Blog dedicado a la formación en todos sus ámbitos: presencial, online, a distancia
“50% isn’t the same as free…” wrote reader Jim when he sent us this picture. No. no, it isn’t.
We wrote to Target to ask whether the promotion is for a free cleaner or a cleaner at 50% off. Apparently Target isn’t sure either, or maybe they’re a little preoccupied.
The people who make Nalgene water bottles assumed that J. made a mistake, and J. doesn’t mind at all. “Empower every employee to make timely decisions and do what is right for our customers,” reads the note that the company sent along with his order. What wonderfully empowered thing did they do for him?
He was ordering a replacement for his old bottle’s cap, which had been damaged in what he calls “an unfortunate dishwashing mishap.” While he was at it, he ordered a second bottle in a different size as well.
How could that become an example of amazing customer service? The person picking his order looked at it–one size of bottle and an extra cap in a different one–and wondered whether he had made a mistake and really meant to order a replacement cap for the new bottle. What was this person “empowered” to do? Throw in an extra cap for the new bottle, too, just in case he really had made a mistake.
“It was a simple thing,” J. wrote to Consumerist, “but they have won me over to buying my water bottles exclusively from them.”
Here’s the note that they enclosed in his order:
The first of the two cases is Riley v. California, initially a state-level case involving whether or not evidence gathered from an arrestee’s phone without a warrant could be used against him in trial.
Police arrested Riley in 2009 for attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon after he shot at an occupied vehicle. He was later arrested and police searched the phone in his possession at the time, turning up evidence that identified him as a gang member out to kill members of a rival gang.
The phone also contained a photo of him with a car that had been spotted at the scene of the shooting. This, along with other evidence gathered from the phone was used against Riley in his trial, where he was convicted and sentence to 15 years behind bars. His lawyers contend that the warrantless search of his phone violated his Constitutional rights and this evidence should not have been used in trial.
The second case, United States v. Wurie, involves the 2007 arrest of a South Boston man for allegedly dealing drugs out of his car. After he was taken into custody, officers found two phones on his person. While police observed, one phone received several calls from Wurie, who they believed to be this dealer’s drug connection. The police reviewed the call log of his phone and tracked Wurie to his home. Wurie was ultimately convicted on drug distribution charges and sentenced to 262 months (21 years, 10 months) in jail. He appealed his conviction on the grounds that the phone search violated the Constitution, but the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction.
While the Wurie case involves the search of a simple flip phone, the Riley case involves the search of a smartphone. Numerous lower courts have held that a warrantless police search of an unprotected, unlocked flip phone is no different that skimming through a handwritten address book found on an arrestee. Smartphones present a more complicated issue to the courts, as they are effectively small computers that contain significantly more sensitive information than a traditional wireless phone.
The Supremes are expected to hear both cases at some point in April.
Court to rule on cellphone privacy [ScotusBlog]
Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you? And do you need a new house because there’s one for sale that could be right up your alley. The owners of a Pennsylvania home advertised as “slightly haunted” thought it would be funny to mention that little detail in their for-sale ads, but despite a lot of attention from ghosthunters and thrill-seekers, the house is no closer to selling than before.
It might be even tougher to unload the property now that the word is out, explains the Associated Press. The couple has experienced banging doors, weird noises in the basement and the feeling that somebody is right… behind… them.
But they thought it’d be funny to highlight that fact about the 113-year-old Victorian — something homeowners are required to inform buyers about by law in neighboring New York state — and went ahead with the ad.
“Slightly haunted. Nothing serious, though,” reads the listing, adding fun details like screams at 3:313 a.m. and “the occasional ghastly visage” in the bathroom mirror.
Cue swarms of ghost hunters and curiosity seekers who stopped by during an open house, without a hint of a serious buyer.
And then there was the guy who used to live there, who got in touch and told the couple that he found a human skull in the basement when he was a child. The wife says she barricaded that same basement door shut once because she claimed she heard the clicking of a cigarette lighter down below.
