RIAA

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The RIAA has been able to run free for years suing just about anyone it can using dubious legal methods. Well, their glory days may be over. The Free Software Foundation has pledged funds to "pay fees and/or expenses of technical expert witnesses, forensic examiners, and other technical consultants assisting individuals named as defendants in non-commercial, peer-to-peer file sharing cases brought by the RIAA, EMI, SONY BMG, Vivendi Universal, and Warner Bros. Records, and their affiliated companies, such as Interscope, Arista, UMG, Fonovisa, Motown, Atlantic, Priority, and others".

That is awesome.

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

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It's a start. Let's hope it goes somewhere.

More coverage found @: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=29792&sectionid=3510203 and http://blog.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2007/04/articles_of_impeachment_to_be.html

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In California, Sprint has been forced to unlock their phones to allow their customers to use their phones with other cell services. The main point here being that if someone has been using their cellphone for years wouldn't normally want to switch to another service even if Sprint was terrible since they might like their phone and have it customized and full of data they wanted to keep.

With cellphone unlocking, now that customer can drop Sprint like a bad habit at will. Bad news for Sprint, great news for us.

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Perhaps Equifax is seeing the same gate closing on them that Transunion did. They are the second of the three credit reporting companies to offer credit freeze protection.

The credit and financial industries have aggressively lobbied against credit freeze laws, claiming they would reduce the availability of credit and discourage shoppers from making big-ticket purchases due to the time spent unlocking a credit account.

And that's bad how? If people have to spend $10 or so to unlock credit and have to spend more time to do it, maybe they won't be so quick to get into credit card debt. Anyway, with so many states having already passed freeze laws, I guess the credit reporting companies are trying to preempt the states that haven't by offering it first.

Either way, it's good news for everyone. Hopefully, the states will still pass regulation requiring fast and easy access to unlocking credit and a lower fee as well, but it's a dang good start. Now let's see if Experian follows the other two.

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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 ID theft victims -- $10 to add, lift or remove for non victims

Before, there were only certain states with freeze laws, but Transunion is making the move to allow freezes anywhere!?

That's a surprising move. With this, they've basically voluntarily shot themselves in the foot as far as selling credit monitoring services.

This is probably some kind of public relations "first strike", but as long as there aren't any scary drawbacks or fine print (and it doesn't appear there are any so far), this is awesome. Let's hope the others follow suit.

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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.

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From the Consumerist:

Early Termination Fees: FCC regulations would require companies to prorate ETFs, with the penalty for escaping a 2-year contract cut in half at the end of the first year.

Service Maps: Cellphone companies would be required to provide detailed maps showing call quality down to the street level. The maps would be augmented by data on dropped calls and coverage gaps collected and publicized by the FCC.

Fee Disclosure: Overage charges would be displayed separately from taxes, and companies would be prohibited from levying any fees, apart from the basic service charge, not expressly authorized by federal, state, or local regulation.

Contract Disclosure: Depriving us of a source of many posts, companies would be prohibited from extending contracts without "point-of-sale notification," and customers would have 30 days to cancel any contract, new or extended. Any contract changes would need to be sent to consumers in writing, and could not take affect for 30 days.

Unlocked Phones: The bill would give the FCC a homework assignment: a single-spaced report to Congress on the harmful and anti-competitive practice of locking handsets.

Military Exemptions: Companies would be required to release military members awaiting deployment from their contracts.

Wow. I can't remember the last time I saw a consumer friendly bill that didn't have some horrible drawback attached. No custom fees? Prorated early termination fees? Street level service maps! So very cool… Let's hope for the best.

George W. Bush

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Part of the Patriot act allowed the feds to issue "National Security Letters" which could demand information without subpoena, without probable cause, and included a gag order requiring that the recipient could not share that they'd received such a letter with anyone.

Despite this being a gross over-stepping of power, Congress did pass AND RENEW the Patriot act. All that aside, a federal judge finally struck the provision as unconstitutional.

Although Marrero recognizes the importance of preserving national security, he asserts in his decision that "The Constitution was designed so that the dangers of any given moment would never suffice as justification for discarding fundamental individual liberties or circumscribing the judiciary's unique role under our governmental system in protecting those liberties and upholding the rule of law."

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The church is accused of being a criminal organization involved in extortion, fraud, unfair trading, violation of privacy laws, and unlawfully practicing medicine. Both the Belgian and the European branches of the church should be brought to court, according to the authorities.

Too bad our government is so corrupt that it can't stamp out stuff like this too. I mean, not only do we not prosecute them, we make them a legitimate religion? Crazy.

The German government considers Scientology a commercial enterprise that takes advantage of vulnerable people.

Duh.