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A disgruntled former employee of GameStop calling himself "WhistleBlowerZero" has created a 9-part YouTube video series which explains quickly, but in exhaustive detail, the many reasons why you, Dear Consumer, should not shop at GameStop.

That pretty much sums it up. I listened to a few of them and the best part is that it's both amusing and packed with real world information and math that explains exactly why Gamestop is a huge rip-off.

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The website includes very loose information about what makes this chip so "uncloneable", but I highly doubt that it's true. An RFID chip is read by radio waves and as long as you can make a chip, computer, or anything else that transmits replicate the signal that the original chip did, you can clone it.

If they mean that you can't make one of these chips copy the data from another of these chips, I can see that as being possible, but what difference does that make in the end if I can use a different brand chip to open your secure door or travel the world in your name?

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Now if the lawsuits would propagate throughout the world, we'd finally be getting somewhere. From the article:

In his order, the judge found that the church had used "personality tests void of scientific value...with the sole aim of selling services or divers products."

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An equalizer made of pure flame, music played with pure electricity, and others. You should really check this out.

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Sometimes when you buy something online or at a major retailer, you'll get it home to find out that it's full of bricks or bathroom tiles instead of the product you expected. Sometimes this is due to shifty warehouse workers and sometimes because a customer buys a product, says it's defective and returns it even though they replaced it with bricks. If the customer service counter doesn't check the box before accepting it, it goes back on the shelf and you get stuck with it.

The store's response to this is generally not going to work in your favor, but there are ways you can make sure you don't end up with the brick.

Read the article for full details, but here are the two main tips they cover that I agree with:

1. Pay with credit card – This will give you many types of buyer protection automatically like the ability to do a chargeback.
2. Check the item before you leave the store – Make sure you know what's actually in that box before you walk out. It's much harder for them to make the claim that you put a brick in it inside the store.
3. Policies aren't laws – Just because a story says "it's policy" doesn't mean you should give up. They often have very bad policies and even some that might be considered illegal. You should fight for what's right regardless of what the store says is "policy".

Oink!

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Today I found an article about how several of McCain's "objectionable" earmarks over the last few years belonged to a town in Alaska who's mayor was none other than Palin herself. Ouch.

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Amazon.com has been closing accounts that have "too high a percentage of returns" or "[ship] to too many different addresses".

I've never liked Amazon.com's policies but this kind of anti-customer activity is even worse than Yahoo. To be fair, there's not much detail on which accounts have been closed and what counts as abuse to them, but this sounds a lot like the customer profiling that Best Buy has been doing.

To the movies!

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Ghostbusters has become the first movie to be distributed on a USB drive. It includes a strong form of DRM that they hope will prevent people from copying it. Whether that proves more effective than the DRM they've tried on DVDs remains to be seen.

Digital Pickpocketing

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There's a small device that when plugged into many cellphone brands (and the list is growing) that can copy all data on the phone. In other words, if someone wanted to know every bit of data you have on your phone, they could ask to "borrow it for second", plug this thing in when you weren't looking and hand it back.

While designed for law enforcement, this device is available to the public for only ~$200

The rule: if your phone contains sensitive data, do not leave it unattended. If you loan it to someone to use because they tell you theirs is not working, make sure you actually see them using the phone and there is nothing connected to it.

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Katherine Albrecht has written has written an article for Scientific American that everyone should read. For those who don't already know her, she's the leader of CASPIAN and one of the world's foremost experts on RFID privacy issues.

Here is a mini summary of some of the major points:

• Companies intend to replace barcodes with RFID
• Unlike barcodes which identify a product type (i.e. a can of soda), RFID will identify an INDIVIDUAL product (i.e. can of coke #48377625376)
• RFID tags can be read secretly from long distances (30 or more feet).
• RFID tags in licenses have minimal security (and even passports that have more security have been hacked already many times)
• IBM filed a patent that was granted in 2006 for a system of scanners at “shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, [and] mu­­se­­ums ? to track the movements of people by their RFID tags
• Alton Towers (an English amusement park) issues RFID wristbands to visitors and tracks their movements through the park. While they use it to create a keepsake "where you went" map for their customers, they prove that the system works in practice