“I tried to word it with a little bit of a sense of humor,” the husband explains, but “I don’t think it has helped with marketing. We’re not really getting very many interested buyers. We’re getting a lot of nonsense people.”
If the home fails to sell in the coming months, the couple says they might think about renting it out at night for those looking to come in contact with the other realm. Again, paging Scooby Doo. Sounds like these homeowners need a proper investigation to reveal the ghost as simply Old Man Jenkins in a creepy mask.
Pennsylvania Couple Advertises House As ‘Slightly Haunted’ [Associated Press]
iPod boxes containing erasers turned up at five different Target stores in the general area of San Diego. Last week, they made an arrest, catching the suspect as he crossed the border into the United States from Mexico.
The alleged culprit pleaded not guilty to two counts of commercial burglary yesterday. He’s not in jail, but police will have the right to enter his home at any time without a warrant. Maybe to check for erasers.
What investigators haven’t told the public yet is how the man would have pulled this off, and neither police nor Target have said whether store surveillance footage helped to identify and find the suspect.
Man accused in iPod thefts pleads not guilty [CBS 8]
Before you start accusing your fridge of plotting your demise, it’s not like these appliances will come to life and tie you up. But a cyber attack, well, that’s a possibility, notes Quartz.
A new study released by a security company called Proofpoint says that between Dec. 23 and Jan. 6, more than 100,000 Internet-connect smart things — media players, TVs and at least one fridge — were part of a computer network that sent 750,000 spam emails.
If this is true, it’d be the first time anyone has proved that these kinds of devices are being bent to the will zombie networks to slam people with spam, mine bitcoin and other dastardly deeds.
And it’ll probably just get worse, now that hackers appear to be employing anything and everything that uses the Internet in their attacks.
From Proofpoint’s statement on the study:
“Internet-enabled devices represent an enormous threat because they are easy to penetrate, consumers have little incentive to make them more secure, the rapidly growing number of devices can send malicious content almost undetected, few vendors are taking steps to protect against this threat, and the existing security model simply won’t work to solve the problem.”
So should you start worrying that your refrigerator is watching you and silently plotting? Maybe not quite yet. Spam can be effectively filtered in email accounts, and there’s no evidence that bigger hacks using smart appliances and other devices are in the immediate future. But there will likely come a day when manufacturers start to seriously considering beefing up the security of those devices or face a battle in the kitchen/living room/anywhere the Internet is employed.
Previously in invasive smart things: FTC: Webcam Company’s Lax Security Led To Invasions Of Privacy
Someone’s refrigerator just took part in a malicious cyberattack [Quartz]
Online privacy: it’s a contentious ground between corporations and consumers, a troubled 21st century frontier of expectations, and, apparently, a universal human right.
As we read via Broadband DSL Reports, the United Nations recently adopted a resolution calling out online privacy as a universal human right. The resolution (PDF) expands the UN’s existing stance on privacy to include the digital realm.
The current iteration of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights enumerates 29 general areas of universal rights. The list not only includes topics like freedoms of thought and expression, but also the rights to employment and to education, condemnations of slavery and torture, and the right to privacy, which is explicitly recognized in Article 12.
Article 12 begins, “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence,” and affirms the right to the protection of the law from any such interference.
UN resolutions and findings are non-binding. Any nation, including member states, can (and always does) have whatever sovereign laws it pleases, whether or not they abide by idealistic universal declarations.
The timing of the resolution, which was adopted late in 2013, seems sure to be related to the cascade of revelations about the NSA’s phone and computer monitoring activities inside and outside of the United States. As an aside in his speech today about those NSA issues, President Obama did announce the formation of a new government group to research big data and the related industry and government privacy implications. The White House fact sheet explains:
This group will consist of government officials who—along with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—will reach out to privacy experts, technologists and business leaders, and look at how the challenges inherent in big data are being confronted by both the public and private sectors; whether we can forge international norms on how to manage this data; and how we can continue to promote the free flow of information in ways that are consistent with both privacy and security.
