Canceled DirecTV
For those considering DirecTV, here are the facts.
DirecTV suckers you in with low prices that are locked in for a year. The catch is that you must sign a two year contract to get the bait and switch prices that expire after one year. I satisfied my two year obligation as of this month and just called to cancel.
When I first got DirecTV, my bill looked like this:
Choice Package: $58.99 / mo
HD Access: $10 / mo
DVR Service: $7 /mo
Two receivers @ $5 each = $10
But then the credits started rolling in and looked like this:
Discount for having AT&T DSL: -$5 / mo
First 12 months rebate promo: -$24 /mo
Extra credit for activating my 12 month rebate on their website: -$5 /mo
Total DirecTV before taxes: $51.99 /Mo
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Then during the course of that two years, my promo credits expired, including the one for having AT&T DSL, and DirecTV also had a price increase.
Then my bill started looking like this:
Choice XTRA (which is like a $5 upgrade from Choice): $65.99 /mo
HD Fee: $10 /mo
DVR Service: $7 /mo
Two receivers @ $6 each = $12 /mo
Total DirecTV before taxes: $94.99 /mo (If I stayed with Choice it would be $90 or something)
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Let’s assume I stayed with Choice and was paying the $90 a month total. That’s still nearly a 75% price increase after your credits expire and they still have you on the hook for another year after that happens.
DirecTV advertisements never mention the hidden fees of HD access and they don’t talk about receiver rentals, so this represents about 300% over their advertised service prices by the time you get a year into your contract.
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What happens if you decide to cancel after seeing your bill go up 75%?
DirecTV has an Early Cancellation Fee: It amounts to $20 for every month left on your contract. If you cancel with the year remaining, they will charge you $240 just to get rid of them.
DirecTV has a system in place to renew your contract when it is nearing completion.
Don’t accept any “upgrades” to your equipment unless you are willing to restart your two year contract at that point. DirecTV made me an unsolicited offer to upgrade my boxes when I only had a few months left on my contract. After I said OK, the rep tried to rush past the disclosure that this would start my contract over on day 1. I ended up declining the upgrade.
If your receiver fails and you do not have the $5.95 /mo Protection Plan.
They will replace the receiver but they will start your contract over at day 1. If you have the Protection Plan, they won’t restart your contract. I was lucky enough to not have an equipment failure in that two years. You might not be so lucky.
Also, be warned that DirecTV will charge you between $40-$70 for every service call where a technician has to come out to your house if you do not have the Protection Plan.
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I am an adult. I should have remembered “Let The Buyer Beware” or “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”, but like many people, the sound of a satellite TV system for “only $35 a month” in big bold letters appealed to me. It’s never going to be what they say it is and your bill will go up every time a “credit” expires or whenever the MAFIAA feels like handing DirecTV a price increase that DirecTV turns around and makes you pay then for.
I’m posting this and admitting I screwed up in the hopes that it saves someone else the two years of being saddled with satellite TV, where the price only goes up no matter what you do, the service is marginal, and they keep trying to sneak in a contract extension through the back door every time you turn around.
I leave you with a commercial I thought was funny, it’s for Clear (a mobile ISP), but the subject matter fits DirecTV perfectly and at this point all I could do was laugh.
This is *my* home now! DirecTV got evicted.
More clean coal lies and cost overruns at Duke Energy.
Just a quick note. It seems like the big polluters over at “Drop a Duke” Energy*are still pressing on with their new Planet Roaster power plant. The state agreed to let them pass on their waste, fraud, and abuse in the form of more expensive electricity for Indiana residents.
In the mean time, they’re complaining of record low winter profits because of the global warming they are causing.
Back to the Planet Roaster greenwashed coal power plant…
Duke agreed that customers will pay only $2.6 billion of the plant cost.
Oh well, fuck you too. Anyone have $2.6 billion laying around? Might want to check your couch. The crooks need it more than you I’m sure.
This would call for a “Ditch Mitch!”, but our constitution gets rid of that fucking asshole next year anyway and it looks like there’s worse to follow.
