Penny Hero (dot) Net

I find this very odd. Two of my friends today asked me “How’s working for Comcast?” or something like that. (Granted, one was a postcard dated March 2… but I GOT it today).

I don’t work for Comcast… Never have. Probably never will. It’s just a very odd coincidence that a friend asked me over IM “how’s your new Comcast job?” while an unread postcard asking roughly the same thing was sitting on my desk.

Odd. haha. :)

Comcast was giving us trouble with our internet… which was PREVENTING me from working for a while. That’s really the only connection.

So, my roommate and I recently switched to Comcast, and he was issued an email address @comcast consisting of the first letter of his first name and his entire last name.

He logged in today and discovered the inbox already contains email (and spam) from the previous owner (whose name was Carol. His name is Chris). Some of this email is from places she apparently shopped at, and if Chris was a Bad Person, it wouldn’t take much effort to go to those shopping websites, claim that “she” lost “her” password, and BINGO! He can go on a shopping spree on her dime. (Fortunately for her, he’s not a Bad Person, and would never do this.)

Does this seem wrong to you?

Someone needs to inform Comcast, and/or people who use Comcast, of the potential security holes inherent in re-issuing their customers’ email addresses.

So…

Dear Comcast:

Please stop re-issuing your customers’ usernames. It results in irresponsible mis-use of personal information. You are effectively giving someone’s old email address (and all correspondences going to it) to someone else, which could result in the misuse of their credit cards or other personal information.

Next:

Dear Comcast subscribers:

Don’t ever use your Comcast-issued email address. Ever. It is not secure, and any correspondences to or from this email address can be read by whoever Comcast decides to give that email address to next.

Luckily, I’ve never used my Comcast email address back when I subscribed.

So, come on kids. Who’s at fault here? and what steps do you think should be made to protect people from fraud in this kind of situation?

My thoughts:

It’s very easy to blame the subscriber for being ignorant of email’s insecurity. However, I don’t think this is fair because the average internet and computer user has great Big Misconceptions about How Stuff Works (it’s a series of tubes?), and there simply isn’t an effective way to educate them all.

So until everyone magically learns how to be more responsible, I think big, well-funded corporations like Comcast should take it upon themselves to make sure their customers are informed of the risks associated with using their services.

(Dude, someone digg this or something. Jeebus. People need to know about this.)

Last night, Graham called me 3 times and I never even knew it because my phone was not notifying me in any way that I could see that I had a missed call. I periodically picked up my phone and pressed a button, assumming that somewhere on the display, I would get a missed call message. Nope. I only got the “unlock keypad by pressing menu and *” message. But really… the “3 missed calls” note WAS there… it was just not visible until you unlocked your phone and it popped up.

Stupid.

My roomie and he both tried to convince me that I had my phone settings wrong and tried to show me where to set “notify” or “alarm” or “reminder” to vibrate or beep. I did. We tested. Still didn’t notify me of any missed calls until AFTER I picked up the phone and unlocked it.

We all agreed that this seemed wrong, so I googled, and found the general forum chatter of people asking “how do I turn on notifications” and everyone advised everyone to do exactly what I had just done. No one ever confirmed that this had fixed their problem though.

Graham’s phone notifies him periodically. So does my roomie’s previous motorola phone. granted, the L2 is newer… but whatever.

This notification/reminder feature seems like a really basic thing. What happens if I miss a call while out of the room? What if I actually prefer NOT to physically pick up my phone and unlock it every couple of minutes to see if I missed a call?

I’m already compulsive enough when it comes to checking my email. I think my phone should be smart enough to let me know when I missed a call. So did Graham. So did my room mate.

So I called Cingular. Cingular claimed that the L2, and most other motorola cell phones, do not have a feature to notify people of missed calls OTHER than that missed call message. They referred me to Motorola.

So I called Motorola, who had me do a master reset, and told me to change the alert and reminder settings just like everyone told me to. So I hung up, tested it, and discovered that it had not in fact restored (created?) any audio or buzz missed call notification.

I called Motorola back, and described the situation. What followed was a long round-about conversation about how according to whoever he talked to while he put me on hold, no motorola phone has this “missed call reminder” notification.

Graham’s phone does. I told him the model.

He replied with “perhaps older models have it, but the L2 and other phones with its OS don’t”.

So I asked him for more detail like, “what’s the difference between ‘notify’ and ‘reminders’. After putting me on hold again for about 15 minutes (no joke. Dean called me and talked with me for a while while I was on phone), he finally replied that one is for notifying you of text messages, and the other is for your calendar reminders…. which is slightly funny because I realize now that I mis-asked my question. My phone doesn’t have a ‘notify’ setting. It has “alarm” and “reminder”. So… how on earth he figured out that “notify” means “for text messages” is beyond me. Maybe that’s why I was on hold for so long. He was off inventing truth somewhere in a motorola back room. :)

So… in conclusion, the Motorola cell phones don’t have any audible “missed call” reminder or notification whatsoever. it’s not a bug, and it’s also not user error.