Th White House announcement also reaffirmed its commitment to the online privacy bill of rights (PDF) it laid out in 2012. While the framework from 2012 is a big step toward consumer protection, its guidance is voluntary, as is compliance. Legally speaking, online privacy in the US is still a messy patchwork of laws, regulations, and hopes for good faith actions from the folks–public and private alike–who gather and hold the data.
A massive new report [PDF] from Acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak cautions that the percentage of adult smokers has begun to plateau in recent years, and that the “burden of smoking-attributable mortality is expected to remain at high and unacceptable levels for decades to come unless urgent action is taken.”
In spite of 50 years of anti-smoking campaigns and the dramatic drop in the number of adult smokers, smoking remains the leading preventable cause of disease and premature death in the U.S., with some 480,000 people dying each year from smoking-related illnesses. More than 20 million preventable deaths have been attributed to smoking since the first Surgeon General’s report in 1964.
Of particular concern are the number of younger Americans who use multiple tobacco products, including electronic cigarettes. Between 2011 and 2012, the number of middle and high school students using e-cigs more than doubled.
“Each day, more than 3,200 youth (younger than 18 years of age) smoke their first cigarette and another 2,100 youth and young adults who are occasional smokers progress to become daily smokers,” reads the report.
“Although the prevalence of smoking has declined significantly over the past one-half century, the risks for smoking-related disease and mortality have not,” writes Lushniak. “In fact, today’s cigarette smokers—both men and women—have a much higher risk for lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) than smokers in 1964, despite smoking fewer cigarettes.”
Each year, $130 billion is spent on direct medical care of adults who smoke, while over the economy waves goodbye to $150 billion in lost productivity due to premature death, concludes the report.
The Surgeon General writes that for every adult smoker who dies of smoking-related illnesses, there are two youth and young adult smokers who start. With the slowdown in the number of people quitting, Leshniak expresses doubt that the U.S. will meet the goal of only 12% of adults smoking by 2020.
He puts the blame for the slowdown on the tobacco industry.
“The tobacco epidemic was initiated and has been sustained by the aggressive strategies of the tobacco industry, which has deliberately misled the public on the risk of smoking cigarettes,” reads the report.
Leshniak says that it’s time to get tough on tobacco regulation, meaning everything from raising the price on tobacco products to media campaigns about the dangers of smoking to making cessation programs accessible to more Americans.
“Enough is enough,” said the Acting Surgeon General at a press conference about the new report. “It’s astonishing that so many years later we’re still making these findings.”
“It is my sincere hope that 50 years from now we won’t need another Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health,” writes Lushniak, “because tobacco-related disease and death will be a thing of the past.”
But what if I’m not a Target guest?
Did you get an email from Target apologizing for the recent hack and offering free credit monitoring yesterday that felt kind of, well, iffy? Many of our readers and others elsewhere on the Internet have pointed to the mass email as sketchy, due in part to pall cast by the retailer’s security breach over the holidays. And then there’s the fact that many people never shop at Target. Not in stores, and not online. Not ever. So how did they get those email addresses?
The email from the address “TargetNews@target.bfi0.com” set some of our readers on edge, especially those who don’t do business with the retailer.
For example, there’s Mike. He writes that he saw people were talking on forums about receiving emails from Target.com about the security breach, and was surprised when he received one as well.
“I have never done business with Target, I don’t have an account on Target.com and have never been in a Target store,” Mike explains.
Brian was in the same boat of suspicion, telling Consumerist: “Just received this email that claims to be from Target. What’s strange, though, is that Target does not have this email address for me.”
The good news first: A Target spokeswoman has confirmed to Consumerist that the email is “an official communication,” despite it seeming like the perfect chance for hackers to strike yet again. So, whew.
