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My poor wife went to a website that I directed her to to buy something for me for Christmas. It turns out that website is a front where they take your money and give no product. If we had known about resellerratings.com, we'd have saved ourselves the hassle, but now we have to cancel the order and possibly get a new credit card issued.

Well, you can bet we'll be checking a site's rating before purchasing directly through a non-major site again.

Anyway, I'm ticked and I'm going to do everything I can to make life miserable for this slimeball. First I'm going to dispute the charges with my credit card and ask if they have any means of prosecution. Second, I'm going to try and get his hosting, domain name, and merchant accounts canceled (with no domain name, no hosting for his site, and no merchant account to take credit cards, I'm guessing it will be harder to scam people in the future). And, if I can, I'm going to see what agency is responsible for this kind of fraud and see what they can do about it.

I'll post updates here if I manage to get any of this accomplished.

Gift Cards - Use with care

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Many gift cards (or parts of gift cards) go unused. Don't buy gift cards unless you consider the possible disadvantages first.

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

Way to go Nordstrom! They refuse to get involved with Christmas until AFTER Thanksgiving! Now if only everyone else will follow along.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

A fairly clever video maker has created a tutorial on copyright law using, of all things, Disney movie clips. It's humorous and informative which is a good combination 🙂

Just be careful because the speed that he switchs between clips might make you convulse.

RIAA

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Here's a little summary of the battle between the RIAA and university students. Looks like things are getting harder and harder for the RIAA meaning as their exploits become more public, less people are willing to bend over and take their abuse.

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

Walmart has tried selling a computer based on a Linux OS before, but this time it seems to be taking. the gPC runs with very light specs (by today's standards), but becuase the system and programs require less memory and processing power, the net result is competitive with today's more beefy machines.

Personally, I'm blogging about this article just for this line alone:

Even at the low end, however, image is everything. The gPC is built using tiny components, but put inside a full-size case because research indicates that Wal-Mart shoppers are so unsophisticated they equate physical size with capability.

Ha!

(Image copyright Jeremy Duffy)

Consumeraffairs.com has an article today about extended warranties. With the way they present it, I wonder why anyone would ever buy one.

It turns out that I mostly agree with them. I sold extended warranties for a long time and I can guarantee that you'll get your money's worth in some specific cases, but unless you know your rights very well and push for them in the face of opposition from the store and the company, you probably will never recoup your costs.

If you don't have the tenacity to fight for your warranty terms, you're better off avoiding the expense.

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

Have you ever bought a hard drive that didn't seem as large as was advertised? Why is my 80 gigabyte hard drive showing less than 75 actual gigabytes?

The reason is that companies like Seagate define their gigabytes by a standard that no one but hard drive manufacturers use which is this:

The first, while semantically correct, has no bearing on computing terms at all and is highly misleading. Though the term "giga" technically means 1 billion, in computing terms 1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes which translates to the second number you see there. For a hard drive manufacturer to play with numbers like that, I say they deserve some retribution.

In this case, they've settled on a class action lawsuit (without admitting any fault of course). Customers of Seagate will be able to get a 5% refund on Hard drives they've purchased… assuming they find out about the settlement of course.

That said, to see the settlement information, go to this site.

AT&T

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AT&T is a company who needs to be watched having been recently discovered that they built a custom algorithm to: "crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls "communities of interest" — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom".

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If you've been following this breach, the key problem here is two part:

1) TJX is the parent company of several other companies including TJ Maxx. Each of those companies shared data with TJX creating a massive database (and a single target for the hackers).

2) TJX (and others) shouldn't have stored the credit card data in the first place and when they did, they should have used better security.

Though they'll blame "clever hackers" for the breach, the fault instead lies squarely with TJX who's business practice of storing credit cards against people's will along with negligent use of outdated wireless encryption (WEP) first created a giant target and then then left a gaping hole for the bad guys to be able to go and get it.