As Indiana starts becoming more like Arkansas under Republican leadership, with incessant attacks on the welfare state, attacks on labor, regressive tax policies, and a high probability of another corrupt Washington insider becoming our governor, it’s looking like a good time to leave the state.
(*I call them that since my power seems to go out reliably whenever the wind decides to blow a little or because they can’t seem to predict that winter weather happens.)
Wait! I need four more years! There must be something I haven’t sold to a foreign company yet! Oh well, Pence will take care of that….
Vista 8: Now with 500% more Microsoft spyware.
With Vista 8 it’s all about SUCKERS, SUCKERS, SUCKERS!!!!
For kicks, I loaded up the Windows 8 “Consumer Preview” in VirtualBox.
I was expecting the usual. More crap that nobody asked for. More anti-competitive Microsoft tie-ins. More lock-in with Microsoft services. More EULA mess. More spyware. I found pretty much all of this.
The setup process was much like Windows 7 up to a point, except there are now three entire pages full of toggle switches where the user must agree to sacrifice their privacy to use Windows 8 fully, in addition to a EULA written in legalese that goes on forever, which nobody who isn’t a lawyer will fully understand. If they don’t, then there will be huge swaths of missing features. (And since it is proprietary software, you absolutely cannot trust anything it says or does, so the choice is misleading anyway.)
As Dr. Richard Stallman has said, Windows is malicious software. Their privacy policies open up the user to all kinds of abuse for simply agreeing with the EULAs (which are mandatory if you wish to use Windows), and in the EULA you agree that Microsoft can slip in updates or change the EULA at any point in the future. So, if there is something malicious that Windows currently does not do, then it would be very easy for them to slip that into an update and push it out tomorrow.
They’ve done this sort of thing before, countless times. Anyone remember how “Windows Genuine Annoyance” wasn’t originally part of Windows XP?
Idiot Exploiter being in Windows 98 without an uninstaller got Microsoft some DOJ attention, but it’s literally EVERYWHERE in Windows 8, and it’s more malicious than ever.
Here’s what you agree to send to Microsoft now to get a fully functional copy of Windows 8 if you take the default settings (Some of these have been a requirement of various Microsoft apps and Windows in the past, some are new. This is in addition to anything mandated by their EULA, so you can’t opt out of all of it even if you tried):
Every site you visit in Internet Explorer.
Everything you download with Internet Explorer.
Every URL you click on in an application from the Windows store, regardless what browser it opens in.
Every web resource that an application loads.
Every application you have installed on your computer, regardless of where it came from.
Your EXACT location. (Via IP geolocation or GPS coordinates.) when you use an app that uses this feature. Note: GPS coordinates are accurate to within a few inches.
Crash data for any application that has a problem, including a memory dump. (Those can include personal information like passwords, site login data, your bank account information, truly any information the app had in memory when it crashed.)
Which parts of Windows Help you have read, and what URLs you clicked on in that.
You agree that they can force application updates on you, silently, even to install malicious features,even if you didn’t want the update.
You agree that they can update Windows, including for the purpose of stuffing in more malicious features, even if you didn’t want the update.
Applications can use your name, account picture, location data, and various Windows Live features, as you.
Perhaps most disturbing at all, the Windows Store and many of the applications that come with Windows that can’t be removed, like their messenger program that censors its users and spies on what they say, require you to sign up with a Microsoft Account (which is, I guess what they’re calling Passport these days), and to fully utilize the software store, you have to link a major credit card/debit card to your account and agree to anything Microsoft or apps you use try to charge to it.
You agree in the EULA that Windows can update things like their Windows Media Digital Restrictions Malware and you won’t try to stop it.
The US DMCA makes it illegal to try to break their Digital Restrictions Malware, even if it’s because it fucked up and you’re just trying to use the content you “bought”. Or because Microsoft’s latest DRM’d music store flops and they take down their license renewal server. Happens.
If you use any of Microsoft’s “Cloud” features, you agree explicitly that they can share your information with advertisers or the federal, state, or local government units with or without a valid search warrant, and you also agree that you hold Microsoft harmless if they fuck up and delete your data. So don’t upload anything expecting to ever get it back out. But, these are problems with most cloud services, which is why you shouldn’t use them.
