INeedAttention.com

The United States Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are created equal, but in practice, no two people are treated equally by law.  In fact, one is not even expected to understand how to apply the law themselves, instead they are expected to hire a lawyer to navigate the complexities and subtleties of the law whenever the need arises. Despite that Miranda rights guarantee a defendant’s right to a lawyer, even if they cannot afford one, lawyers that are forced to take on these pro-bono cases are often already handling other paying cases, and thus have no financial incentive to prepare and present a proper defense in court for their poor clients.  Conversely, someone with a lot of money can hire an accomplished attorney that will be willing to spare no expense in order to achieve the desired outcome.  Furthermore, the concept of a fair and impartial trial by peers breaks down in circumstances where a celebtiry is involved. For example, football star and actor O.J. Simpson was accused of a brutal double murder, and stood trial in the state of California.  Simpson was already a pop culture icon, even before his infamous attempt to flee police in a White Bronco gained the attention of every media outlet.  It would be laughable to have assembled any mentally or socially competent jury of 12 that could honestly say they had heard nothing about the case already in order to hear it from an impartial viewpoint.  Simpson also had one of the most skilled — and expensive — legal panels ever put together for a single case, and in fact the defense team was popularly referred to as the ‘Dream Team’ by media.  This case, amongst countless others, are excellent examples of the inequities of our legal system.

One sunny spring afternoon, a congregation of Verizon technicians descended upon the cul-de-sac deep in the heart of suburbia that I call my neighborhood.  These technicians were not here to read the telephone meter, mind you, they were outside digging holes and pushing cables into places I never knew cables could go, in order to deliver their new Fios fiber-optic home installation.  Shortly after they finished installing the underground cables, we noticed intermittent electric power outages.  Apparently Con Ed also noticed, because one of their technicians discovered that there was damage to the underground utility lines in the neighborhood, so the electric power lines were replaced.  Cablevision, “home of Optimum Products and Services, for your home and your business,” also joined in on the frenzy by replacing their underground coaxial cable line.

It just so happens that my front lawn is used as a right-of-way where a fiber-optic head end converts the Cablevision fiber optic network to the coaxial cable feed that we know and love. And despite that the cul-de-sac has fewer than 8 homes, there is a second underground utility pedestal across the street on my neighbor’s yard that splits that coaxial signal.  For some reason, when Cablevision returned like the other utilities had, they didn’t replace their underground line immediately.

Instead, they took some coaxial cable, terminated it in the box on my lawn, then ran it out of the pedestal…

Up a tree in my front yard, where it was tied on near the top with some wire…

Strung across the street, where it was tied to the head of a light post…

Before re-entering the ground where the other pedestal is.

I noticed the grass starting to grow back where they had dug weeks earlier, and I started to wonder if Cablevision ever planned on doing anything about it or if they would just leave it this way forever.  You can see clearly there is exposed wiring, and even though this is coaxial cable which usually only carries signal-level voltages, I was still pretty concerned about this, especially considering that Con Ed was replacing cabling because of some electrical fault worthy of replacing their underground plant.  I mean, there was absolutely no lighting protection, and in addition there were exposed conductors from the previous underground installation hanging out right in the open.

But also, no one from Cablevision ever asked to use my tree as an ad hoc telephone pole, and in fact, when they were installing the wire in the tree, one of the technicians gave my brother a hard time about moving his vehicle in order to access our own driveway.

So I called Cablevision, and guess what happened — nothing, so I called again, and still nothing happened. I did this once every week or two for just over a month.  No one could tell me what the delay was, or how long it would be before they re-installed it properly.  I started to get frustrated, so the next time I called, I selected the options to make a new service call, and told them I was going to cut down the tree in my front yard, with their wire attached to it. The phone rep had no clue what I was talking about, even as I explained that I was about to cause an outage.  I asked if I could speak with someone on the technical side to at least explain what was going on, because obviously, there was something going on. But the phone rep insisted they had no idea what work was being performed or not in my area, and that no one could tell me what was going on.

