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@Home Critic Silenced By @Home
Scareduck writes: "We've all heard much of @Home's lousy service. Ed Foster's column today in InfoWorld discusses a fellow who got his @Home e-mail account pulled for posting @Home internal documents to a Usenet newsgroup explaining how tech reps are to assume problems are always on the customer's side. He subsequently posted them on various free Web services (WebJump and Angelfire) only to discover his pages mysteriously disappear. @Home earns bonus villain points for invoking the purely evil DMCA in their justification of this thuggish behavior."
I'm a current @home subscriber, and have had nothing but problems with the way @home runs their service.
Many of the incidents, I attribute to sheer Idiocy. Example : 7 Months ago, my service gets cut off. I call and ask whats going on, as my modem isn't connecting.
The response I get is "We're upgrading your node, you'll be out of service for 3 weeks"
Well, isn't that just wonderful. I didn't recieve so much as a NOTICE that the service was going down, and to top it off, after the service came back up 3 weeks later, I recieve an email dated THREE DAYS after service was shutdown, notifying me of the service outage.
As if that isn't bad enough, I changed credit cards in June. Being a responsible individual, I call and give the new numbers to their billing dept so that they can continue billing me.
About 2 weeks ago, my service gets cut off again w/o any notice. Calling their tech support, I find out they've cut me off for "Billing Issues"
Apparently they never updated their accounting database with my new numbers, and had been billing the old card inneffectively for the past 4 months.
During this period, I never recieved a Phone Call, Email, or Mail Notice regarding the billing problem. They just chose to cut-off my service, w/o notification. Re-instating the service took about a week, because they "Cannot bill you manually, only on the 7th and 14th of the month"
Its amazing to me that @Home can stay in business with such poor customer service. I guess when you have a monopoly on Broadband access, you dont have to worry about appeasing your customers.
~MhaelIf anybody knows the URL where those documents used to be, he still can get them from google:. org/localpath
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.somehost
Granted, practicing medicine without a license is a criminal act in most of the world. To obtain said license one must have recieved a MD degree from an accredited medical school, so the distinction is pretty much academic.
Jouralists, unlike physicians, don't need a license to practice their trade. Posting text to the internet is legally identical to publishing it in print; giving the poster the same rights and responsibilities as a traditional publisher or journalist. It relates back to that little thing called "freedom of the press".
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
-IANAL, and I have not seen the actual documents. However, if the documents show that @Home has service problems, and that they are trying to bill customers for services never rendered then we may be looking at a case that has federal whistle blower protection.
It certainly leaves @Home open to a class action law suites. Which is probally why they are irritated. If the documents have wide enough dispersement then it's no longer a trade secret. It could be used against them without suppression.
but to claim up to X, it has to be possible to achieve X. I never expected to get 10Mbs transfer rates - I understand network congestion and cable's shared bandwidth system. However, before the cap, it was possible to achieve 10Mbs under perfect, though unlikely, conditions. I signed onto up to 10Mbs not up to 2Mbs.
As for Port 25 blocks... 95% of those who want to host an SMTP server are doing it for relays or their own spamming enterprises. The other 5% are doing it as a part of their technical consulting
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I have to wonder, why does someone have to be a Designated Journalist before one is "allowed" to investigate things of interest to oneself?
This guy wanted to find out why @Home service -- a service he is paying for -- sucks. So did a lot of other people who were in the same boat. So he does some digging around, finds a sympathetic soul at @Home willing to spill a few beans. He then publishes his findings.
Tell me: What, ethically, is wrong with this? You may argue that the documents were company confidential, and the company should be able to prevent their disclosure. But where, in concrete legal terms, is the line on actionable disclosure?
Let's say someone uncovers internal documents of a certain ISP revealing they have an official policy of "losing" account cancellation requests, thereby continuing to bill customers' credit cards. This is clearly information that is material to the ISP's competetive advantage. Should it be treated as a trade secret? Should be the ISP be able to silence its disclosure?
