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Some folks either have poor credit or are afraid to shop on credit for fear of ending up with a huge bill and huge interest. For these folks, there are debit cards. Debit cards are tied directly to the cardholder's bank account. If the account doesn't have enough to cover the charge, the charge is declined. This works via the ACH system used by banks to process checks and electronic payments. ACH transfers typically cost only a few cents, regardless of the amount. This is why payment services such as Paypal encourage you to use your bank account.
Visa and Mastercard have pulled off what retailers are calling a dirty trick. They charge more for their debit cards, a whole lot more. But in order to force retailers to accept them, they have tied acceptance of their cards to acceptance of Visa and Mastercard credit cards. In short, you must agree to accept ALL Visa and Mastercard or you can accept none. The lawsuit is seeking damages and an appeals court has already ruled that is has merit as a class-action lawsuit. If the plaintiffs prevail, damages could exceed 39 Billion dollars, as well as pave the way for lower fees and competition in this arena.
VeriSign Loses in Preliminary Court Ruling...
Do you remember the recent piece I wrote about VeriSign mailing "renewal" notices to GoDaddy's customers, telling them that their domain name is about to expire, and asking them to renew, with VeriSign, for $29 per year?
Many people were fooled into thinking that those notices came from their actual domain name registrar, instead of VeriSign, which is typically 2-3 times more expensive than its competitors. And those who responded to the notices with payment had their domain names transferred to VeriSign automatically.
BulkRegister.com, another registrar that has been the victim of VeriSign's misleading practices, finally sued VeriSign. And in the preliminary ruling, VeriSign was ordered to stop their misleading advertising practices.
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About a year ago, a payment service called Paymentalt popped up with text very similar to Paypal. There was no company information or list of officers. Digging around, I found one single person's name with no explanation of who he was and what he did. The address appeared to be a New York City apartment. The website was one of those el-cheapo, 5-megabyte jobs. Everything about it sounded like a scam. But they sported the Verisign logo. I called Verisign and asked what this meant. They explained that this meant the person had paid them to show the logo. It did not mean that Verisign had investigated the company or stood behind them in any way. I alerted the NY Attorney General's Office to a possible fraudulent site. Paymentalt disappeared very quickly in the wake of an investigation, along with thousands of credit card numbers and many complaints.
So what exactly does the Verisign logo mean? That someone paid for the right to display a logo? In my opinion, sites sporting the Verisign logo should be regarded with suspicion. Why are they paying to display a logo meant to fool the unwary?
While on the subject of ebay, some people just have too much time on their hands...
Computers read the data tracks of a cd first. CD Players read tracks in order and skip non-music portions. Sony's "hi tech" plan to prevent copying was to put an unreadable data track on the outside edge of the CD. CD players would skip this track. Computers would get stuck trying to read it. This would prevent computers from playing or copying the track. The solution was simple: using a marker, write over the bogus track. The computer would then skip this track.
I don't want to get into the legalities of disk copying. That's between you and your conscience and the record companies and the FBI. I do want to discuss companies that don't seem to have a clue, that don't understand that:
1 - there is no such thing as copy protection. If it can be played, it can be copied.
2 - preventing it from even being played on a PC, is preventing the rightful owner of the CD from putting it to the purpose for which it was purchased. This prevention may even be illegal. I don't have a hi-fi CD player and listen to CDs exclusively on my PC.
3 - the time, effort and money wasted on copy prevention can be better spent looking for ways to take away the reason people pirate things in the first place. These are:
a) high prices. Why are these things priced so high? I know folks will talk about marketing and licensing and packaging and so on. But the bottom line is that the profit margin is way higher than on most items and there is definitely room the lower it. I don't exactly shed a tear when a recording artist cries from her 9 million dollar home that CD-piracy is ruining her financially and she can only afford a fifty-foot yacht instead of a larger one.
b) content: Many albums contain one or two good recordings and then a bunch of filler thrown in just to fill up the disc. Now that folks can burn their own, they want to fill up a CD with only the songs they like but they don't want to buy 10 or 12 different albums to do that. So they start by buying one album, copying the two songs they like, then trading with their friends. The end result is that 12 different people each bought one album and then recorded songs from 12 different albums. Now who is cheating who? Is it the folks who bought one album and then recorded parts of 12, or the record companies which want to force people into buying 12 albums in order to get one album's worth of good recordings?
c) failure to change their methods: This is actually a response to problems a and b. Pre-Internet and CD burners, the only way to get an album was to buy it. Now that music can be digitally delivered, it's time for the record companies to take advantage of it. Instead of spending all that money for packaging and marketing, why don't they sell the songs directly over the Net? Folks could order just the songs they want. Prices would be lower. But maybe that's exactly the reason the music industry won't change. Instead they will continue to come up with lame protection schemes and continue to sue exchange programs like Napster and waste millions of dollars on lawyers rather than share it with the consumers who support them.