I started getting outright upset that it was so complicated to communicate with Cablevision, because I was completely in the dark for these weeks, while they disregarded my repeated escalating requests for action or at least information. It could have been completely up to standards, which I doubted it was, but if someone had just explained if it was, I would have been satisfied. Instead, their labyrinth voice response system and marathon wait-times wore me down with multiple phone calls lasting over 10 to 15 minutes each.

Clearly, I needed a new strategy.  Instead of calling the service number that Cablevision said I should call, I called the number in their uber-catchy urban salsa themed commercial.

The wait time to speak with a representative was noticeably shorter, and also the voice prompt indicated that if I didn’t have a home phone number, I could just press 0.  Unfortunately, even though I got through to someone, they said they’d have to transfer me for repairs, and that put me right back in queue.

But still determined to get through to someone, I tried this time calling the toll-free number I saw in advertisements for Optimum Triple Play for Business, which had a different number then the home service.  Yet again, I was routed to the appropriate department with incredible bureaucratic predictability.  I still needed to be even more creative.

I called back the Optimum Business service phone number the next day. I navigated through the prompts to request a repair. When I was connected, and the rep asked to verify my account info, I interrupted and told her I must have dialed the wrong number, that I was a vendor looking for information on how to bill them for something. For the first time ever, an Optimum phone representative offered a name and number to call for someone I could speak with.

I called the number the next day.  Sure enough, this was a real land line phone that went directly to someone at the Cablevision Corporation, not a voice response system. I pulled yet another switch on this unsuspecting person in the Cablevision corporate billing department. This time I told the person I was a contractor, and that one of my workers encountered a live wire and needed someone else to check it out. Finally, I was getting somewhere, because the lady on the other end gave me yet another number to call.

When I called that number, I dropped the contractor angle and just explained the situation. He seemed to genuinely understand the problem, making him the first person out of nearly ten at Cablevision.  Sure enough, that very evening, Cablevision technicians arrived and restored order.  The pedestal box still sits a bit askew, but clearly it’s too much to expect decent service, let alone perfection, from Cablevision.

The guy I’d spoken with last called me up the next day and apologized for the trouble.  He offered to let me call him directly with any issue like that in the future.  He did a great job, but seriously, it took way too much lying and social engineering to resolve something relatively straightforward, albeit odd.

I’m not trying to plug FiOS with this post, because I’ve never even tried it, and frankly I have my doubts that anything Verizon does could be cool.  But while we’re on the subject of Optimum, they throttle BitTorrent traffic quite significantly.  Optimum phone representatives, naturally, have no idea what BitTorrent is, in fact sometimes the representatives seem to genuinely not know what a bandwidth cap is either.  But Optimum Online will inject RST packets into your connections (just like Comcast) if it detects you seeding a BitTorrent without downloading anything as well. Opportunistic encryption built into programs like uTorrent are probably the best solution to this for now, besides bringing attention to the fact that Optimum’s lightning fast speed does come at a cost.  But at the end of the day, 30 Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream (with “Optimum Boost”) is pretty fast for the United States, and it does do the job.  I have a feeling, but cannot substantiate in any way, that they also throttle traffic to common speed test sites to make it appear that your connection is faster than it really is in normal conditions.

Also, the picture quality for non-HD channels on iO cable is horrendous.  You’re almost better off plugging the analog coaxial signal directly into your cable-ready TV than using their digital cable.  Watching a show like “South Park” on Comedy Central is painful because the amount of MPEG compression artifacts degrades what should be smooth colors and lines into blocks and splotches of incongruous colors.  The HD channels, although still limited, will continue to grow over time, and will hopefully continue to be amazing.

Perhaps it’s all part of a larger Cablevision conspiracy to make me think my service is good! Time to don my tin foil hat and protect myself from the mind-control radio wives emanating from that (no-longer) exposed underground wire!

