Consumerist
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walmart
Video: Turning Illegally Logged Wood Into A Walmart Toilet Seat
This week's New Yorker reports on how illegally logged Russian wood is smuggled over the border into China, where it's turned into all sorts of products. In this video that accompanies the article, you see it end up as toilet seats for sale in U.S. Walmart stores.
It's hard to think of an object that isn't made of wood or packaged or encounters wood at some point in its journey through the economy. Any number of household items that you can buy at Walmart, like a toilet seat for instance, may very well be made from Russian wood.
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Debt
Is Volkswagen Violating The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act?
Tim's neighbor received a call from VW Credit asking her to walk across the street and leave a note on her neighbors' front door and VW Bug asking them to call back their creditor. Calls like these are known as block parties, and they are a direct violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. More » -
government
Everything This Farmer Wants To Do Is Illegal
Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Charlottesville, Virginia attained a certain moderate level of fame when his operation was featured in Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Now he's got a book of his own called Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. More » -
urban blight
LA Has 4,000 Illegal Billboards, But City Looks On Helplessly
In 2002, LA banned any new billboards from going up in the city. Since then, an estimated four thousand have been put up by advertising companies who have ignored the law, which obviously the city's billboard inspectors—"a tiny, and some say incredibly inept, group"—have never bothered to enforce.
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bad ideas
Cheap Tattoos Come With Free Drug-Resistant Staph Infections
If you're in the market for a cheap, illegal tattoo, you might want to make sure that you have good health insurance, because your new ink might come with a free drug-resistant staph infection.A West Rutland [Vermont] couple is facing charges for allegedly giving tattoos that infected a number of people.
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retail
Gap Responds To Child Slave Labor Scandal
The Gap has pledged $200,000 to to improve working conditions in India, where only some forms of child labor are outlawed, and it also promised to tighten its own standards. The retailer canceled half of its orders with the vendor in India that was responsible for subcontracting the workshop in which children who had been sold to the factory were working off the debt by embroidering clothing for Gap Kids. More » -
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the sound of silence
Cellphone Jammers Are Effective, Illegal
The power to silence the annoying schmo yabbering away on their cellphone rests within a small black box the size of a cigarette pack. Selling for as little as $50, cellphone jammers can spew radio signals powerful enough to disrupt all nearby cell signals. The downside? It's illegal.The Federal Communication Commission says people who use cellphone jammers could be fined up to $11,000 for a first offense. Its enforcement bureau has prosecuted a handful of American companies for distributing the gadgets — and it also pursues their users.
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dirty deals, havana nights
Travelocity Fined $182,750 For Booking Trips To Cuba
As a travel company, you would think Travelocity would know that there is an embargo on Cuba. The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control filed a complaint against the company earlier this month, alleging that Travelocity violated the prohibition nearly 1,500 times between January 1998 and April 2004. More » -
spying
Hewlett-Packard Is Listening
In their January issue Harper's published excerpts from "emails and other documents related to Project Kona II, a surveillance operation run by private investigators hired by Hewlett-Packard last January to identify a source of leaks of confidential HP information to the press." As a part of the program, HP obtained phone records under false pretenses and spied on reporters from New York Times, BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal, and CNET News:
FROM: KEVIN HUNSAKER
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spies
How Did The Walmart Spy Intercept Text Messages?
No one knows for sure which technique the Walmart spy used to intercept text messages between media relations staff and the New York Times, but Slate has a few guesses. This is their best one:
It's also possible to intercept unencrypted or poorly encrypted messages directly as they're broadcast over cellular channels. (If the network uses sophisticated encryption, you might be out of luck.) To steal messages with your phone, you would need to upload illegal "firmware" onto your phone. This essentially turns your phone into a radio and allows it to pick up all the texts broadcast on a given channel—instead of limiting you to the ones addressed to you. You'd also need to know the network for the target phone—Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc.—and you'd have to make sure that both your phone and the target are within range of the same base station. This method isn't too expensive since you don't need much more than a computer, a phone, and some firmware that any serious techie could find online for free.
Hmm. We do not know anything about illegal firmware, so we'll take Slate's word on that. More »
illegal
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Wed Dec 3
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