Incidentally, at least one company is already selling some songs over the Internet in MP3 format for 99 cents. ZD Net story.
The same situation applies to software. Now that many homes have PCs and sales of popular software have multiplied, there is no reason why certain programs sell for hundreds of dollars. The cost of the development and support have long been recovered. Like the record albums, most home users don't even need all of the features. Many are finding cheaper "lite" versions on the Internet (take a look at the Office clones at the bottom of this newsletter). But some folks end up saying, "We use Office at work and that's what I'm used to and I'm not sure that these clones are 100% compatible. Since I can't justify spending upwards of $200 to be able to occasionally take work home, I'll just copy the CD."
Again, I don't want to get into the issue of the legality of this. I only want to point out that while Microsoft and others whine about the billions of dollars they are losing to piracy (if you assume that every pirate would actually buy the program at list price), what are they doing to combat it, other than spending even more money on lawyers, investigators and activation schemes that penalize the legitimate users? Corel WordPerfect (which I happen to think is a far superior product) isn't as widely used as Word, particularly in the business world, doesn't have the clout of Microsoft yet is able to sell Academic versions to students and teachers for about $25. Why hasn't Microsoft tried this approach? I'm sure even they would agree that $25 per home user is a better deal than $0. And think of all the money they could save on lawyers and investigators and crazy activation schemes. I refuse to even consider using XP because of it and I would guess I'm not the only one who feels this way. Did Microsoft's activation prevent piracy or did it prevent sales? There are hackers in foreign countries who are selling XP for about $2 a disk without the activation. The pirated product is actually better than the original. Again, did Microsoft's activation prevent piracy or did it prevent sales?
Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Way back when, there was a company called Ashton-Tate that produced the first popular database program for PCs called dBase. It was based on a program developed for the government. Other companies were using some of the same technology which had been released into the public domain, but Ashton-Tate was the first company to put together a useful version with manual. Ashton-Tate then did what a lot of large companies do, they sat back on their laurels with the attitude "We're number one. We don't have to try anymore." Meanwhile, number two was trying harder. Other companies began releasing similar products that had more features, fewer restrictions and ran faster. Instead of competing with a better product, Ashton-Tate sued them for patent infringement and "look-and-feel" issues. Because the product commanded a very high price (around $600 per copy and you needed a copy for every person using it), it was probably one of the most pirated progams around. Instead of reducing the price or making license deals for multiple copies, Ashton-Tate concentrated on copy-protection schemes. They paid about a million dollars for a product they believed would elminate the piracy. It didn't. Then most of the lawsuits were dismissed. Today Ashton-Tate is history.
Sony Music Lobbies for Ban on Markers By Brian Briggs
Washington DC - Ralph Hughes of Sony Music testified in the Senate today urging lawmakers to enact legislation which would ban felt tip markers. "These innocuous looking writing instruments are the scourge of our society," he said holding up a Sharpie. "Not only can this black stick of death be used to violate the DMCA, but it could also be used to write the instructions to incubate the anthrax virus."
Hughes did concede that a marker had some legitimate uses, but he cited several examples of dangerous and illegal use of the markers which "clearly overshadow any justifiable purposes."
Man escapes prison with felt-tip marker by drawing a fake mustache on himself and fooling guards.
Snorting felt tip markers leading cause of death among teens who die snorting felt tip markers.
A terrorist could sketch a knife on Post-it note and hijack the plane with the picture.
A baby with a marker once ruined a perfectly good sweater.
In response to the Senator Fritz Hollings introduced the Hollings' Felt Tip Marker Family Safety Act. "Never have the dangers been so clear and the solution been so evident. This legislation will protect the children of our country in the wake of September 11th and the release of Celine Dion's "A New Day has Come" CD.
"Some citizens may have to switch to pencils or ball point pens," Hollings continued, "but that's a small price to pay for the security of our great nation."
Many pundits were surprised by the Hollings bill. "Normally Senator Hollings only introduces legislation when it's in support of Disney. This support of the Sony Corporation is a welcome change and shows the bi-partisanship of the Senator."
Tom Stephens of the Sanford marker company testified in support of markers, "I spent all last night trying to think of a proposal that was more ridiculous, but I kept drawing a blank."
Stephen Forshaw's invention won first prize in a competition sponsored by Sony. His invention, called PS Call Me, is a folded piece of paper with a circuit, posted as a letter. The recipient can call the sender back by pressing a button. More of a gimmick than an everyday means of communication, the letter-mobile would be a unique way of getting in touch. The sender, who Forshaw estimates would pay between £5 and £10 for the device, would activate it beforehand to ensure the phone calls back the person of choice.
