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Mister Bear Squash You All Google

Mr Bear Squash You All FlatBack in the 1950s, I enjoyed reading the book shown at the left. It's still available today; I should say that it's available once again today because it wasn't on shelves for a while. Mr. Bear was the neighborhood nuisance who enjoyed sitting on everyone's house and squashing it flat. For some reason, I thought of Mister Bear recently when Google's name came up. Google, the company with the Don't be Evil motto isn't evil, but its extreme focus on having more money than 90% of the world's nations combined is pushing it to be less than entirely good. Mister Bear found out that he couldn't squash everyone's home and get away with it. Maybe Google will learn a similar lesson one day.

Scott Dunn, writing in the Windows Secrets newsletter says "rogue anti-spyware" that promotes itself deceptively is allowed to advertise on such major search engines as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's Live.com. Dunn provided a chart that shows which services allow ads from these "services" that report the presence of spyware even when none is present and then charge the victim to remove something that isn't there. Worse still, some of these "anti-spyware" applications actually install nasties of their own.

Fake Antispyware

Yet Google and the other big search engines allow them to advertise. Dunn cites Spyware Warrior, an anti-spyware research group that says these applications install the very problems they claim to cure, generate false positives to trick users into buying a 'remedy', and use aggressive or misleading advertising. Is Google really not being evil?

Dunn directs readers to Spyware Warrior's website for the full report.

I've written previously about Google's propensity to look the other way when presented with an opportunity to make money. It's sad to see what seemed at one time to be an extraordinarily ethical company prostitute itself. Here's an example:

Click for a larger view. Here's an Ads By Google panel that I encountered. The fourth item in the list says I can get a free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, but the offer "ends today". Should you encounter this ad next week or next month, you'll see the same text. So before I've clicked anything, I'm fairly certain that the company behind it has already lied to me.

CLICK THE IMAGES FOR A LARGER VIEW.
   
Click for a larger view. Here's the story. I've been chosen for a FREE* gift.

*With completion of program requirements.

You can bet that the "program requirements" will be so onerous that few will complete them. And those who do will have signed up for offers that will cost them money. This kind of advertising is legal; whether it is ethical is another question.
   
Click for a larger view. The next page appears to contain a link to the "program requirements", but it's just colored text. There is a link to the requirements in tiny text at the bottom of the page. The requirements consist of several pages of obfuscation.
   
Click for a larger view. Here's what they want: Your e-mail address and your contact information. You can bet that the "program requirements" include removing any federal Do Not Call restriction on your phone number for this gang and anyone they can peddle your phone number to.
   
Click for a larger view. You might think you'd be almost done when you see this screen, but you'll see at least 20 more screens like this. I lost count.
   
Click for a larger view. This is about one third of the "final" page. I selected NO on every "almost done" page, but you can see that my answers here have been converted to YES. How many people would consider this ethical?
   
Click for a larger view. The next page (the last one before I hit a dead end) offered many "bonus gifts". It must be my lucky day. In addition to a free copy of Windows Vista Ultimate, I could score a $500 Best Buy card, a free Iphone, $1200 worth of gasoline, a free Apple computer, and lots more.

If your Early Alert Fraud Warning System is now on full alert, you're not alone.

Yet Google thinks that this kind of marketing is fine because it's legal.

How can so many Very Smart People be so dumb?

It doesn't take a great deal of intelligence to know that advertising works only when people trust it. Google has built an empire on trust. The company has made it clear that it wants to hire only superstars and has no interest in having standard-issue intelligent people on board. One problem may be that when everyone at the company is genius level or higher, there may be a growing corporate culture that believes Google is so smart that it can get away with fooling, manipulating, and hoodwinking the slugs (that is to say "the rest of us") who use the service.

If so, they're right. It is indeed possible to do exactly that. But not forever.

Trust is difficult to establish and even harder to maintain. Once lost, it is nearly impossible to retain. Google seems focused on losing the trust of its users. If that is true, the end may be closer than it appears.

Google: Committing suicide slowly?

5 cats

Google has acquired or built some astonishingly great products over the years, but management seems to have gone off the rails in pursuing ever increasing profits. That's great for shareholders, but not so great for the rest of us.

Please, Google, get back on track.