"But that practice is flagrantly illegal!" you cry. Okay, how about something more nebulous: Based on studies that most people give up after 10 minutes, the ISP (confidentially) establishes a policy mandating a minimum 15 minute wait on hold for tech support. They also use caller-ID to immediately identify the caller, look up their account and, based on previous call frequency or experience, weight their calling priority. This is clearly a practice that is grievously disrespectful to their customers, but it's not illegal. Should this information remain confidential? Should the ISP be able to prevent its disclosure?
Ethically, I see little wrong with what Wesley did. Its revelation is merely embarrassing to @Home, nothing more.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
This is exactly the sort of attitude that gives geeks a bad name.
Most of the people calling tech support aren't "stupid"; they just don't enjoy wasting hours reading some incomprehensible manual... and I say this as a tech writer myself: there are a LOT of bad manuals out there. They don't get their kicks from playing with computers. I do, but that doesn't make me smarter than them, just different. (And better paid, but that's another discussion.)
I have non-geek friends who are perfectly intelligent, even brilliant, individuals. They use AOL, because it's simple and they don't have to mess with it. They don't have the inclination to spend a couple weeks on the phone with tech support trying to troubleshoot a bad DSL connection, as I did. They're English professors, not network engineers. And the last thing they deserve is some snotty geek-snob treating them like morons just because they dared to call tech support. That would be like your mechanic laughing at you because you didn't understand the [insert rambling, incomprehensible car problem here] and then getting hostile toward you because you didn't know how to fix it yourself. After all, all you'd need is a brain and a [insert name of obscure, baffling automotive tool], right?
I love Slashdot (I'm here aren't I?) but I'm getting really tired of this whole "All corporations are evil!" mentality. The guy published some of their internal documents. That's their private stuff. If someone published your old mash notes to your significant other, you'd probably want to squash it too. This is not a case of an independent reporter being "silenced" by the evil MegaCorp(tm), it's about some guy who took internal company documents and posted them publicly.
For crying out loud, let companies have some rights, okay?
Got Rhinos?
Others have addressed the issue of copyright. As far as confidentiality is concerned, if Wesley has not under an agreement, he is under no obligation to preserve the confidentiality of anything. The person who gave the documents to Wesley may have violated some kind of agreement, but Wesley probably has not.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Remember, @Home is owned by AT&T, those fun people who were talking about charging online merchants a fraction of any sale to a AT&T Broadband customer, and even for just "delivering" those customers to the merchant in the first place.
I believe that AT&T/@Home has a vritual monopoly in the US on the cable modem lines. (My cable modem is certinaly AT&T/@Home, and it makes me think I should be posting this anonymously... oh well.) If it weren't for DSL, it would be a virtual broadband monopoly. Is there a lesson in here somewhere? A lesson that's been learned over and over again in history?
If we had other cable companies to get our cable modem service from, we wouldn't have to endlessly bitch about @Home. From the other end, @Home would have to clean up their act to keep their customers. I know I've swicthed phone-in ISPs several times, and have found one which has service and capabilities that really match what I want. If we can't vote with our feet, but can only bitch against people who have weird "intellectual property" laws to stifle that bitching, we're hosed.
-Rob
Here is a little story, about three weeks old, about my experience with my friendly @home ISP.
OK, I cannot connect to the 'net. First reaction: ping the gateway. It responds. Nose around -- a-ha, it's their DNS servers that are down.
Wait a day, they're still down. Fine, I find myself a public DNS server, plug it in and I have a working 'net connection. Still, I want the @home DNS servers back...
Call the customer service. Spend some time explaining to the first "tech" what DNS is and why it's useful. Got some info: he can ping the servers, the're up. So it's likely a routing or a connectivity problem. However he cannot fix anything or actually do anything because his database is down. Oh well, call tomorrow.
Tomorrow: rinse, repeat.
Next day: rinse, repeat. But I acquired a useful piece of knowledge: whey you get your first 'tech' say the magic words "escalate me to tier two". It generally works and I don't have to spend half an hour explaining what a nameserver is and why do I need it.