But when we asked where Target obtained email addresses for people who are not now and have never been customers of the retailer, the spokeswoman simply said, “The information was obtained by Target through the normal course of our business.”
Consumerist reader Erica points to discussions on Twitter and elsewhere, wondering if perhaps the email addresses were from Amazon, a remnant from the old Amazon-Target partnership. That could be the normal course of business, perhaps? But it’s very unclear.
We asked Target’s spokeswoman to clarify what the “normal course” of their business is, and have yet to receive a response.
For the time being, rest assured that the email is at least not a phishing attempt. But in the future, Target? You might not want to make your emails so… hacky, especially right after a big, widely publicized hack attack you’re trying to recover from.
The sketchy email in its entirety below:
(click to enlarge)
When you’re paying hundreds of dollars to eat cutting-edge food in a fancy setting, a crying baby is one of the last things that you want hanging out in the dining room. There were a lot of assumptions that outsiders made about the situation, though, and the Chicago Reader contacted Alinea’s chief wizard/co-owner Grant Achatz to clear these up.
Who brings a baby to Alinea?
Most readers assumed that the party in question was a couple, but it was a party of four.
Yes, but who were these people and why did they bring the baby?
Media outlets speculated that the baby-sitter must have canceled at the last minute, but they never told the restaurant that.
Where were they sitting?
They were in a small downstairs dining room with five tables.
When did the baby start to cry?
According to Achatz, The baby was fine for about an hour, then started to fuss. The general manager suggested that the mother take it outside of the dining room: she popped into the bathroom for a bit, then came back to the dining room and let the baby continue to fuss.
“It almost felt like it was people projecting this entitlement. Like ‘We’re here, we can do whatever we want, we paid for it,’ without any concern for the people around them,” Achatz told the Reader. That was the problem, not bringing a baby into the dining room in the first place.
Are you hungry for specifics in this week’s huge Alinea story? [Chicago Reader]
The rendering of the first TargetExpress really makes it look like any of the corner Walgreens you’ll find in many cities.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the first TargetExpress, set to open near the University of Minnesota campus this summer, will only be 20,000 square feet in area, about 1/8 the size of your standard Target and about 1/4 the size of a CityTarget store.
TargetExpress is aimed at the urban shopper who wants a place to get most of the things they need but without having to go to a mammoth store on the outskirts of the city. The retailer says that the smaller store will still have those items people want the most from Target — health and beauty products, groceries, pharmacy, some home goods and electronics — but is designed for shoppers who are purchasing fewer items.
By it’s description, TargetExpress is starting to sound less like a small Target and more like a larger Walgreens or CVS. It certainly can’t be any worse than the retail hell I experienced shopping at the Brooklyn Target for seven years.
American Apparel’s advertising has generally been notable, but never for its restrained good taste. has never been known for restrained good taste in their advertising. They’re best known for the exact opposite of that, actually. This week, the company is getting some very badly wanted attention with a window display featuring mannequins in thin white panties with lush brunette lady gardens.
Regular Consumerist Flickr Pool contributor Scoboco captured some photos of the display at the brand’s store on East Houston Street in Manhattan.
Even outside of our Flickr pool, people in New York and in fashion have been talking about the window and the crowds it’s drawing. Gothamist went as far as compiling a handy history of pubic wigs, an accessory that most people had probably never given any thought to until the moment that they first saw this window.
The three ladies in the window stand in their underthings with a pale pink background and some pink clothes blowing around in the background. They have very ’80s plastic glasses and updos, and they wear thin and pretty underwear. Also, there is what appears to be a giant piece of brown faux fur crammed in their underpants.
Scoboco even got us this mannequins’-eye view out the window. That view is pretty much what you think it would be: people gawking at the window.