Stupid spam of the week

Here's something new that I'll do from now on or until enough people complain about how stupid it is or until I get tired of doing it, whichever comes first. I don't have to look at spams any more, so now they're no longer annoying. Now I can look at the occasional spam whenever I feel like it and marvel at the stupidity of the spam designer or the stupidity of anyone who might fall for the spam. This week I'll start with a phishing spam and the 7 clear giveaways that it's a fake.

Stupid Spam

Seven reasons I knew this was a fake the instant I saw it:

  1. "Unprivileged user": If the sender really works for Bank of America and is sending out messages to users about possible account problems, the message will not come from an "unprivileged user".
  2. "Nobody": Wrong answer.
  3. KuwaitDomain.com: Kuwait may own our souls, but it doesn't own the Bank of America. At least not yet.
  4. The registered trademark (R in a circle) would never appear here. OK, maybe this requires either legal or marketing knowledge, but it's not a difficult concept: Bank of America is a registered trademark. Message is not.
  5. 14/08/2007: This is a date format used in Europe and the Middle East. The US format would be 08/14/2007. There's also a missing space following the colon. Banks are sticklers for details.
  6. Dear Valued Customer: In US English, there is no space before the colon as you see in the message. The larger problem, though, is that the bank will address you by name, not as "dear valued customer".
  7. Nonsense English: If a message that you think may be a phishing spam has perfect English, it may still be a phishing spam. If the message sounds like someone from a Bangladesh middle school wrote it, there's no chance that it's a valid message.
  8. Bonus giveaway #1: The subject line says Bank Of America, but the graphic (stolen from the real Bank of America) appropriately lower-cases the "of". Banks are sticklers for detail.
  9. Bonus giveaway #2: The message was sent to an address that I would never consider providing to a bank.
  10. Bonus giveaway #3: I have no Bank of America accounts.

Bottom line: Nobody with an IQ above 80 and who's paying attention should have any problem identifying this within 5 seconds as a fraud.

In an ideal world ...

You'd report a problem and the problem would be fixed. End of story. This is not an ideal world and it seems to be getting worse. "Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?" occurs to me more and more frequently as I deal with "corporate America." As you may know if you've been following the ongoing saga, I've been complaining about Wide Open West's service nearly from the time I signed up with Wide Open West several years ago. It got so bad that, when this program was Technology Corner on WTVN Radio, Wide Open West pulled its advertising from WTVN and the WTVN's management tried to convince me to lie about the situation. I refused. Technology Corner is no longer on WTVN Radio. Is this a coincidence? I report; you decide; it's the fair and balanced way to do things.* Much to my surprise, there has been a remarkable change in the past few weeks.

  * Actually, I think it was a coincidence.
I've used this construction to illustrate how propaganda organizations such as Fox News disguise stating an opinion in such a way that it leads to a conclusion.
Ethical news organizations avoid constructions such as this.

By way of background, I've been paying for 4000Kbps downlink speed for several years and getting no more than 1000Kbps on a regular basis, and often far less than that. WOW sent "technicians" to examine the installation at my home a few years ago. "It's your router," they said. I had done enough testing to be relatively sure that this wasn't the case, but I didn't press the issue at the time. Previously, WOW "technicians" had blamed the problem on the firewall.

Why do they always assume you're lying or you're an idiot?

Several years ago, my complaints convinced Wide Open West to send "technicians" to my house. They connected a laptop computer to the cable modem, rebooted it, saw the speed they expected to see, and pronounced the problem to be "with the customer's system". I already knew that rebooting the modem would create the momentary appearance of normal speed, but the WOW technicians didn't bother to stick around and watch as performance dropped to sub-modem speed.

When younger daughter Kaydee started complaining about slow connectivity, I knew there was a problem. I started tracking the speed. What I found is that the only time I could attain 4000Kbps was immediately after rebooting the cable modem or first thing in the morning and that speed lasted for only a few minutes. That didn't absolutely rule out the router, but it pointed toward the cable modem.

In mid July, I sent official complaints to WOW's corporate offices and to the Columbus office. A week later, I'd heard nothing, so I repeated the drill with a somewhat more shrill message. In an ideal world, neither of these messages would have been necessary.

The big change

Following the second message, I heard from people at both the corporate and local offices. They sounded sincere in wanting to resolve the problem, so I continued monitoring the situation and on July 21 I decided to spend several hours testing the cable modem by connecting the desktop system to it without the router being in the middle.