Next day: talking to tier two guy. He has no clue what's wrong. Tries to reset my cable modem from their end, tell me to call tomorrow.
Next day: finally somebody who seems to have a clue. He checks some permissions on some routers, updates them, tells me that it'll take a couple of hours for the changes to propagate and I'll be fine.
Next day: he lied. DNS servers are still not pingable from me (BTW, no machine on that subnet is pingable, a clear routing problem). Call again, bitch and whine, be told that there is nothing more they can do.
Next day: Going through the usual rigamarole when the tech notices that I do my pings, etc. not from a Windows machine. The fact that it's OpenBSD throws him off stride in a major way. I spend half an hour arguing with him (he: we don't support non-Windows OS; I: I don't want you to support my OS, I want you to fix your routing problems). So he goes off to find a supervisor, returns, tells me that no, they don't support anything.
OK, I offer him to reboot the machine to Windows (it's dual-boot) if he thinks (hah!) it will help. He goes away to consult with a supervisor again and returns to tell me that they don't support dual-boot machines. At this point my jaw starts bouncing on the floor and I spend some time trying to understand his logic. His (that is, his supervisor's) position was: Wipe out the hard drive, reinstall Windows, and then we'll support it!!! At that point I gave up trying to communicate.
Next day: magically, the DNS servers appeared back, I could ping them, access them, etc. I have no doubt that somebody accidentally/normally/for-some-other-purpose just rebooted something and as a side-effect fixed my routing problem.
Do I like @home customer service? Guess!...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Imagine for a moment if documents leaked out from @Home were published in the New York Times. Now, if @home wanted to go after them, they'd have to file a lawsuit and go through numerous hurdles. Even if their suit was successful, the paper was printed, the impact was made. The printing can't be undone and it may be argued that is shouldn't be undone. The legal consequence is paid by the paper for this but what is done is done.
In this case though, @home just has to have a lawyer type up a letter and e-mail it to a few places to have this shut down. There's no judicial order, or oversight of any kind. The yanking of the document was purely based on the whims of the corporation. Unless the ISP feels some moral obligation they aren't going to fight it. And frankly moral obligations don't boost sagging stock prices.
Personally I think that if @home feels they have been so wronged by this, they should go after the guy who did it in court. What he did may or may not be wrong and in doing so he should be aware that he is opening himself up to legal risk. So let that play out. Take it to court and see what the court says. We are giving away the right of judicial review to a bunch of lawyers and word processors. That's a VERY dangerous precedent.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The Connecticut Hackers Group has posted mirrors of some or all of the documents.
News on ct2600.org and mirrors @ ct2600.org/athome.
The vast majority of calls to tech support are from people too stupid to comprehend the fucking manual even if they bothered to read it.
--
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You are a fucking moron.
According to @Home,
"These are our confidential and copyrighted documents shared with our cable partners and not intended for the public."
What reason do we have to disbelieve them? If Wesley could claim freedom of speech, it's trumped by confidentiality and copyright law!
Surely you must admit the law is not on Wesley's side.
Unless, perhaps, he was a journalist, and was acting under freedom of the press. Is he a journalist, or a speaker? Seems like a speaker to me. Still, noone should doubt where the law stands. (Firmly on the side of those with the money).
-Ben
I was getting errors trying to connect through @Home, so I set up a script to ping and log the DSN and Gateway servers.
The servers go down EVERY DAY. Sometimes 3-4 times per day. Downtime duration is anything from 3 minutes to 1/2 hour.
And this is only on my segment....
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
I've returned consumer devices that required reading the manual: it's a sign of poor design and poor value.
Why do you have a computer?
It is ridiculous to say that everything a consumer picks up should be easy to use without reading a manual. That's a dreamworld mentality for people who don't believe they should ever have to learn anything.
Now we have to put out substandard merchandise with tons of overhead costs to ensure that John Q. Public can figure out how to do complex tasks without any knowledge whatsoever. Don't slow down technology!
