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GoDaddy, an Internet hosting provider that's no stranger to controversy of its own, has pulled hosting of RateMyCop.

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for "suspicious activity."

When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?"

I wouldn't touch GoDaddy hosting with a ten foot pole. If you're hosted with them, find someone else. Now.

Unscrewed: The Consumer's Guide to Getting What You Paid For: Burley
(See online!)

Here's a new book on my list: "Unscrewed. The Consumer's Guide to Getting What You Paid For".

The Consumerist has a great interview with the author that describes some of the techniques in the book. Check this one out:

BURLEY: As you know, none of the techniques require anyone to scream or yell or spit at great distances. As a matter of fact, those are disqualifiers. There's an old-school belief, yes, walking into the middle of a showroom and screaming at the top of your voice, "They cheated me!" These days that will get you escorted out by the security guard. A lot of the techniques in the book put a twist on the old techniques of being a squeaky wheel. Such as writing a letter. Writing a letter to the president of the company these days is not going to get you anything. They've got legions of people and the president of the company is never going to see that letter. But I have a letter-writing technique that's called "Spokesperson For The Competition." You don't write a letter to the company that's causing you a problem, you write a letter to the president of the company that is their number one competitor, telling your true story and offering to become their number one spokesperson, and giving them permission to give a copy of your letter to every one of their sales people. Now before you send that letter to the competitor, you send a copy of that letter to the president of the corporation that's causing you a problem. And now they do the math. They say, ok, instead of losing just that one customer, our competitor is going to have evidence of just how poorly we treat our customers. And since we're in a highly competitive business, and we're trying to get those business accounts and fleet accounts or whatever, if every one of their sales people have evidence of how badly we treat our customers, how much business will we lose? You see what's happened there, it's the same technique, you're writing one letter, but you have somehow multiplied the effect, because you're not now one individual against the company that is causing you a problem. Using this technique of writing a letter to the competition, and offering to become a spokesperson for the competition, you've now multiplied your impact, your effect, a thousand fold? Ten-thousand fold? And suddenly, once again, it becomes more cost-effective for the company to take care of you than to ignore you.

That's quite brilliant actually. I should definitely get a copy and see what it's like.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

It's worth repeating that if you get charged for something you didn't ask for, you should challenge it. One point this article makes that I want to stress, sometimes you get signed up for something because you didn't notice and uncheck a box during a transaction with some other company or you had a free trial and it charged you after it was over.

These are dishonest and while they might technically be legal (though they shouldn't be), it's worth challenging them all the same.

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Comcastmustdie.com is a blog where people are invited to post their customer numbers so Comcast can get in touch with them to resolve issues. Given that people sometimes have vast difficulties that never seem to get resolved over the phone, this is a pretty good idea.

And according to the blog's comments, people have been getting results. It's worth checking out.

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Just spreading the news. But I was also very troubled by this:

"People have been scared out of their minds to speak out about Scientology," said Hill, Miscavige's niece, in an interview. "Nobody should have to be that scared to speak out about a church." Wiseman echoed the sentiment, adding that the Anonymous campaign had influenced her decision to reveal her identity last week. "The Internet is listening. If something happens to me, all of these people will know."

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It certainly appears that way. There's almost no content at http://www.igotmyidentitystolen.com/, just ads and links to Lifelock.com.

If it really is a front-site, then Lifelock's advertising campaign is even more aggressive than I thought! I already knew they advertise heavily on websites, but I've seen comments and reviews on many websites that read more like planted ads than actual reviews.

Case-in-point, some guy that left a nice long comment complaining about my views on fraud alerts who's website has another giant ad for Lifelock that's supposed to be a "review", but with all the ads, it's hard to believe that he's impartial.

RIAA

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A judge just ruled against the RIAA's theory of "making available". What this means is that the RIAA can't pursue a lawsuit solely on the fact that someone has a song available for download, but that someone actually downloaded it from them.

This one ruling could derail future (and past?) RIAA lawsuits and make filesharing a whole lot safer for the masses. Interestingly enough, the judge also helpfully offered the defendant a bunch of other possible defences that they could have used which the judge (presumably) would have ruled in their favor with.

(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

Because of fears of data sharing, data loss, and inappropriate disclosure, people are circumventing their doctors and insurance companies when getting DNA tests. Smart people.

Can and would they use your DNA results against you? Do credit card companies raise your rates according to unrelated things on your credit report? Do insurance companies raise your rates due to traffic tickets that have little to do with telling how good or safe a driver you are?

Like I said, avoiding a record of your DNA is a smart idea.

Watch out for leaks

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According to an Associate Press article, it's quite common for employees to snoop through customers' personal data.

Vast computer databases give curious employees the ability to look up sensitive information on people with the click of a mouse. The WE Energies database includes credit and banking information, payment histories, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and energy usage. In some cases, it even includes income and medical information. Experts say some companies do little to stop such abuses even though they could lead to identity theft, stalking and other privacy invasions. And companies that uncover violations can keep them quiet because in many cases it is not illegal to snoop, only to use the data for crimes.

But of course, if they didn't store all that necessary data, this would be far less of an issue.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

I…. I just don't have the strength to explain why this is a bad idea today. "Do no evil". Yeah… ok. You forgot about, don't do something that will make it easy for evil people to do evil, but I guess that wouldn't look as good as a company motto.

Oh, but don't worry! Your data will be protected by your Google account password! I feel better already…