Insurance of any form is rarely a compelling value proposition for consumers. Take, for example, life insurance. Life insurance is the one product that people buy that they hope to never have to use. From the insurer’s perspective, it’s a safe bet: you don’t want to die, and you’ll do whatever you need to in order to avoid it. On the other hand, life insurance can present a compelling value since, as they say, it provides peace of mind. That peace of mind comes from the assurance that when you die, your loved ones will be well supported in your absence. Insurers help manage risks in our lives. Homeowners risk losing their homes in natural disasters, floods, and fires. Automobile drivers risk being crashed into and also crashing into something or someone and thus being exposed to considerable amounts of liability.

But insurers can help you manage other less significant risks, as well. My adventure in obscure insurance services started when I found out that I was eligible for a discount on any Verizon Wireless service thanks to arrangements between Verizon and my employer. When I went to apply the discount to my account, I found out that I couldn’t apply the discount because the account wasn’t in my name. Our entire family was on one plan, and my mother’s name was on the account. So we switched the account to my name. At that time, Verizon had me change my plan around. This proved to be in our favor, and we ended up with a comparable plan for much less per month. One key change to save money was to switch my data plan from unlimited to per-megabyte, since I figured I would rarely spend as much as the cost of the unlimited plan in a single month. A few days later the changes went through, and my discount was applied, lowering the bill even further.

Things were great. I received the first bill, and then noted that on two of the five handsets, a charge appeared: “TEC INSURANCE”, $5.99 per month. TEC, or Total Equipment Coverage, replaces your phone if it is lost, stolen, or broken, for a modest $50 deductible in addition to that $5.99 per-handset monthly premium. My phone wasn’t completely broken, but the online phone claim website allowed me to file a claim for the intermittent failures I was experiencing.

The claim explained that the phone, an LG VX4500, had been through a lot. I lost the antenna, and replaced it with an aluminum twist tie. The outer screen cracked when I was rollerblading in the city one afternoon. Repeated falls onto hard surfaces rendered the volume adjustment buttons inoperative, and also caused the LCD backlight to experience a mysterious 2-to-3 second delay when powering up. Speaking of powering up, the phone would spontaneously power down when the battery was nudged the wrong way since the battery’s plastic tabs were broken. One of the weirder problems was that the LCD display would occasionally go blank. The solution: remove & replace the battery, call *228 (phone activation) and re-program the phone, then the display would come back on when the phone restarts. I’ve had this phone for four years, and I’m comfortable and generally satisfied with it for some reason. It just works –it makes phone calls, sends text messages, and even gets my laptop online via 3G. What more could I want?

My claim didn’t fit into the pre-selected claim categories, so I had to explain the damage just as I listed above. It was approved within a few minutes of submitting it. There was just one problem: the LG VX4500 was discontinued, so they couldn’t replace it. When I called and spoke with a claims representative, they offered me the LG VX4650 instead. I didn’t know the model off hand, so I did a quick Amazon.com search while I was on the phone, which revealed that this phone too was discontinued. I asked how it made sense that I was offered one discontinued phone in place of another discontinued phone. The agent put me on hold, came back, and offered me an LG VX5400. Again unfamiliar with that model number, I searched online and found a slightly used handset for $24 (plus shipping). I asked the agent what was costing so much for the premiums in addition to the $50 deductible if the handset wasn’t worth close to that. The agent couldn’t really explain. I asked if any other handsets were available, but they said those were all my options. I politely declined to complete my claim until I could investigate the matter further.

The first thing I did was look up all three phones — my original LG VX4500 handset, and the VX4650 and VX5400 as well. At that moment, there was at least one of each phone listed on eBay. The market prices for the phones I was offered, accessories included, on eBay were:

• LG VX4500 - Original handset - $8 (+s/h)
• LG VX4650 - Offered replacement handset - $16 (+s/h)
• LG VX5400 - 2nd offered replacement handset - $24 (+s/h)

The real kick in the nuts was that on top of the pre-paid $5.99 per-month premiums, the insurance company’s $50 premium didn’t cover the separate shipping and handling fee for the replacement handset.