We live in an age where the government doesn’t even need warrants because people tell them everything they want to know, willingly. How many criminal cases has the government been able to make out of data that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have turned over? We might never know.
These reasons, and many more are why it’s time to consider making the move to Free and Open Source software. There’s no 20 page EULAs, no “activation”, no spyware, fewer headaches, and no bullshit.
Big companies have proven time and time again that they are not to be trusted with your information. Why do people agree to give them more and more of it all the time in light of this abuse?
If you need a starting point in learning about Free and Open Source software, what it is, and more reasons you should be replacing your proprietary software with it, here’s some places to read up about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_and_open_source_software_packages
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
In short, there’s probably a suitable free and open source replacement for almost everything you use, even for operating systems such as Ubuntu and Fedora, office suites such as LibreOffice and Caligra Suite, even replacements for Photoshop, like The Gimp. Of course that’s just naming a few.
Look Daddy, I’m feeding your credit card to the ponies! OM NOM NOM NOM!!!!
Switch now, and you will not only have the peace of mind that nobody is using your computer against you or effectively leasing your own computer out to you, or using your software to censor or spy on you, but also that they can’t rack up fraudulent credit card transactions from an app that is targeted to your children which sells them pretend apples and hay to feed imaginary animals with.
One Apple customer was recently in the news, horrified, that his seven year old daughter managed to rack up the equivalent of about $350 US dollars to his credit card, which Apple simply allowed to go through. If you think Microsoft will be treating customers any better, I would suggest that you’re in for a painful life lesson.
One more disturbing trend….
Each version of Windows comes in yet more “editions”. “Edition” is just a nice way of saying they cripple it a bit more and a bit more to segment the market and create price points. This is something else you never see in Free and Open Source Software, because it would be pointless. Nevertheless, Microsoft has decided that Windows 8 will not play a DVD or Blu Ray without the “Media Pack”, which will be an additional fee.
How much? They declined to say. For reference, adding DVD playback to Windows Media Player in Windows XP cost $25, and adding Blu Ray support to Windows has typically meant a MONTHLY RECURRING SUBSCRIPTION fee because it requires downloading the new content restriction keys every month, so if you stop paying, your discs stop playing. Isn’t that cute?
Benjamin Mako Hill wrote about this deliberate software crippling in an essay about Windows NT 4. He called the disabled features anti-features. The point he made, quite concisely, was that if you pay Microsoft for anything other than the most expensive version, you’re literally paying them to remove features from your software. He also made a list with more examples of products with antifeatures.
There’s much more detail I could go into, but this is yet another wake up call that you deserve Freedom, and Free Software gives you the Freedom you deserve. The Free Software Foundation defines “Free” (as in freedom!) Software as giving the user these four freedoms.
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
In short, you are free to study, modify, redistribute, and use the software, for any purpose, and you are never “under surveillance” by it or unable to help your friend by sharing the software with him or her.
Microsoft and Apple both have something in common; they try to make the user overlook all of the things they have to sacrifice just to use their software, by making it pretty on the surface. That pretty surface is only skin deep, and underneath it, the internals of the system are as bug-ridden and as DRM-encumbered as ever. Just because you paid for a license doesn’t mean they can’t come back later and terminate it, for any or for no reason, without a refund.
What’s most disturbing, above and beyond anything else I’ve talked about, is when the software is so tied to the hardware that the hardware is useless without their software (such as Windows on ARM or the iPad). What do you do if they throw you out? I guess you have a really expensive door stop. (Did someone say, Plasma Active? Yes, you should use Plasma Active.) 
Windows 8 gives you a choice. You can keep surrendering more of your freedom to Microsoft and other malicious software companies every year, or you can get off their slippery slope right now.
Microsoft censors Windows Live users. Gives free speech a treatment that would make any tyrant dictator proud.
Ballmer still wants to "fucking kill Google", but first, Bittorrent.
You’ll have to wait until May to see Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, The Dictator, but in the mean time, Sweaty Ballmer wants to show us how being a petty tyrant is done.