If you aren't willing to pick up the manual, to have any idea of how to actually operate the merchandise, and expect that the world should revolve around you, then you become part of the problem.
That's the justification of the users to not read manuals ~ 'I shouldn't have to read a manual, I just paid $xxx for this merchandise!' If you purchased nuclear waste and were contaminated because you didn't read the documents on properly shielding yourself from radiation, who is at fault? The person who sold the waste, or you?
It is the responsibility of the consumer to be educated when living in the consumer market. In the case of @Home service, it is the consumer's right to this type of information. The OS's aren't tricky, and the providers of the service should have a checklist to go through step by step to determine if the system is set up correctly. If they cannot provide consumers with the service they claim to provide, then they should not be in the business. In a consumer market, this is the only way they should be able to survive.
- that
setup. It would be pretty funny to see if they try to get a DSL provider to take some sort of action against a user criticizing cable.In the article, it states "And although Wesley says he received no notice of why his pages were closed down, Sullivan says Webjump.com and Angelfire.com both sent him infringement notifications as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after Sullivan informed them of the infringement." Just goes to show how bad the email service is at Excite@Home!!
I live in Clearwater, FL and there are a SLEW of internet providers. I literally have my pick of 100 or more ISP's. I work as a Network Engineer now, and previously built a local ISP from the ground up.
The company I choose to do business with now is called Intelligence Network. They have a strict policy of using only Cisco routers and switches, and only Sun Microsystems workstations and servers. Personally, I like playing with old Sun hardware, but I greatly disagree with many of Sun's policies regarding licensing. Nevertheless, no informed individual in the business can say that your average Intel/Bay Networks enterprise-level network can even compare with your average Sun/Cisco network. That's Point 1: Quality.
Secondly, they are a small-to mid-sized company. They have four static T-1's and a burstable OC-12. I'd prefer they had a burstable T-3 instead of the four T-1's, but nevertheless, that is again one of the signs of a smaller, more personalized company.That's Point 2: A small, non-conglomerate company.
Next, they have little to no advertising. They rely on the quality of their service to keep their business at a solid level. They are not in the business seeking profits (or else they wouldn't be spending well over $1,000,000 per server they have), but rather they are in the business to provide a purely quality-oriented service. Point 3: No major advertising.
Lastly, their tech support is good. This is the hardest to gauge and monitor. They have perhaps a dozen technicians. Some are assigned to dialup service, some to DSL and T1/E1 service, and some to colocation and other services. Atop this they have 3 head technicians who actually comminicate directly with the customer. In fact, they're so good with communication that they gave me a free 10mbit SBUS ethernet card for an old Sparc IPX i've got for a firewall. They are the kind of company that wants to get personal with the customer and actually develop a relationship with them. Point 4: Personal Customer relationships.
Okay, one more point. This one is very arguable and lies entirely in my preference. I like this company because they do NOT try to match the bottom-price market. Instead, they charge a fair price for a very reliable service. They are not motivated by high-volume income, and it is very clear by the quality and (relatively small) size of their company. I look for this with every business or service I deal with.
For you performance geeks out there, my DSL connection has had a total of approximately 2 hours of downtime in the last year. I monitor my uptime by 30-second intervals and keep it logged in MRTG-style reports. Those two hours were an accumulation of many very short service failures, many of which I proved were due to AT&T doing maintenance at 4am on Sunday morning every other month. Nearly all of the rest of it, short of approximately 20 minutes, was due to GTE/Verizon (many bad things to say about them). Their end result from these points is an extremely reliable service, and my performance is ALWAYS 99% or better of my bandwidth provisioning.
If you want a _quality_ provider, open up your local phone book and pick a handful of ISP's you have never heard of in your local area. Call each of them and ask them two simple questions:
- What hardware do you use to run your network and servers?
- How much bandwidth do you have, and from what providers?