What was the company thinking, other than their usual need for horrified attention? The window is a Valentine’s Day celebration of the Caucasian, slender “natural female form.” No, really, that’s what they said. A company representative sent this statement to Elle magazine:
American Apparel is a company that celebrates natural beauty, and the Lower East Side Valentine’s Day window continues that celebration. We created it to invite passerbys to explore the idea of what is ‘sexy’ and consider their comfort with the natural female form. This is the same idea behind our advertisements which avoid many of the photoshopped and airbrushed standards of the fashion industry. So far we have received positive feedback from those that have commented and we’re looking forward to hearing more points of view.
In an interview with MetalHammer Magazine [via TorrentFreak], the one-time arena rock god and godfather of rock merchandising laments the end of an era, all due to pesky kids and their file-sharing.
“The sad part is that the fans are the ones who are killing the thing that they love: great music,” explains Simmons. “For fuck’s sake, you’re not giving the next band a chance.”
And by “next band,” we presume he actually means once-popular arena rock acts like KISS, because his statement ignores all the many, many artists who are not only doing just fine in an era of digital downloads and easy file-sharing, but are thriving because of this ease of delivery. Instead, he goes on to complain about how much money he’s not earned.
“How much have we lost through illegal downloading? It’s certainly millions,” explains Simmons. “I don’t think it’s tens of millions, but it’s certainly millions.”
Simmons has long been an outspoken critic of file-sharing, going back to the days of Napster and other early peer-to-peer networks.
“They should have bitch-slapped them,” he says about the operators of the early p2p platforms. “Gone down with the FBI, seized everything and put everyone in jail. But then they should have done what the Allies did with the Nazis: made them work for us.”
Can you imagine Napster founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker sitting in a garment factory, silk-screening KISS t-shirts, faking bandmembers’ autographs on KISS photos and posters, and drilling holes in KISS bowling balls?
<img src="http://ift.tt/1dXUSjQ; alt="Walmart shoppers in NJ snapped this photo of filth-darkened tanks that still contained dead and living fish. (Photo: Dina Ely/Patch.com)” width=”610″ height=”444″ class=”size-large wp-image-10149284″ /> Walmart shoppers in NJ snapped this photo of filth-darkened tanks that still contained dead and living fish. (Photo: Dina Ely/Patch.com)We’ve written before about Walmart failing to keep its shelves stocked, but here’s a story about a different kind of neglect at the nation’s largest retailer. Shoppers at a New Jersey Walmart say the store was allowing the live fish in its pet department to fester in dirty, unfiltered water with dead fish sitting on the bottom of the tanks.
“It was a nightmare,” one customer tells the Mendham-Chester Patch about the filthy tanks she discovered when she tried to look at the fish with her grandson. “Most (of the fish) were dead, and rotting in the tanks… Many were still swimming — starving, freezing, choking on foul water full of ammonia and algae.”
Customers told Patch that the tanks, which had gone dark with pollutants, had been unplugged for about a week. When the grandmother tried to complain to management, she says she was told the manager was unavailable and that the pet department manager was “out to lunch.” She waited an hour to eventually be helped by a store associate who sold her the least ill of the fish remaining in the tank.
When Patch reached out to Walmart HQ, the initial corporate response was that this store had stopped selling fish months earlier. Patch replied with photos sent in by customers showing dead and dying fish in these dirty tanks.
That got Walmart’s attention.
“This is unacceptable,” said a company rep after seeing the photos. “There are protocols in place that were not followed, and associates (in the pet department) will be retrained immediately.”
Here are eleven of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.
Our Flickr Pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Want to see your pictures on our site? Just be a registered Flickr user, go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool.
President Obama is expected to call for reforms to the NSA’s phone surveillance programs in a speech later today, according to reports.
The NSA’s collection of phone metadata has been highly controversial since it first gained public attention in 2013. The data includes records from all telecom providers of what calls are made, to what numbers, and now long they last. Although it does not record the content of every phone call, intelligence agencies can put together robust profiles of individuals, communities, and networks of association from the metadata alone.
Reports from Reuters, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal indicate that the planned NSA reform will restrict the collection of this phone-related data and will change where and how that information is stored, and by whom it can be accessed.