Torrent Freak reports that Microsoft is censoring Windows Live Messenger users.
When the user enters a link and it’s to a site that Microsoft doesn’t like, Microsoft’s new approach is to block it at their server and report back to the user that the site is “dangerous”.
So far they seem to do it with The Pirate Bay, which probably hosts and serves less malware and spyware than Microsoft itself (source source source) or sites that aren’t being blocked by them, such as CNET Download.com which delivers crapware bundles with legitimate software.
Since the censorship of links is done at the server level, it means that (not shockingly), Microsoft is monitoring, logging, and spying on everything you say or do while connected to their chat service. It also means that users of alternative messenger software which doesn’t come bundled with the ability to display malicious advertisements like Microsoft’s official client does will not escape the Microsoft server spying on them and kicking back any links that Microsoft doesn’t like. If Microsoft can’t keep their own software and websites from installing malicious software onto Windows PCs, they shouldn’t be blocking anyone else under that excuse.
Microsoft’s official terms of use for their spyware instant messaging network clearly forbid the user from taking any measures to protect themselves from Microsoft’s built-in advertising, which ranges from merely obnoxious, to becoming hijacked to serve malware, either by applying binary patching to their official software, adding “127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com” to their hosts file, using Privoxy as their system-wide ad filtering local proxy server, or using free and open source software such as Pidgin (which runs on many platforms) or Telepathy (which now has front ends for GNOME and KDE, and what I personally use with the Jabber instant messaging service).
The penalty for being caught doing any of this is the worst kind of censorship that Microsoft can impose on their users, total account deletion. Some choice excerpts from the EULA for Microsoft’s instant messaging service.
” In particular, we may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications”
“We may cancel or suspend your service and your access to the Windows Live ID network at any time without notice and for any reason.”
In addition, the terms point to a separate obnoxious Code of Conduct with such gems as:
“You will not use any form of automated device or computer program that enables the submission of postings without the express written consent of Microsoft Corporation.”
Among other things, you agree that you won’t post links on how to bypass the security of computer software or break DRM, piracy, “pornography” (which even the Supreme Court has been unable to define, but thank god we have Microsoft as the arbiter of all things wholesome), and of course you are responsible for anything that malicious Windows software decides to do once it has taken over your computer and starts spamming all your friends. (which is bound to happen sooner or later considering you’re using Windows).
Of course, Microsoft includes the clause that lets them delete your account for no reason at all, so really anything you do can (at their whim) be grounds for suspending or deleting your account.
Bottom line: Microsoft is malicious and abusive and anyone who bothers to read their burdensome, obnoxious, and dangerously open-ended and one-sided policies and licensing agreements would have already known this.
If anything, this should serve as another wake up call to ditch Microsoft and their abusive policies and a reminder that if you think Microsoft can be trusted, you’re living in a dream world.
Microsoft censors Windows Live users. Gives free speech a treatment that would make any tyrant dictator proud. by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Should Mozilla support h.264? It depends.
There’s news that Mozilla is considering supporting the patent-encumbered and dangerous MPEG-4 formats known as “h264″ and “aac”. LINK (As reported by The H Online)
It’s unfortunate that it has come to this, but I am in favor of doing it in the way they have described. Albeit unenthusiastically…
We know that there is a dangerous and criminal organization out there called the “MPEG-LA” that doesn’t innovate or produce anything, but acts as a “patent pool” to sue victims who try to implement media codecs without their permission. They “own” several thousand “essential” patents (meaning that you can’t implement the spec without violating them) describing what h264 with aac does.
Microsoft and Apple, which are also criminal cartels, are also members of the MPEG-LA, and are trying to wipe out the open and unencumbered VP8 and Ogg Vorbis combination known as WebM by refusing to support it in Safari and Internet Explorer.
Mozilla and Opera have so far not implemented MPEG codecs because they would be gouged by the MPEG-LA’s innovation tax.
The problem for the user, which is caught in the middle, is that sites that are out there today and insisting on MPEG-4, such as Vimeo, won’t work in Firefox or Opera in HTML 5 mode, and require the proprietary binary blob with gazillions of security problems known as “Adobe Flash” to play their content.
