - Facebook is now sharing your personal profile information with third parties. For now, it’s just a few web sites, like the music site Pandora, and the consumer review site, Yelp.

Facebook is automatically sharing that information, without your consent. If you don’t want to share, you have to opt out.

University of Minnesota law professor and privacy expert Bill McGevern says it’s an important line in the sand. And for Facebook, with 600 million users, the stakes are high.

“Facebook is trying over and over to get this shared so Facebook becomes the center of the web,” said McGevern.

Facebook want to make money by selling user information.

Source

Either legally or otherwise your data is being proffered for sale. Are you sure you know who you are sharing that data with via third parties that you have no relationship with? Do you even know what is being done with the data? You ought to care, as it may mean you losing the next job or promotion. Forty-five Percent of Employers Use Social Networking Sites to Research Job Candidates, CareerBuilder Survey Finds To be blunt about it, if you have a rant on FaceBook about anything you might as well write LOSER on the bottom of your resume.

I have never held a Facebook account as I read the TOS first and found it lacking. Besides these days it is both cheap and easy to setup your own site on the web where YOU have total control of both the content and how it is shared. Consider this post a friendly hint. But you have been forewarned.

We have been here before, many guises, many different firms. I don’t want it to sound like Microsoft is the only who has been tarred with this, there have been others. Its a matter of get a good price, sign the contract and wait for the deliveries to roll in. Never a thought to how it is achieved –

Showing Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their desks with exhaustion, it is an image that Microsoft won’t want the world to see.

Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86f heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks.

For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for the American multinational computer company.

Read more:

What to do? Well several things. Don’t buy MS accessories. Send Steve Ballmer a letter that you are aware of this and find it contemptable of their stature. Do the same to Best Buy and Office Depot two of the largest retailers of MS accessory products.

Steve Ballmer —
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399

Steve Odland –
Office Depot Inc
2200 Old Germantown Road
Delray Beach, FL 33445

Brian J. Dunn –
Best Buy Corporate
P.O. Box 9312
Minneapolis , MN 55440

Sometimes corporate policy forces these companies. Other times it is just the shame that becomes attached. Let your conscience be your guide.

For the benefit of those that might not have been watching. Amazon and Macmillan got into a pricing dispute over eBook sales. Part of the trigger being that Macmillan cut an agency deal with Apple for the iPad platform that has a variable rate that is higher than Amazon’s pricing. It got so heated that at one point Amazon disabled purchasing of the entire suite of that publishers books.

Why do we care?

Well primarily because it might change the landscape for eBooks. But my gut says this will not play out like either party thinks.

Whose right?

Well neither. Remember this is at its core a contract dispute. So you have two parties haggling over price and terms. But one author did have an interest viewpoint –

If Amazon were a smaller retailer, this probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But Amazon pretty much, right now, has a monopoly on online bookselling. They’re huge. As a result, this becomes nearly a form of de facto price fixing.

source.

Which if not in word, at least in deed is probably the case at this point and time.

Is one price for a book wrong?

Well no. But if you think of a free market, single cost pricing may be efficient for the offerer but it forces a self selection from the buyer to only consider catalog items that have an intrinsic value more than the offer price. So ‘Gone with the Wind’ would sell well, but ‘Attack of the NanoAtomic Vampire’ from an unknown author would not.

So what’s the moral here?

Its all theatre. Here is why. There is no determined pricing for ePub books. Its all new. The book publishers want to set an expectation in the ~ $20 range, right below a mid-successful hard cover release. They want to protect their legacy infrastructure when for all purposes it is toast. To me that is as bad as Amazon trying to fix a one price strategy.

The reality is the following — ePub pricing will be determined on authorship, topic and audience. It will no longer have a printing component determining the floor price of the publication. That is what both parties are trying to avoid and they don’t want you to think that it might be possible to buy ‘Linear Algebra II’ from Knopf, Knuth and Rupert for $4.99. But that is entirely possible even with today’s technology.

ePub platforms are crude compared to what they will be like in say 5 years. Authors will be able to set their pricing, eliminate the Macmillan’s of the world, and sell pulp copies if need be through a supplier like Lulu.

