Thursday, March 28th, 2019 (
No comments yet)
From Ars Technica:
Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good—and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008.
Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD!
Here's a brilliant spoof of the Yahoo announcement that was sent to subscribers that I found at
Digg.com:
Dear Consumer
We would like to thank you for being a customer of the DRM Clothing Store. Unfortunately, DRM'd clothing has not been as successful as we hoped, and we will be discontinuing service effective as of noon today. At the time that we suspend operation, all the DRM'd clothing that you have purchased will spontaneously cease to exist. We appreciate that this may be inconvenient to many of you, particularly to those of you who are currently wearing our DRM'd clothing at, say, a business meeting, a funeral or a formal dinner.
The DRM features in our clothing primarily affect the seams and stitching. If you use a sharp knife to separate your DRM'd clothing into separate fabric pieces, and then re-sew the clothing using your own needle and thread, the clothing will continue to function much as it did before. However, you must do so before noon today.
We regret the inconvenience caused to our loyal customers and thank you for your custom. We trust you will look back on your time as a customer of the DRM Clothing Store as an exciting adventure in digital living. And to those of you who don't receive this message in time, and find yourselves standing stark naked in a crowded subway car, trying to protect your modesty with an empty Starbucks cup and a day-old copy of the "New York Post", we'd just like to say "DRM Clothing – life on the digital edge!"
Yours sincerely, DRM Clothing
P.S. No refunds will be issued.
Tags:
DRM,
Yahoo,
Your Rights
Saturday, April 13th, 2019 (
85 comments)
I've had a Yahoo! account practically as long as I've been on the Internet. I've practically abandoned the mail because of the amount of spam it receives every day, but I still use it from time to time and it has a lot of historical and nostalgic value due to the e-mails that are still in there.
I've also used my account for the Yahoo! Answers service to help spread information about credit freezes and avoiding scams like lifelock. I'm guessing that last one is why I got a generic letter like this:
Oops
Your account has been suspended.
If you feel there has been a mistake, please contact us at answers-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com.
Most likely, your account was suspended in violation of Yahoo! Answers community guidelines. Click here to read the full guidelines
In the meantime, feel free to browse Yahoo! Answers
Long story short, I asked them for an explanation, and their responses were all BS of one form or another. I used to have a lot longer and more detailed description of what happened next, but rather than get into all that, I'll leave it as simple advice: when something like this happens, complaining to the Better Business Bureau and consumer protection sites like the Consumerist for publicity are good, but won't probably help. Yahoo has the right to deal with whoever they want and, at best, you can argue that as a company that so aggressively entices people to use their services, they have at least some measure of obligation to treat people fairly, but that's a stretch.
In the end, the best possible thing you can do is avoid using Yahoo! services. There are plenty of alternatives out there and I, for one, have no interest in spending time and energy on an account that can be disabled at any time for no valid reason.
Tags:
Yahoo,
Your Rights
