Today I encountered two security fails.
1) When chatting with Sprint customer support they need your account PIN to update your records. After the conversation is over they email your transcript with your PIN sent in the clear.
2) When signing up to pay a travel fee to gain entry to a South American country they confirm your signup by sending you your username and password in the clear.
Good job!
I’m not a big fan of CVS. At peak customer times every store seems to have 10 people stocking shelves filling the aisles with bins with only one person working the register creating a line of customers twenty people deep. CVS recently announced they will no longer sell tobacco as a move to become more of a health store. As the article points out they still sell a lot of very unhealthy products in their store. My cynical guess is that they found that they weren’t making a lot of money cigarettes and they didn’t work well enough as a loss leader. This move has more to do with getting a marketing bump while eliminating a marginally profitable product than it has anything to do with creating healthier customers.
A trend that took hold in 2013 is putting overlays over the screen that will block your access to the page unless you give as a ransom your email address or access to your Facebook account. I treat my email address and access to my Facebook like a daughter in high school and to those sites I say.
I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I complain often and loudly about the fact that I live in the capitol of the richest and most powerful nation in the world yet I have to settle for shitty DSL with no option for FiOS or a cable modem. While I understand that FiOS involves infrastructure changes, I can’t say the same for the much hated Comcast (my local cable monopoly) Comcast simply doesn’t want to string a cable to my building. Despite my sole shitty option, I on a regular basis get ads for FiOS and Comcast Business services.
This week I got a letter in the mail touting Comcast Business Services I went to the website http://www.cant-wait.com/ to find out more info and for a mere $109.95 a month I can get 50/10mbps which is literally more than 10 times faster than my current connection. My hope is that if I’m willing to pay for business level Comcast they might be motivated to add me as a customer. So I filled out a form on the site and got an email letting me know that I would be contacted by a rep within a few hours. This is who the rep reached out to me (name redacted)
Did you need services??
XXX XXX, Business Services Executive
Comcast Business Services – Northeast Division
676 Island Pond Road, Manchester, NH 03109
Office: 888-895-2988 Option 1, ext XXXX / Efax 800-317-XXXX
Direct office # 603-628-XXXX
business.comcast.com
Earn $100!!!! Refer another business to Comcast and it's yours! Please call 603-222-7799 for more details.
Technical Support: If you are having trouble with your service please contact 1-800-391-3000 for 24/7 assistance.
I’m contacting you for a service that runs over $100 a month and your response looks like something that I’d expect to see on Yahoo! Answers. That’s a pretty solid way to ensure all of the complaints about your shitty customer service are likely true.
Yep this is all I get.
Fucking Bitch Ass Scabs
The almighty Congress. Do they do it for the common folk? No. Should we have ever really thought they did? No. But they win heroes of the week for reaffirming my belief in evil (not in a supernatural way, I don’t believe in religion beyond that, but in a very real way). Sometimes i grow soft and optimistic, I start to believe governing bodies really do have the people’s best interest in mind. Egad, I was starting to get such good vibes I almost decided to grow dreads! Thank you Congress for setting me straight again and bringing me back home to cynicism and defeatism.
Secretly, I think Rage Against The Machine
I have a plan to end street harassment and if I understood how Tumblr worked I would have used their tool to promote a post I came across today “My plan to end street harassment forever”. I have a much less violent way to stop street harassment of women.* There are way too many corners or construction sites in our cities that many women avoid because of the regular harassment and catcalling, which are really one in the same.
My solution is code named “OPERATION URSA MAJOR.” The plan is to gather a bunch of bears and have them hang out at the aforementioned spots. They would then whistle and catcall at the people who are usually harassing women. My guess is after a week or so the harassers would get the point.
As a reminder to the general public the only time a catcall is ever acceptable is at a wet t-shirt contest, but if you are at a wet t-shirt contest you, as a participant or viewer, should probably question your life decisions.
via Flickr user Hope Abrams
*I haven’t posted this earlier because I felt it reeked of a patriarchal tone of “how to protect the women from evil men”
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