Mozilla is not proposing to ship the offending codecs themselves, but to just use the ones on the system, if any. On Windows, they can hook into DirectShow, on OS X they can hook into Quicktime, and on Linux they can hook into and use anything Gstreamer can play. Of course Android, iOS, and Windows Phone (with all three people who have one) all have their own media codecs.
The problem with this is that it shifts the responsibility to the user to make sure they have codecs. In most cases, the platform in question is promoted by some big company that sees the MPEG-LA siphoning their profits as a cost of doing business, but the codecs are there nonetheless and Firefox is currently not making use of them. It’s the case where a person uses free and open source software, such as a Linux distribution, and doesn’t want top be gouged and run nonfree MPEG Cartel-sponsored gstreamer codecs (from Fluendo), that they have to make a choice about whether to use the codecs that infringe US patents (such as the free and open source gstreamer codecs). In the case of proprietary software, the choice was already made for them, as most choices usually are.
Therefore, my position is… With the objection to the MPEG-LA cartel even being allowed to exist at all. That Firefox should use whatever the user has installed. Refusing to play formats for which the user already has codecs is ridiculous. The user should ideally be using software that respects his or her freedom (such as the gstreamer-bad and gstreamer-ugly codecs, which is where ones with patent problems end up). Even more ideally, the laws should be changed to invalidate every last software patent out there so that the user is free to do what they wish with their own computer, and programmers are free to make software that can compete with established monopolies like Microsoft and Apple. Until then, a couple of minority browsers ignoring those codecs won’t make those codecs go away any more than some Linux distributions not officially providing MP3 codecs has made MP3 go away. Those sites are out there, and users should not feel compelled to use proprietary software such as Internet Explorer, Safari, and Google Chrome to simply view them. Just as users who encounter MP3s, while this is unfortunate, should not have to use proprietary software to play those MP3s.
As a second point for this position, we know Microsoft slips trojan horses into competing browsers on Windows, and so if Mozilla doesn’t do it, Microsoft will wedge in another broken plug-in that is full of security problems to Firefox users on Windows. By making the change in Firefox, they can preempt Microsoft infecting Firefox with more things the user may not have approved of.
It’s unfortunate that this method will make it the user’s problem to decide if they care about using untaxed codecs, but you can thank Microsoft and Apple that someone is going to be stuck with the check.
Should Mozilla support h.264? It depends. by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at daemonfc.wordpress.com.
Microsoft giving out “free” Vista 8 tablets to bribe “journalists”
They did something like this when Vista and Vista 7 went out. In that case, they sent out Alienware laptops to bribe favorable reviews for Vista from the people that got one. LINK (Archive.org copy, the original was disappeared)
Now it appears they are promoting Vista 8 like this as well, only it’s tablets this time.
Kubuntu forums administrator Steve Riley claims he got a “free” tablet at Microsoft’s Vista 8 promotional event called “build”, and that he subsequently removed it and installed Kubuntu.
The intention of Microsoft is that once a “reviewer” (journalist, shill, whatever) gets such a pricey gift, they’ll feel like they owe Microsoft a favor.
It obviously works or they wouldn’t still be doing it. Next time you see a favorable review of Microsoft’s Vista-based operating systems, ask the person what kind of expensive computer Microsoft gave him to pay for that review with.
Not amused by Spotify
Just a short post to anyone considering Spotify, don’t.
List of reasons (for me anyway):
Their Linux support is a joke. To access their API you have to agree to have proprietary software installed which can’t legally be bundled with software under the GPL. Their official statement appears to be “use Wine”. My reply: “Fuck that.”
Their monthly fee is several times more expensive than Last FM’s.
The artists get basically nothing from the fee you pay. (Same is true for other internet radio services though. The MAFIAA keeps most of the money and gives the rest to the Billboard Top 10, so Justin Bieber gets paid for your listening to Alice In Chains.)
Oh yeah, their Android app crashed my tablet several times.
They require you to sign up with the voluntary spyware company called Facebook to get a Spotify account.
I scrubbed and I scrubbed, but they just don’t make water hot enough!