Caryn Wisniewski, a Pueblo, CO, legal secretary and diehard Brady Bunch fan, came across the mistake while searching for information about the show's first-season cast. "When I first saw 1968 on the web page, I thought, 'Wow, apparently, all those Brady Bunch books I've read listing 1969 as the show's first year were wrong,'" Wisniewski told reporters at a press conference. "But even though I obviously trusted the Internet, I was still kind of puzzled. So I checked other Brady Bunch fan sites, and all of them said 1969. After a while, it slowly began to sink in that the World Wide Web might be tainted with unreliable information."
Following up on her suspicion, Wisniewski phoned her public library, the ABC television network, and the office of Brady Bunch producer Sherwood Schwartz-all of whom confirmed that "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site" was in error.
Attempts to contact the webmaster of "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site," identified as Ted Crewes of Naugatuck, CT, were unsuccessful. The page has been taken offline by its host, Cheaphost.net, which released a statement Tuesday. "We at Cheaphost were deeply saddened and disturbed to learn that one of the millions of pages we host contained a factual discrepancy," the web-posted statement read. "Please be assured that we are doing everything within our power to ensure that nothing of the sort happens again. We will not rest until the Internet's once-sterling reputation as the world's leading source for 100 percent reliable information is restored."
Paul Boutin, senior editor of Wired, said the error is likely to have a profound effect on how the Internet is perceived. "Will we ever fully trust the Web again?" Boutin asked. "We may well be witnessing the dawn of a new era of skepticism in which we no longer accept everything we read online at face value. But regardless of what the future holds, one thing is clear: The Internet's status as the world's definitive repository of incontrovertible fact has been jeopardized." Though the Brady Bunch error is the first confirmed instance of false information on the Internet, scares have occurred in the past. In 1998, an e-mail sent to a woman in Warner Robins, GA, made an unverifiable claim that she could earn thousands of dollars from an initial $5 investment. The claim was never conclusively proven false, and no charges were filed.
www.mdwoptions.com. Want to learn about the stock market? How to use options to leverage profits while minimizing investment? Visit this site for an education.
the Fuzzpad - When you write HTML code, the steps typically are: 1) write and save the code, 2) bring it up in the browser to see how it looks, 3) go back and edit or add some more code (repeat as necessary). The Fuzzpad is a nice little tool. Enter your code right in the window and see how it displays in the browser immediately. When you have finished, just copy the code and paste it into your editor. There are also very nice lessons about HTML written for the novice.
Open Office another freeware version of a program that is supposed to do everything the Office 2000 does and handle Office 2000 files.
Easy Office. This is a freeware version of a program that is reported to be every bit as good as office and fully comaptible with office files (word, presentations, excel, quicken, quickbooks.) It also creates PDF files in many resolutions. It works in all versions of Windows. There is a freeware (ad-supported) version but the full version is only $40.
Statbar - a nifty status bar that shows you lots of useful information about your system and is very configurable. Works under all versions of windows.
CDR FAQ Site. A site for frequently asked questions about recordable CDs. A wealth of information.
DVD FAQ Site. A wealth of information about DVDs.
Eprompter. Check multiple mailboxes and stop wasting time on spam. In the last issue I told you about a program called Mailmoa (see below). Eprompter is very similar and I find it even better. It allows you to check up to 16 email accounts including Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. It shows a button for each and the number of emails waiting. You have the option of downloading the headers only - a good way to save time if you get a lot of spam. You can then delete the messages unread. You can reply to messages without opening up your email client.
Mailmoa - This is a very useful program. It lets you set up connections to multiple email accounts which it will check on a regular basis (the default is every 3 minutes). If it finds mail in any of them, it will pop up a window showing you the account and the subject of the mail. Since it does not download the message, it does this very quickly. From that window, you can choose to view the message, reply to it or delete it. If you decide you want to keep it, you can fire up your email client and retrieve it normally.
I am now using it for two purposes. First, I don't have to check several email accounts regularly to see if I have mail. Mailmoa now does this for me. Second, I don't have to wait for every spam message to be downloaded and some of them take a long time with their annoying graphics. I review the retrieved subject lines in the mailmoa window and delete the spam unread.
Process Listing. This site has a list of hundreds of processes that may be running on your machine. Take a look and see what you might want to eliminate.
Drivers This site has the URLs for hundreds of drivers and DLLs by manufacturer and category.
push the freakin button Ever have a button or dialog pop up that you just want to close? This little program can be set to do it for you.
clipcacheplus Keeps a list of all the items you copied to the clipboard so you can bring any of them back.
Freeware - all the best freeware you need. Check out: drive rescure which claims it can recover data from a hard drive even if the FAT is corrupted and works on FAT and FAT32.
Trend Micro Anti Virus Site - a virus scanner that works off the web
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