In the recent article Wired tells about the artist and Rutgers professor Hasan Elahi, who was mistakenly targeted by FBI as a suspected terrorist. Yep, he’s the one who decided to put all his life out there in the open to make sure authorities know he’s innocent. “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away” – damn, now every paranoid would set up his lifeblog online. Hear me, good people of Internet – next thing you know would be some smart ass sending out bulk spam with his/her daily activities.
Tag: technology
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Yahoo holds its ground
Last week I subscribed to Yahoo music. Yeah, I know. But I was going to give it a try anyway.
Surely, the service sucked from the very beginning – you have to download a special player (called Yahoo Jukebox), that downloads tons of crap while playing my purchased music. This itself is a very fishy concept – why would company force me to view ads while I enjoy a content I paid for. If the music was free – I would have understood the ads. But I already paid for this – why do you have to feed me all those stupid ads full-screen at 1600×1200 pixels resolution, if I only want to hear music – is totally beyond me. Of course, finding something useful (unless it’s a today’s MTV hit) is next to impossible.
But the real excitement begins when you are trying to cancel the account. Do you think you can cancel from JukeBox? Wrong, you can only upgrade. Do you think you can cancel from Yahoo Music Home page? Wrong again. In fact, the only way you can cancel the service is to go to My Account page, select Manage Premium Services, then Manage Service link next to Yahoo! Music Subscription, then Cancel Service. But you didn’t think it would be THAT easy, didn’t you? While following this narrow path to freedom you are asked for your password twice. Upon the clicking on Cancel Service link another screen appears that (legitimately) asks you for the reason of your cancellation – I selected “The service was difficult to use”. Then another screen apologetically offers to get online help or contact support. However, if you insist on cancelling – hey, we warned ya! – you need to enter your Yahoo password again (third time). Guess what happen then? Wrong, you need to enter your password again. And again. And again. And – it’s the infinite loop. You also cannot change the payment method, should this idea cross your mind.
I do realize that this might be some sort of glitch in software. I do realize Yahoo doesn’t really benefit from my 70 bucks that it is trying not to give me back so hard. But I do realize one important thing – if I trap the customer in a loop like that, I’ll probably loose more then just one customer. Guess what just happened to Yahoo?
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Post2Blog
Trying out new software – Post2Blog – (version 2.10a). So far it looks as convenient as Microsoft’s Writer (or what was the name of that Beta thing). It automatically discovered settings for both my Blogger and WordPress blogs and offered to save pictures either to ImageShack.us, Picturelli or Flickr (I choose latter). There’s also a somewhat useful feature – Quick Snippets – whenever you type something like ’zealus’ it will be replaced by Zealus.com (i.e. in my case – web site name with link).
Worth a look, if you into this sort of things.
