X it out!

A reputation for bad customer service got you down? Congressmen are calling your CEO to Capital Hill to testify about the atrocities that your company has committed against the American public? A proposed corporate merger turns into a public relations disaster as every major news network (except one) comes out with guns blazing to blast it as irresponsible and monopolistic?

Yes, times are tough out there, peoples. But never fear, CEO's know what to do when this happens: X it out! If you're a mercenary company called Blackwater under fire because your employees are sociopaths who kill little children just for fun, turn your name into Xe, and presto chango, you're no longer an evil mercenary company called Blackwater under fire because your employees are sociopaths who kill little children just for fun! And if you're a hated evil cable company called Comcast called "Comcrap" because your customer service people are morons and it takes months to get any problem fixed and they censor your Internet connection to keep you from using the bandwidth you're paying for... well, just change your name to Xfinity, and you're no longer a hated evil cable company with poor customer support and censored Internet connections!

Yessiree, it's that magic "X" letter that is the solution to all corporate problems, and Compost has decided to rebrand itself with it to, well, uhm... does anybody here think that Xe's mercenaries have suddenly quit being sociopaths who kill little children just for fun? Or that Xfinity's customer support people suddenly all received brain transplants and no longer get a deer in the headlights look when you point out that your Internet uplink is being swamped by outgoing traffic from one of your neighbors who has been virused by a botnet? Uhm.... alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Just another Republican sex scandal

Yaaaawwwwn.

The modern GOP: The party of racists, perverts, conspiracy theorists, and Christianists. It's like a batshit crazy carnival sideshow, except for real.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Comcraptastic goes Cocks

Cocks Internet (Cox) blocks outgoing port 25. I just got an email from Comcast that they're blocking port 25 now too, but only for folks like me who actually use port 25 to go outside of Comcast's network (i.e., to any server other than Comcast's). Which I do because I route all my outgoing email through badtux.net to make sure it gets properly logged and archived. Comcraptastic! Now I gotta go figure out how to make Exim4 on Debian listen on something other than port 25 (I am *not* going to send email via Comcraptastic's SMTP server, I found out the hard way that Comcraptastic's SMTP server drops half the email that it gets into the bit bucket, apparently using some hyper-vigilant algorithm that detects many ordinary emails as "spam" or "viruses").

Oh well, at least now hopefully the other people on my neighborhood segment aren't going to overload our upstream with zombie porn spam anymore. Note that I run a Mac and have my WiFI on my Airport Extreme secured with the most secure encryption, so I know I wasn't the source of any spam (no viruses for Mac, remember?). But I certainly saw a spike in virus traffic last week that was probably zombifyin' machines all over Comcraptastic's network... made things here on the penguin's iceberg pretty goddamned craptacular until Compost got the morons cut off. Looks like their algorithm for "probably a spammer" can't tell the difference between a buncha spam going to lots of servers, and a few emails going to a single server. Morons. But what can you expect from folks who've outsourced everything and thus have only a few dozen people who know anything who keep the whole craptacular piece of shit network they run up and going somehow and thus haven't a second's amount of time to, actually, like, *think* about the craptacular code they wrote in the five seconds between solving one problem that threatens the whole network and solving another problem that threatens the whole network? It's all about how corporate management can squeeze their employees for more profit by replacing competent people who know their shit with idiot contractors who can't find their ass from a hole in the ground, and nothing about customer service, unless your definition of "service" is what a stallion does to a mare.

-- Badtux the ComCrapilated Penguin

Aftermath:
I followed the directions for configuring exim4 at:

http://edin.no-ip.com/content/exim4-courier-ssl-debian-etch-mini-howto

with the exception that I authenticate against SASL rather than against Courier since I don't run Courier, I run Dovecot. So I un-commented the SASL section of the configuration file rather than the Courier section of the configuration file. But that was done years ago (been prohibiting relaying w/o name and password on port 25 for years, have never allowed "bare" relays for obvious spammer control reasons), so all I had to do was configure my keys, set the SSL enable at the top, and change last line of /etc/default/exim4 to say

SMTPLISTENEROPTIONS='-oX 465:25 -oP /var/run/exim4/exim.pid'

and after restarting, voila. Now listening for SSL on port 465, and non-SSL on port 25 (for things destined for that mail server which also hosts my Badtux domains). Tested it, and it works with both Thunderbird and AppleMail (I run a Mac, remember?).

"Poor Customer Service Representatives!"

At one site I was browsing about the scumbags (Chase Bank) below, someone said, "Poor customer service representatives! It must be horrible to have people yelling at you about something you have no control over. I feel sorry for them."

Yeah right. They choose to work for an unethical and immoral company. That is a choice they make. I don't feel sorry for them. There is more honor in walking the streets homeless but honest than in lying for a living. I have thank god never ended up homeless because of me valuing honesty over lying, but it's been close at times, like one summer where I worked census and delivered pizza all for minimum wage, barely enough for gas and food, before I remembered someone who'd called me a few months back about a job, called him, and got an honest job that didn't pay a lot but at least paid for gas for my rusty $850 Chevette with enough left over for food, auto insurance, and electricity and water for my rundown old $2800 mobile home.

So I don't feel sorry for the "poor CSRs" who choose to work for an unethical and immoral company. They choose to enable evil. So be it. I'm not going to yell at them or anything because that's not useful, but I'm not going to pretend that they're these virtuous people that I should feel sorry for either, because they're not. They chose to work for evil. So be it.

-- Badtux the Vicious Penguin

Scumbags of the month: Chase Bank

Read the complaint. My name isn't on that complaint, but these guys have my name, address, and phone number if they need another name to put on a revised complaint.

How it works: a few years back, Chase made an offer to me: transfer a balance to their card, pay a one-time transaction fee, and it would be 3.99% until the balance was paid off. I took them up on the offer and transferred a balance to their card (the balance being basically what it cost me to be unemployed for six months then to move from Phoenix to the Silicon Valley, or roughly $16,000). Since then I have faithfully paid on the balance every month, never a day late, never a dollar short, and the balance is now significantly less than that. I have, in short, lived up to my end of the contract.

Chase, however, has not. They have apparently decided to take that $35 billion of taxpayer money that they got from TARP, and use it to illegally try to kick the "deadbeats" (i.e., those of us who pay our bills every month) off of their books. I can see why they don't want my loan on their books -- while they're getting money at 0% from the Federal government, still, 3.99% sucks as an interest rate. But they made a deal, and now they don't want to live up to it, instead charging a bogus "transaction fee" that is not allowed by the promotional agreement. And oh yeah, they've also accelerated the payment, but that doesn't bother me, I'm paying off my credit cards and all that's doing is shifting which credit card I'm paying off. No big deal. It's the bogus monthly transaction fee that's not authorized by the agreement we had.

I personally don't see much chance of the class action lawsuit succeeding. I'm not a lawyer, but that arbitration provision in the cardholder agreement looks pretty ironclad to me. But that doesn't make Chase Bank any less scumbags. If you have an account with these people, MOVE IT IMMEDIATELY. Unless you're actually costing them money. If you have a no-annual-fee credit card with them, pay it off and then charge a $1.50 soda with it once a month. And then pay your bill via a check and US Postal Service. That way they have to pay mail handling fees, check handling fees, and otherwise spend money on your account. But hey, it's what scumbags deserve :-). In the meantime, my credit cards are going to be paid off by the end of this year (and I have the money to pay off Chase immediate but prefer to put it to use elsewhere). Good riddance to them all.

-- Badtux the Ripoff Penguin