Maybe this service could be a good value for people that have these $400 smart phones and expect to break a handset or two per year. Insurance for smart phones is more expensive, but at the time my VX4500 was originally purchased, the MSRP was just under $200. The manufacturer’s warranty on the handset lasts one year already anyway. After one year, the selection of phones will have advanced significantly anyway. If you needed to replace the phone exactly 1 year and 1 day after you bought it, you would be faced with one of two options. Without insurance, you would be liable to pay for a new phone out-of-pocket — another $200 spent, but you’ll have the newest latest model again. With insurance, you’d have already spent $71.88 in premiums. The additional $50 deductible, for a total of $121.88, to replace your original phone may be a good value. But after two years, the nearly $200 in combined premiums and deductible to replace the phone would likely not be a good value, since the phone will have depreciated significantly as new handsets replace it on the market. After three years, the $270 combined spent on the insurance and claim would easily have paid for a new handset with superior features.

But it gets even better — usually Verizon Wireless can work something out with you to give you another free phone after 2 years when you go to renew your contract. So why file a claim at all after two years? You could get a brand new phone free! Oddly, the agent I spoke with at the insurer sympathized with me when I pointed this out. I should get a new phone from Verizon if that was a better deal. But that seemed absurd — we’d apparently paid for insurance premiums for nearly 4 years on 2 handsets for a total of over $400 in premiums. The solution they offered for that price paid was a discontinued handset that was worth less than the deductible, and when I pointed out this was a bad deal, they suggested I get a new phone with a new Verizon contract.

Knowing that I could get the exact same handset I had for under $10, I chose not to proceed with the insurance claim. I canceled the insurance service the next day. My girlfriend had the exact same phone before she upgraded to a BlackBerry. She gave the phone to me, and Verizon Wireless was able to set up the phone over-the-air when I dialed 611, and even waived the usual $19.95 fee because of my discount plan. The phone was replaced by my girlfriend’s goodwill for a total cost of $0. It’s like my phone is brand new.

Unfortunately, the insurance company got away with murder thanks to the poor choice in selecting the insurance when my mother set up the plan. There is a sort of happy ending to this story though. I went to their website, and found a list of the names of their management team. I sent a strongly worded email to the company’s senior officers using the format “first.lastname@company.com”. Sure enough, all of the emails went through except one that bounced back. In my email, I promised that I’d find at least one other customer of theirs and convince them to cancel.

I got a call back that day from their corporate offices and spoke with the director of their entire customer service operation. She seemed a bit mystified that I didn’t want to accept the replacement handsets, despite my explanation that it simply was a bad value because the deductible was so high. The customer service director ended up settling with me for cash! I received $100 in traveler’s checks via overnight FedEx, as a gesture of goodwill. In return, as a gesture of goodwill, I’ve masked the name of their company, although I still didn’t make it very hard to figure out what the company’s name is.

At the end of the day, it’s just generally a bad value to buy these handset insurance plans. Make sure you really understand what you’re buying when you get insurance and extended warranties. A good rule of thumb with insurance is to insure only things that you can’t afford to replace. Things like your life, your house, and your car fall into this category for most people. Things like your TV, your power tools, your computer, and your cellular handset just usually aren’t worth that much to begin with. Skip the insurance on these small items and spend them on something more worthwhile.

The old phone, on the left, seen with its cracked external screen and aluminum twist-tie antenna.

The keypads may look similar, but the phone on the left can been seen missing superficial covers over the screw holes. Also the buttons on the side didn’t work on the old phone.

