Today, I received a commercial email message from Sears Home Services, a.k.a., Sears Holdings Corporation. They got my email address when I made a service appointment through their Web site, which I subsequently canceled when it became clear that they were going to charge me more than a local repair man. The email message contained… Read More »
Recall my recent letter to Chase, which ended: As I see it, you have three options for what to do now: You can throw my letter in the trash. Result: I close my Chase account and get a new card from someone else. You can send me a useless, boilerplate response that does not address… Read More »
I’ve been subscribed to The Consumerist since Continental lost my daughter last summer and The Consumerist picked up the story. I was impressed by their reach and by the quality of stories that they ran. Unfortunately, two or three months after I started reading them, the quality seemed to start going down. There were a… Read More »
As I previously wrote, I recently had to change my password on over 300 Web sites because my default “medium-security password” was compromised. The compromise was caused by a bug in the WordPress blogging platform which can result in inadvertent disclosure of information when content is pasted into the WYSIWYG text editor built into WordPress.… Read More »
As I wrote earlier today, I just changed my password on over 300 Web sites. In the process, I encountered a large number of sites which simply don’t know how to do password security properly. Some of these sites are operated by major corporations which are entrusted by their users with confidential and sensitive personal… Read More »
“Hi, my name is jik, and I’m a password reuser.” “Hi, jik!” If there isn’t a “Password Reusers Anonymous”, there probably should be. By “password reuse,” I mean using the same password over and over on multiple Web sites. It’s a really bad idea, and I should know that better than most, since I’ve worked… Read More »
My blog postings about the DMA (initial and followup) got picked up at The Consumerist and got over 5,200 views, which is a respectable take, but not nearly as good as when Continental lost my daughter :-). You will also find on The Consumerist a rebuttal from the DMA which doesn’t actually respond substantively to… Read More »
(Simulblogged on universalhub.com.) Long-time readers of my blog know that I have been trying, for almost two years, to eliminate junk mail — the paper kind — from my mailbox. I’ve registered everyone in my family with the DMA’s MPS, tried out various Web sites that purport to help you stop junk mail, and most… Read More »
Citizens Bank “upgraded” their online banking site over the past two weekends. This morning, when I attempted to log in, here’s what I experienced: 30 seconds to load the initial login page 72 seconds to load the identity verification page (i.e., “you’re using a computer without one of our cookies already in its browser cache,… Read More »
I was delighted to discover a few days ago that the problem with the MBTA’s on-line route data that I’ve been trying to get the T to fix for over six years and almost got arrested over is now fixed in Google Maps. Alas, it’s still wrong in the MBTA’s own Trip Planner. Go figure.