President Obama will announce in his speech that the bulk metadata collected by the NSA should not be held by the government, but instead should reside in a third-party database. A judicial order will be required before the NSA can query that database for information.
The structure and location of this third-party database are yet to be determined; the President will ask Congress, intelligence agencies, and Attorney General Eric Holder to come up with a proposal by March 28.
In December, a US District Court judge held that the NSA’s phone surveillance program did not violate existing laws, but that whether and how the program should exist was up to the legislative and executive branches to resolve.
Over the past few months, the NSA has turned out to be pretty much everywhere. Not only is the agency listening in to phones, but it’s also got eyes and ears in electronics, in video games, and in data centers.
One of the many not-terribly-happy Tweets from former U.S. Senator Bill Frist to United Airlines.
Yesterday morning, heart surgeon and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist from Tennessee took to Twitter to complain about “miserable service again,” and that his seat on a United Airlines flight had vanished.
When the United Twitter account replied to his complaint by stating that “Every airline reserves the right to adjust seating for operational purposes,” Frist provided more details about his particular problem.
“I booked a first class seat and now I’m in the very last row next to a bathroom that’s in heavy rotation,” griped the former lawmaker.
His proximity to the lavatory provided additional grist for Frist’s Tweets:
“I can confirm that the toilets on this @united flight work! My seat vibrates with each passenger’s visit!,” he wrote, followed by, “I also appreciate what @united is doing to keep the plane’s weight down. Bathroom walls this thin have got to be fuel-saving!”
The bitterness-tinged joking continued with Tweets like, “If anyone gets this intimate w/fellow @United passengers, might as well be surgeon. Though maybe should have introduced myself first,” and “Pro tip: ask your @united flight attendant for a cup of coffee grounds. It might help, and if not, placebo effect?”
Frist eventually made his connecting flight and says he paid to upgrade to business class, but not before asking United, “do you refund passengers for selling seats that don’t exist?”
To which the airline replied, “Could you clarify what non-existent seat was sold to you?”
And the dance goes ’round and ’round…
Unfriendly skies: Bill Frist goes off on United Airlines after rough experience [The Tennesseean]
The company announced this morning that it will launch in the Greater Cincinnati region — a 24-county area (see below for more details) that also includes parts of Indiana and Kentucky — on Jan. 21.
Subscribers will get online access to 30 over-the-air channels, including WCPO (ABC), WLWT (NBC), WKRC (CBS), WXIX (Fox), WPTO (PBS) and CET (PBS), along with a handful of special interest and weather channels.
The base $8/month subscription includes 20 hours of cloud-based DVR storage. An additional $4/month triples that to 60 hours.
For those who aren’t aware of Aereo, the streaming startup uses arrays of very small antennae to capture freely available over-the-air broadcast signals and then transmit them on to subscribers in the local market.
The company has been sued by all of the major broadcast networks who claim that Aereo is violating copyright and illegally retransmitting signals without permission and without paying a fee.
Aereo contends that because each individual antenna is dedicated to a single end-user, the service is doing nothing more than acting as a really good rooftop antenna, but instead of sending that captured signal along a few dozen feet of copper cable in a house, it’s being sent over the Internet.
In each region that Aereo has launched, broadcasters have sought court injunctions that would stop the company from operating in that area. So far, the broadcasters have been unsuccessful.
So last fall, the broadcasters asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let them jump the normal queue of waiting for all the regional rulings to come in and just hear the case already. Aereo agreed, and the Supremes decided last week that they would hear arguments this coming spring.
Back to the Cincinnati news, consumers in the following counties will have access to Aereo starting Jan. 21:
OHIO
Adams, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Clinton, Hamilton, Highland, and Warren;
KENTUCKY
Boone, Bracken, Campbell, Gallatin, Grant, Kenton, Mason, Pendleton, Robertson and Owen
INDIANA
Dearborn, Ohio, Ripley, Switzerland, Franklin and Union.
