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10 Things To Never Buy Used

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
7:58 PM on February 7, 2007

ironically, i've sold both a laptop and a carseat on ebay. hopefully i haven't killed anyone.

Announcing The 2007 Worst Company In America Contest

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
9:01 PM on January 31, 2007

does the u.s. government count? i've seen my shareholder value plummet for years...

ConEd Customer's Personal Info Highly Vulnerable To Online Theft

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
8:57 PM on January 31, 2007

i'm not saying consumerist should be considered liable for any trouble that someone else decides to start over this. my concern is how much concern is shown for the consumers at risk.
was coned simply sent a single email as a warning? was it sent to anyone in particular, or some anonymous "contact us" address? were there any follow-up messages sent? was there any regulatory agency contacted before the rest of the world? more information is needed.
like i said, if more was done than a cursory notification, then all is forgiven. but if all that was sent was a single 'fyi', then coned wasn't the only one who fell asleep at the consumer protection switch. keep in mind that we're not talking about a bank- a criminal wouldn't just have the capacity to defraud coned. they'd have the capacity to defraud any number of innocent consumers. to enable that behavior on a consumer-centric site seems counterproductive.

it's a fuzzy area to be sure, but it seems to me that consumerist's obligation should be to steer clear of fuzziness when it's their own base at stake. i'm not talking about legal interpretations, i'm concerned about right and wrong. (even if it's just my own sense of it.)

ConEd Customer's Personal Info Highly Vulnerable To Online Theft

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
9:01 PM on January 30, 2007

We emailed this information to ConEd earlier this month but never received a reply back, so now we're going public.

did you get multiple unsatisfactory responses from the reps/supervisors? did you escalate it to some executive-level csr? have any consumer protection agencies been notified?

maybe it's just me, but i'm a little leery of the whole "we haven't gotten a response to this security issue, so we're gonna go ahead and tell everyone" methodology. whether you're talking about exploitable open ports or buffer overruns or weak website security, it's advertising an issue to anyone who might be interested in taking advantage, who may not have known before the announcement.

say someone breaks into coned's system and starts going to town. say they found out about the vulnerability from consumerist or some link. coned may be the fools with the weak security, but consumerist would be part of the process that facilitated the escalation. if i stand on a street corner announcing to everyone, "hey, the bank left the vault unlocked!", i may not be guilty of a crime, but i'm still an *sshole.

unless of course you did more than just send them a single courtesy email a few weeks ago, in which case all is forgiven.

10 Shopping Tricks That Stores Hate

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
8:46 PM on January 30, 2007

for the love of god, never buy accessories - cables and such - at best buy. $50 for a dvi-d cable?!?

Inside Organized Credit Card Fraud

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
8:38 PM on January 30, 2007

the sad thing is that there isn't enough of an incentive for corporations to protect the financial information in the first place. so many dollars spent on enforcement, so few dollars spent on prevention.

Autozone: Free After Mail-In Rebate (Except Not Really, Just Kidding)

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
8:25 PM on January 26, 2007

not just autozone. i got a hydraulic jack and jackstands a pep boys a couple months back with a promised (and also MIA) rebate. i didn't care enough to fight because the sale price was low to begin with. but what are the odds that it was an isolated case...

Super Bowl Ad Spoilers

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
8:18 PM on January 26, 2007

...then i just read falcon's comment and was left speechless by the irony. someone needs a hug. and a spellchecker.

Super Bowl Ad Spoilers

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
8:13 PM on January 26, 2007

seriously, coke has had some pretty damned good creative teams working on those ads. there's been 5 or 6 over the past year or so that have been really inventive. (no, i don't work for coke.)

Nation's Largest Pork Producer Discontinues Use of "Crates"

Commented by dave the wet sprocket:
8:08 PM on January 26, 2007

how long before they discontinue the use of "pigs"?

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