I’ve long thought that the problem was not within the LAN, but I’ve had this back-of-my-mind suspicion that maybe it wasn’t Wide Open West. Maybe it was the router. I needed to know the truth and I was willing to apologize to Wide Open West if I was wrong. So at 3:37 pm on Saturday, July 21, 2007, I connected the computer to the cable modem, rebooted the modem, and rebooted the computer. My immediate speed was 4309Kbps. I thought maybe I would have to apologize because this made it look like it might be the router. This parallels the test that Wow's "technicians" performed at least two years ago. But they stopped too soon. If you reboot the system, including the cable modem, you'll get 4000Kbps. But wait a few minutes and you'll see a remarkable change. Speed tests shown below are the ones recommended and sanctioned by Wide Open West.

I rebooted the cable modem again about 6pm and everything looks normal. This is the point where the WOW "technician" would say, "See! The trouble is in your router. We go now. See ya, chump."

After rebooting the cable modem

But if you wait about 90 minutes (with the desktop computer still connected directly to the cable modem) the downlink speed drops under 1000Kbps. My router is not in the picture or the circuit here. It's all WOW.

After rebooting the cable modem

And about 40 minutes after that, the downlink was below dial-up speed—34Kbps on a direct connection from the desktop system to the cable modem. By this time, the WOW "technicians" would be back at the office with their feet up on a desk, drinking a cup of coffee. Sometimes, guys, it really does pay to believe the customer. Once in a while the dumb ass who's paying for the service actually gets it right when there's a problem.

After rebooting the cable modem

This test conclusively illustrated that the problem is not with the router. The router was entirely out of the picture and both the downlink and uplink speeds were well out of the expected range.

The solution

Wide Open West sent two technicians who spent four hours in the neighborhood.They found 3 problems that were upstream from me. Each of the problems was minor, but each would have affected my service. When those problems were corrected, I regularly saw 1Kbps service, or about 25% of what I was paying for. At least the speed generally stopped falling to modem speed.

The following week, Wide Open West replaced the "drop" (the cable from the pole to my house) but there was no improvement. The next step was to send a technician to examine the system in my house. "I couldn't get above 2MB," the technician said after testing first with my system via the router and then with his own notebook computer connected directly to the cable modem. "I called our NOC (network operations center) to check the modem. They updated the bin file and still I got the same results. I replaced the modem and was able to acquire 4Mbps." He also replaced the cable from the drop to the cable modem.

Since 2003 I've been trying to communicate to Wide Open West that the problem I saw was not imaginary and it was not my computer, my firewall, or my router. Until July 2007, nobody at Wide Open West (including top management) appeared to take the problem seriously.

What's different?

It may be that my complaints and those of other users have finally convinced WOW's top management to do something about what seemed to me to be one of the worst tech centers on the planet. When I call the support center, as I did, to report a problem with the domain name service server only to be told that there is no such thing and then to be put on infinite hold when I request to speak to the level-one tech's supervisor is a clear indication of trouble.

Last month when I called WOW's support, I encountered a technician who honestly seemed to be trying to understand the problem and everyone I've dealt with this time around has seemed sincerely to be interested in resolving the problem. But ... did I mention that I've been trying to convince Wide Open West since 2003 that the problem was with their equipment?

But I can thank WOW's local support supervisor Stuart Sumpter, WOW technician Shaun Smith (who spent a lot of time in the neighborhood and in my house), WOW's ombudsman Bill Wright, and other WOW personnel who believed I was telling the truth and were willing to investigate.

Conspicuously absent from that list is Scott Neesley, vice president and general manager for Columbus. On WOW's website, Neesley says "Having worked in the telecommunications industry for over seventeen years, I have watched other service providers struggle to find the secret of providing great customer service. The WOW! Team has figured out the formula to delivering an exceptional customer experience while providing a great working environment for our employees."

The team may have figured it out, but it seems to me that an apology might be appropriate. Despite the recent problems and the resolution that shows I've been correct since 2003 and despite knowing that my complaints reached WOW's corporate headquarters, I've heard not a word from WOW's local manager.

But I suppose some things never change.

I have suggested to Wide Open West that they owe me some compensation for 42 months during which I paid for service that I did not receive. So far, that suggestion has been met with total silence.

The current consistent results using Speakeasy's speed reporting service:
Current speed

Wide Open West (today): When it works, the service is fine.

