Man Cleared of Charges in Circuit City Case
If you've been following the case of Micheal Righi, a man who refused to show his receipt at Circuit City and was soon arrested (because he wouldn't show a police officer his ID), you know that our "security society" is pushing people to take away our rights and pushing others to accept it.
Fortunately, Micheal didn't back down, .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Tags: Circuit City, Customer Abuse, Receipt Inspection, Your RightsHarvard Student Bookstore Desperate. Kicks Out Student Writing Prices
The saddest part of this story is that Harvard's bookstore is so desperate to prevent students from shopping online that they kicked out a student who was writing down the prices to compare them online later. They claimed that the pricing is copyrighted, which, of course, it's not.
Face it: if you charge more for a book in .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Tags: Harvard. Bookstore, Scams - Ripoffs - Dirty TricksTransunion Credit Reporting Company to Offer Credit Freezes Nationwide!
TransUnion becomes the first credit reporting company committed to providing U.S. consumers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia with the ability to freeze their credit files, should they feel that step is warranted.
The pricing is as follows:
-- Free to add, lift or remove for all .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]Microsoft Secretly Installing Software on XP and Vista Machines?
In some slightly overblown reporting online, Microsoft has been caught downloading updates to its software without user knowledge or consent. In this case, they were just updating the Windows Updater, but the key complaint here is that the users didn't get to choose.
In the past many people delay updating (or avoid it altogether) because the updates can sometimes .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Tags: Microsoft, WindowsGoogle Proposes Privacy Standard, But Who Are They to Talk?
Google, trying to hold up their former image of being a rebel company who "doesn't do evil", has proposed a universal privacy standard that they say all companies should follow. The main idea is that there should be a minimum set of standards that everyone agrees to follow when dealing .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Tags: Big Business, GoogleAmeritrade Data Breach
There's just nothing more I can say about this so I'll stick with pointing you to the news articles and just shut up.
On second thought, here's an interesting article stating that they knew about the breach since last May!
Microsoft to Place ID Tags in Music, Track You
Rather than try to prevent people from copying or sharing music with drm, Microsoft has patented a watermarking procedure that will allow them to tag music with IDs that are very hard to remove.
First take: this is bad, bad news. While Ars Technica believes that this could help to get rid of the much hated DRM, I believe .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Tags: Big Business, DRM, Microsoft, TrackingOhio State Intern, You Guessed It, Loses Laptop
How many years has it been since America's Funniest Home Videos came around? How many videos do you still see of some dad somewhere teaching his kid to swing a bat, but he stands behind him and gets nailed in the crotch? You think they'd learn.
Well the same can be true of these laptops. How many times does .... [Click here to read the rest of this post]
Tags: Lost Laptops, Ohio State UniversityFCC Considering “A La Carte” Cable – Choose Just the Channels You Want
It would be nice if this worked: allowing customers to pick only the channels they want and not charge them for all the ones they don't.
.... [Click here to read the rest of this post]Tags: Cable TV, Good StuffFair Use Helps Economy More than Copyright
Here's an interesting take on the whole situation. According to Computer and Communications Industry Association, fair use of copyrighted materials adds more value to the US economy than the copyright holders themselves.
.... [Click here to read the rest of this post]Tags: Copyright, Fair Use