With the backs removed, it’s obvious these phones are actually not identical. I noticed a few differences between the phones after careful examination. The first was that the “new” phone lacks the Scheduler tool, however the new phone has the “voice scheduler” and “driving mode” options in the “voice” menu. Also in the “sounds” settings menu, the new phone has “speaker phone” while the old phone has “speaker” options. Finally, the old phone has an option “ERI alerts” under the “alerts” sounds settings menu. The “phone info” menu also indicated two other differences: the old phone’s software version was “T45VZV04″ vs the new phone’s seemingly older version “T45VZV02″, and the new phone had an ERI version of “ERI4″ vs the new phone’s version of “ERI 50018″.

They were nice enough to send me back $100 of the $420 in wasted insurance premiums that we’d paid. Then again, I did tell them I was going to make a point to get at least one other person to drop their service. Since they were nice enough to give me that gesture, I’ve shielded their name. Still, they made a solid couple hundred bucks off it over the years. Also it’s hard for me to feel too bad for them when were ready to charge me a $50 deductible, plus shipping, to send me a phone that I could get on eBay for half that price plus shipping. It would be like having a $10000 deductible on car insurance even though you paid $500 a month. Hardly a worthwhile investment.

It would be impossible to argue that there isn’t a lot of hype around Facebook. Microsoft’s recent purchase of a mere 1.6% stake of Facebook for a total of $250 million means that Microsoft believes Facebook to be worth a whopping $15 billion. To put things in perspective, that means that Facebook has a higher valuation than the Ford Motor Company (whose market cap is about $13 billion).

So clearly, there’s something to Facebook that makes them so appealing to consumers and apparently valuable. Facebook is an e-marketing wet dream. Few other sites can boast that their users volunteer so much demographic data, ranging from their age to their relationship status to their political views to their favorite James Blunt song. Privacy advocates be damned — this generation can’t help but share with the world every little detail about themselves.

Social networking sites like Facebook contain some features that help users control their privacy, but let’s be real: if you’re posting something on the Internet, there’s a good chance that someone will eventually see it. Herein lies the problem: it becomes very difficult to control data once it hits the Internet, since digital files can be infinitely reproduced at no cost with no loss. Anyone that ever downloaded an MP3 illegally understands how this can work to their benefit. With that said, this article will explain how to ensure you are accessing the most content you are permitted to view. So first, a disclaimer: depending on how you define “hacks”, this may not be a “hack”. Feel free to refer to it as a “trick” instead if you’re a pedantic grammar-police volunteer.

Facebook at least attempts to pretend it cares about user security since it first launched. However, numerous exploits soon surfaced (covered elsewhere on this blog). I was once even approached by (presumably) Russian spammers that learned I had a technique to harvest email addresses from Facebook. It may not be so easy to harvest emails anymore, but one thing is for sure: most people don’t understand how to set privacy permissions on their photo albums. When you create a photo album on Facebook, the default “Album Privacy” setting is to allow your album to be shared with, well, everyone! But, while “everyone” may be able to access the photo album, not everyone is able to access your profile. To further confuse things, photo album privacy settings are set from the album itself, not from the usual privacy console. So without further ado, here is a technique to browse photo albums that you normally would never be able to browse. The only requirement is that you must already have access to one photo in the album.

So, for example, you load up your friend’s profile, and click “View Photos of Me”. Now, under “Added by others” you should see a whole set of photos that were added by that person’s friends. Click any photo added by someone else. This will load the photo page. If you click “Next”, you will be taken to the next photo of your friend - not the next photo in the original gallery. Here is the hack: to view the photos in the original gallery, you just need to edit the URL you’re at. Let’s say the photo’s URL is: (and note this is NOT a valid URL)

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=34567890&op=1&view=all
&subj=1234567890&id=1234567809

Clicking “Next” might bring you to photo:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=35678901&id=1345678901
&op=1&view=all&subj=1234567890

Note that the “pid” and “id” values have changed, but the “subj” value did not. The “subj” value is the user ID of the person you’re friends with. The “op” and “view” values tell Facebook what type of navigation to give you (i.e. where the “next” and “previous” links point to). Let’s reload that first photo again without all the clutter. Delete everything from the URL besides the “pid” and “id” values. The new URL will look like this:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=34567890&id=1234567809

Now, click “next”. Notice that it’s probably not the same photo that you saw when you clicked “next” last time. That’s because now, you are loading the photo as if you are browsing the gallery. Instead of browsing by “subj” (photos of the person you know), you’re now just loading the photo. And remember, you have permissions to load that photo because the default gallery permission is that “Everyone” can.