That ladies and gentlemen is what the dust up is about. They don’t want you to know that very shortly there could be a door number 3 to choose from for all your reading.

Previously we had pointed out that the Telcos can take care of their own. They have a revenue stream (well used to, it is getting a little frayed), that is mostly never ending. The resource is finite but better than what anyone else has. So why do they want to do this to their more lesser mortal peers? —

In the dead of night, just before the latest draft of the Stevens bill came out, a helpful Telco lobbyist inserted a little provision to stack the deck in the case of judicial review. Section 1004 of the Stevens draft now places exclusive jurisdiction for all decisions by the FCC in the D.C. Circuit. This includes not just network neutrality, but media ownership, CALEA, wireless issues, anything.

Why would anyone do that you ask? Because the D.C. Cir. is, without doubt, the most activist court in the land when it comes to pressing its vision of media and telecom policy. More than any other court, the D.C. Cir. can be credited with destroying hope of telecom competition in the United States by perpetually reversing and remanding the FCC’s efforts at rulemaking and enforcement until the FCC finally gave up and effectively deregulated. The D.C. Cir. is also responsible for vacating (eliminating by judicial fiat) the rule preventing cable companies from owning television stations where they have cable systems, and overturning much of the FCC’s cable and broadcast ownership limits. Finally, through the legal doctrine known as “standing”, the D.C. Crcuit has done its best to make it impossible for regular people to challenge FCC decisions or bring individual cases on antitrust grounds.

Source: WetMachine

Why? Well to make it more costly to litigate telecom policy. So if you are a small coop outside to Duluth and are being destroyed by some arcane rule your choice would be under this suggestion having to hire a high priced heavy weight from Georgetown.

There is something else that bothers me about this that has nothing to do with Telecom. Consistency. In the history of this country we have applied the mindset that one tries a case in the jurisdiction of either the defendant or the place where the infraction occurred. Even at appellate, you remand to the closest circuit district from which the original case issued. And NOW we are going to turn this on its ear? The system as envisioned has worked reasonably well, there is no need to change it at this late date.

This provision needs to be removed. Verizon can afford to get on a damn airplane like anybody else.

In this case its Verizon again. The name of the game is a Titanic shuffle of their data rate plan. May sound like small potatoes till you see the hurdle before you as a customer –

First, the details: Verizon has introduced a new data tier at $9.99 per month with a 25MB cap—this is the cheapest data plan now offered by the company and by most US wireless carriers, and applies to all 3G devices. Why does this equate to “upping” the data charges? Because the company is ditching its $19.99 per month plan with a 75MB cap altogether—you must either go with the $9.99 plan for a third of the data or or the $29.99 smartphone plan that applies to WinMo, Android, or BlackBerry devices.

This in a sense is a variant of the give the lantern away but charge for the oil dearly. Only this is charge minimally for low oil but if you want to use the lamp every night you has to pay!

Why can’t stuff be simple? Just charge .001¢ per kilobyte and be done with it. Equitable, quick and customers can check their bills quickly. But then that would not justify the marketees salary would it?

Linky.

COSHOCTON — A free service enjoyed by hundreds has been shut down due to illegal activity conducted by one individual.

“It’s unfortunate that one person ruins it for those who use the service legitimately,” said Commissioner Gary Fisher.

About five years ago, the county made a free wireless Internet connection available in the block surrounding the Coshocton County Courthouse at 318 Main St.

It was disabled last week after someone used the wireless local area network address to illegally download a movie.

The county’s Internet Service Provider — OneCommunity — was notified by Sony Pictures Entertainment about the breach, and the county’s Information Technology Department was in turn notified by OneCommunity.

Yes you got it. The actions of one person has ruined it for a whole town. Which is the problem with the current state of law in the realm of Internet Law. The innocent suffer along with the guilty.

‘Nuf Said?

Linky.

Following the bosses lead on a previous post. I it is a shame but way too many consumers are not sufficiently savvy in consumer electronics of any kind. Case in point –

SAN LEANDRO — A brand-new 37-inch Sony flat screen television for $100? Great deal — until you take it out of the box and realize you just bought an oven door.

San Leandro police Lt. Pete Ballew called it a variation on the old “rocks in a box” scam, in which a box is presented as containing new, expensive electronics for sale but is actually full of rocks.