This feature simply doesn’t exist.

Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451″ came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence

Hahahahahaha. coincidence, my ass.

so… I’ve been hanging out on reddit.com this morning. can you tell?

I don’t get it. Why is the runaway bride making it to the top of google news? What’s so newsworthy about a woman who runs from her wedding, panics, tells conflicting and confused stories, and then comes home a few days later?

Why is this such a big deal? Did she murder someone on her way out? Is the husband a rich pompous ass who’s pissed that she hurt his pride?

Why the hell do they want to press charges against her?

I don’t get it. This just seems so stupid.

And here I am, feeding the link frenzy and boosting the story’s ratings by linking to it in my livejournal. hah.

Tell me if you think that results like this would be statistically significant at all…

Let’s say that researchers were studying a certain species of insect. These “tidal bugs” were observed to have very elaborate feeding cycles that peaked regularly, and for SOME individuals, the cycle was in sync with the tides, even for those that did not live near the ocean. However, most individuals’ cycles ranged quite a bit, so that only about 30% of the population was “in sync” with the tide cycle.

Researchers want to know if there is any correllation between high tide and their cycles because high tide is an “urban myth” explanation for the elaborate feeding cycles and they want to see if there is any scientific evidence to back up that kind of correlation.

They studied the 30% of the total population that had a cycle with equal or less than 1/2 hour difference from the tide cycle and found that the feeding cycle peak happened within 6 hours of high tide in 69% of the population studied.

My question: Does this statistically reveal a correlation between high tide and the peak of this species of bugs’ feeding cycles? Why or why not? If you need more information, I’ll try to find it and answer specific questions about the study or the statistics themselves.

I’ve got my analysis happily hidden in a jabber chat log conversation with a friend… but I’d really like to know if I’m the only one who has come to these certain conclusions about this study.

Note: The study is real. And it totally wasn’t looking at bugs. I’ll tell you what I’m really talking about later… and that should make it clear why I’m interested in getting a third, fourth and seventeenth opinion on this analysis.

Suck my pee pee, microsoft!

“Partner sources say Microsoft is wavering on the extent to which it plans to support CSS2 with IE 7.0. Developers have been clamoring for Microsoft to update its CSS support to support the latest W3C standards for years. But Microsoft is leaning toward adding some additional CSS2 support to IE 7.0, but not embracing the standard in its entirety, partners say.” (source)

I’m a student! a busy one! You don’t really expect me to enjoy having to STILL learn two ways of making shit work, do you?

*grumbles*

In Other News: in my first final, our instructor accidentally handed out exams for Eng211. That was a riot. we all wrote our names on them of course, and briefly panicked as none of the passages or questions were remotely familiar. About 1/4th of the class is actually IN 211 too, so they got a free peek. heh. Academic dishonesty anyone?

Sent emails saying loved ones are dead.

Why the fuck would anyone want to do that? What the bloody hell would he have gotten out of this besides sick laughs? bastard.

Stories about pirates and rapists and sex-traffickers kidnapping orphaned children (bottom section, “Preying on the Victims”) in the tsunami aftermath are even worse… much much worse.

A few months back a year ago, a friend of mine found an article about an investigation into the sex-trafficking “industry”, with special focus on how the US doesn’t even seem to have it on its radar. People being kidnapped and “trained” (like animals get “trained”) and eventually broken into a sex product for rich bastards here and abroad…

the way these people destroyed their victims’ identities, or brought them into the US illegally so that if caught, the victims would be punished for being here without paperwork was… horrid.

This tsunami/earthquake disaster is probably seen as prime feeding ground for predators looking for orphans to bring up as fresh meat. They don’t even have to worry about anyone looking for these kids… ever.

There are so many problems in the world that need attention right now. And there are so many idle hands… The majority of the unaffected population, richer upper-middle class americans, CEOs and owners of chains of housing developments (for examples) who aren’t aware or ignore the fact that they could help.

why aren’t more people distraught?!

I just discovered that I’ve been spelling the word “Exercise” incorrectly all these years.

Wow.

Talk about your disillusionment.

This is the first time I’ve heard a semi-logical argument against paying teachers more. It is kind of interesting. read on:

PiezoCuttlefish says:
Teachers are paid little not because the job is of little importance, but it is vitally important that we keep the best and the brightest in the field and out of teaching positions. The low pay simultaneously ensures that the only people who teach are those that really want to do so, and also that the people who can, do. It is said that the world is run by C students. Would you rather it run by D students? Pay teachers $50,000 and the C students will become teachers. Pay them $75,000, the B students; $100,000, the A students. And while our future may then appear bright, our buildings will collapse on our head, our F-16s will crash into the ocean, and in general Bad Things will happen.

Omoshiroi, ne?