I find this very useful for finding photos of someone that may have been untagged. For example, if your friend was at a party, and their friends uploaded 10 photos of them, maybe they started to get a little tipsy at the end of the night and didn’t want people so see those last 9 photos, so they untagged all but one. Load that one still-tagged photo, hack the URL as described above, and you can see the remaining photos.

I’d love to hear feedback on this — whether you consider it a hack, a bug, an annoyance, or even just a feature!

This morning I found out that RateMyCop.com, a new site that just launched with the purpose of rating police officer’s performance, had been taken down by its hosting provider and registrar GoDaddy. The site launched to mixed reaction, with a sharp contrast between the negative response of law enforcement and mass media and the relief to armchair constitutional scholars posting on Internet message boards. With over 4200 diggs, and nearly 1400 votes on reddit, it’s clear that there’s a public interest in the story here.

As a GoDaddy VPS customer, and amateur tutorial author and reviewer, this upset me, so I wrote a note on GoDaddy’s public relations feedback page.

“As a GoDaddy customer, I am extremely concerned about GoDaddy’s behavior in deleting DNS records for ‘RateMyCop.com’. Continued behavior in this regard will force me to switch to another domain registrar & host.”

This is the sad state of affairs at the moment — other sites have had GoDaddy lay down the law, as extensively documented by NoDaddy, a site about alleged GoDaddy abuses. GoDaddy also notably took down DNS records for computer security site SecLists.org alleging violations of their terms. Similarly, in this case, GoDaddy responded that the user had exceeded its alloted bandwidth, and thus they were cut off for that reason. Here’s their reply:

The situation with the Web site RateMyCop was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way.

The site’s operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy’s concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.

This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire ’shared server’ accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.

Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck.

The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.

While the “censorship” allegations certainly make for an edgy “story,” they simply had nothing to do with this situation.

- Go Daddy
Office of the President

I’m inclined not to believe this, since GoDaddy charges for bandwidth overages and would be more than happy to let you pay the overage unless you specify that you want overage protection.

Clearly, the topic of RateMyCop.com is politically charged. Cops don’t like being called out, and historically never have — that’s why they’re cops (so they can call others out). In my community in particular, police criticism isn’t welcomed, after all, we’re the second safest city, and we have great schools, and that’s why our property taxes grew 40 percent and the Palisades Mall’s rose 8 percent, even though the Palisades Mall was supposed to pay lots of taxes to keep our taxes down. Sometimes our police deserve some criticisms despite our incredible performance in arbitrary lists compiled by politicos. It’s only natural to deserve some kind of criticism, nobody is perfect, we understand that, but if we pay high taxes, we deserve high quality service, and that means being held accountable when the law isn’t properly followed.

The Internet has delivered a cornucopia of police abuse videos. More than ever, we are confronted with amateur videos of police brutality and plain old lack of professionalism. Way back in 1992, was one of the most prominent examples of this, with the amateur taping of the Rodney King beating. Without police oversight, guys like like this guy (below), continue indulging themselves and getting high on their own power. Watch as this cop from Baltimore tells a 14 year old that his behavior will get him killed (2:05):

I think GoDaddy needs to step up to the plate, and publicly apologize for any wrong doing, and even if they weren’t wrong, make right on the bandwidth issue — a now highly public issue — by offering the RateMyCop.com authors some massive hosting package for a year. Bob Parsons, a former marine, once fought to protect our freedoms — so it sure would be a shame to see his company do just the opposite.