On Wednesday San Leandro police pulled over a man who had in his car a box containing what appeared to be an expensive 37-inch flat-screen television, but in actuality was a glass oven door cleverly disguised as a TV. The man is suspected of trying to sell the item for $100 in the parking lot of the San Lorenzo Wal-Mart, 15555 Hesperian Blvd.

“It was very ingenious,” Ballew said. “If you were a bargain hunter, you might think, ‘Wow, this is the deal of the day.’”‰”

Police got an anonymous call Wednesday from someone who raised suspicions about a man who tried to sell him a television out of his beige 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass in the Wal-Mart parking lot. The witness said the seller told him he had bought the TV for $60 at a flea market.

Flat out its just a variant of the rocks in a box routine. But there are other scams as well. Many not so obvious. One we have discussed here is the subsidized phone CPE market. Thank goodness that is finally showing cracks. Another is channel bundling by the ISPs. But no matter, any of these vehicles are ripping off the consumer.

Oh, I bet that the first complaint to the scam above is — “Where is the remote?”

Linky.

Initial post: Jul 23, 2009 12:16 PM PDT
Jeffrey P. Bezos says:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

With this Amazon issues an apology. Readers how would you rate it? Good, Fair, not worth the electrons?

Here’s my take. Amazon should have ate it. The cost I mean. They should have worked out whatever deal they could with the publisher for the customers to be able to keep the books. Another words Amazon should NOT have inconvenienced the customers and ate the costs. Absurd? Well what if it had been a physical book? You think Amazon would have gone through the pain and shipping costs for something that would not have been successful? Of course not. The fact they had the delete key was the only reason they went that route. Oh and every version of Kindle made in the future should have the remote delete feature removed. Period.

So the apology was NOT ENOUGH!

Linky.

Does it all sound too good to be true? If so, that’s because it probably is. What little information is available about the services is vague, technically inconsistent, and doesn’t match up with public records.

One key player in the network of companies is Mark Petschel. He’s the CEO of Global Verge, the multilevel marketing firm that is recruiting people to sell Zer01’s service, under the Buzzirk brand. Sales associates are paying $70 initially to become part of the program and $40 a month thereafter for back-office support.

Petschel is currently on probation after pleading guilty to securities fraud. According to a bankruptcy filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, Petschel allegedly promised to invest $168,000 that he collected from several people, but instead spent some of the money on items like jewelry.

Petschel has been on the losing end of three contract disputes, including one in 2002 in which he was ordered to pay $50,000. The Circuit Court of St. Louis County has no record that he’s complied yet with any of the rulings.

If you get approached to sell cellular services where you pay for the privilege then earn credits on ’sales’ to others, be very wary. Its probably a MLM scheme and it might just be the guys above doing it.

More here.

In what has to be big downer for the DISH, they have to pay out a considerable sum to States and customers for deceptive practices, failure to uphold Agency responsibilities, No Call List violations, etc. –

“We’ve had 196 written complaints in Iowa since 2004 about DISH Network,” Miller said. “TV satellite service in general has been one of our top complaint categories in recent years.”

The states had alleged a wide array of unfair and deceptive practices by DISH Network and its third-party retailers.

The states alleged that DISH Network: Refused to accept responsibility for misconduct by its third-party retailers and installers; violated do-not-call rules; failed to disclose all key terms and conditions of their customer agreements; did not disclose that purchased or leased equipment was previously used and/or refurbished; charged customer credit cards and debited bank accounts without providing adequate notice and obtaining appropriate authorization; and committed other violations. The company denied any wrongdoing.

The agreement between DISH Network and the states (called an “Assurance of Voluntary Compliance,” or AVC) says DISH “shall not commit any unfair or deceptive trade practices.” The AVC contains fifteen pages of details about how the company must avoid misrepresentations, must clearly disclose all material terms, must clearly disclose any limitations on programming (such as unavailability of local channels or sports programming), must clearly disclose any termination or cancellation policies, must not violate Do Not Call requirements, must handle complaints rapidly and effectively, and must adhere to many other requirements.

All well and good. How about a peek into Comcast while you are at it there Mr. Miller?

Linky.