5 cats

I know people in other states who pay considerably less per month for Internet service than I do and routinely attain 6000Kbps or better. I can ignore them when my service provides the 40000Kbps that I'm paying for.

Wide Open West (2003-2007): When they call you a liar, it's annoying.

0 cats

People ask why I stuck with Wide Open West for so long when the service was so substandard. Maybe I'm more patient than I thought. Maybe it was because I kept believing that eventually I would encounter someone who would believe me.

Eventually, I turned out to be right about that, but I wasn't expecting it to take 42 months.

Will the US survive this century?

We like to look at India and laugh. In the 1960s, we looked at Japan and laughed. We said the cars they made were constructed from used beer cans. Dealers held "bash a Toyota" parties. Those same dealers are now selling Toyotas and Toyota is the largest American auto manufacturer. The "big 3" are no longer so big. But we don't learn from history. Now we're laughing at India.

India

Nerdly News

Nokia burning-man battery recall

Nokia says it has no reports of "serious injuries or property damage", but still has offered to replace some 46 million batteries in its mobile phones. Think about that number: 46,000,000. If every battery costs Nokia just $1 (and you can be sure the cost of replacing the batteries will be far more than $1 each) that's a direct bottom-line hit of $46 million. The problems affect only BL-5C batteries made by Matsushita between December 2005 and November 2006. Fortunately, 250 million other batteries made for Nokia aren't affected.

Nokia says it has received about 100 reports of overheating and "in very rare cases the affected batteries could potentially experience over heating initiated by a short circuit while charging, causing the battery to dislodge." Dislodge. That's an interesting word. A bullet is dislodged from a gun when the trigger is pulled. Gentle prodding will dislodge a seed that's stuck between your teeth. When the battery dislodges, does it act more like a bullet or a seed? Nokia didn't say.

You'll find information on the Nokia website regarding how to identify the battery in your phone. Nokia says it is working closely with relevant local authorities to investigate this situation.

The recall isn't mandatory. Nokia, in fact, downplays the urgency: "While the occurrence in the BL-5C batteries produced by Matsushita in the time-period specified is very rare, for consumers wishing to do so, Nokia and Matsushita offer to replace for free any BL-5C battery subject to this product advisory."

Nokia's website has information on how to determine whether a battery in your phone or GPS unit is affected.

Tenth anniversary: Machine over man

It's been 10 years since chess master Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue. The common perception is that man was beaten by machine even though that clearly isn't the case. Yes, Deep Blue won the game. But Deep Blue was a computer that was simply running a program that was developed by humans. So a gang of humans who wrote a chess-playing program defeated chess master Garry Kasparov. Doesn't sound quite so radical when I put it that way, does it?

According to the MIT Technology Review, "The following years saw two other human-machine chess matches that stand out: a hard-fought draw between Vladimir Kramnik and Deep Fritz in Bahrain in 2002 and a draw between Kasparov and Deep Junior in New York in 2003, in a series of games that the New York City Sports Commission called 'the first World Chess Championship sanctioned by both the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), the international governing body of chess, and the International Computer Game Association (ICGA).'"

The article notes that machines play chess in a way different from the way humans play chess. They "can't be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players," all of which are concerns for human players. They can't be sidetracked into thinking about something else during the game. They can't be bluffed or intimidated.

You'll find the article online at Technology Review.

The pipes are nearly full

After more than 3 years of fighting with Wide Open West over what I said was substandard service and they said was working as intended, the cable company finally admitted the problem and fixed it. Just in time for bandwidth problems to start affecting my service.

The demand for bandwidth is huge and growing.

ABI Research says high-definition video, video on demand, online gaming, and high-bandwidth Internet applications are combining to create problems for the industry and those who are connected via cable modems. It's not a crisis yet, but it's something nobody in the industry wants to talk about that according the ABI Research vide president Stan Schatt.

Cable providers need about 750MHz of spectrum currently—most of that (about 675MHz) for analog cable, digital cable, video on demand, high-definitions video, voice over IP, and Internet service. That's the downstream side. The upstream side takes up only about 54MHz. ABI says there will be growth on the upstream side and additional sources of high-definition video will have an effect on the downstream side.

The cable industry spent more than $100 billion on infrastructure over the last decade and is now faced with having to do more. Much more.

 
           
 
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