If they have the bandwidth to realistically support the performance they claim, and they are using quality hardware, you've got a company that meets three of the above points: Quality, Small Company, and NO Major Advertising. At that point, there's only one way to really test their customer service, and that's to use their service.Don't expect your "cheapest and fastest" advertising ISP to get you anywhere. Throw in a few more dollars and ignore the claimed performance gains, and deal with a company that actually wants to provide service.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
As for your computer and nuclear waste analogy, clearly, there are devices and processes for which it is either necessary or interesting to learn a lot about them. But that's driven either by professional needs ("nuclear waste") or interest (Linux). If every alarm clock, automobile, lightbulb, refridgerator, washer, drying, etc., demanded that kind of attention, we'd never have time for anything else.
Or, to put it more succinctly, if a consumer device requires more expense in terms of time to set up than the benefit in terms of fun or time savings derived from it, it's not rational to keep it. And since the fun or time savings derived from many consumer devices is pretty small, having to read a manual often crosses that threshold.
Even when there is a copyright, there is some copying permitted by the fair use doctrine.
They must know this is bogus, but they know they can get away with it by bullying people with abusive legal process?
Why would anyone be suprised?
Mattel / TLC / MSI sued me because they didn't like their critism. Mattel / TLC / MSI sued the CPHack guys because they didn't like people seeing their dirty laundry. Mattel sued the MPAA because they didn't like the Barbie Girl. Mattel lost the Barbie Girl case, the judge said that a company can't use trademark law to silence criticism.
Only by taking on some of these abuses, we can win.
Fight Spammers!
This depends greatly on where he got these documents.
If he knew the company had designated them 'confidential' or 'not for public release' or whatever, then damn straight.
Oh.. and who says *anyone* is requird to do business with you if they don't want? Hey.. @home has *THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE*. Just like I do in my own business.
Hey.. I run a consulting business. Does that mean that if someone wants to be my client, but then badmouths me, I have to continue providing him service? I think not.
Oh yeah. And on the ISP side.... it is *correct* for technical support to assume that all problems are on the users end, because 99.9% of problems *are* on the users end.
Mmmm... could it be that these 'notifications' were sent to his @Home mailbox? And could it be that, just perhaps, this is why he didn't get them - because the email service wasn't working (again)?
Wonder how that would show @Home up in court...
as a former @home worker .. I can tell you they dont MEAN to be evil .. its just a by product of their total lack of organization.
The turn over is HUGE (hence .. former),
a lot of the old timers left after cashing in their pre-ipo stocks when it hit $200 a share,
The purchace of Excite certainly didnt help .. as they began to play musical employees.
To give you a few examples of what I mean :
I still dont pay for my cable modem service :P and I have been gone for months.
My e-mail still works.
A friend of mine who left about the same time still has her phone, and e-mail accounts active.
However - you do get beer on fridays :P and there is a slide in the main office .. so I guess that cant be that bad :P
Chuckle .. maybe they are just evil drunks.
(kudos though .. they did refuse carnivore, and refused to give up the records for the guy who wrote the melissa virus (even though they suspended his service - and did try to bill him for his modem :P heh )
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I don't usually read rags like Busineess Week, but I went in for some dental abuse last week, and the cover story of that week's issue caught my eye while I was waiting my turn.
It makes for interesting/enlightening reading. I found it somewhat disturbing - partly from seeing how cold-blooded companies have become about customer service, but equally because it's really hard to fault the practices on rational grounds.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Since he was openly publishing this information, he was acting as a journalist.
If I took out your appendix, would that make me a doctor? No. If I installed Linux, would that make me an open source advocate? No.
Give journalists just a bit more credit. Just because some dude grabs some internal documents and posts them doesn't make him a journalist.
Hell, even if he were a bonifide Washington Post Watergate veteran, stealing is stealing. Were he a journalist and he did steal internal documents, he'd have no special protection from the law. Shield laws only protect journalists from revealing their sources. Shield laws don't give us the right to break the law.
InitZero
A vast majority of my calls are regarding an error caused by the user. But, I see it as part of my job as to help the user clear up the error and not do it again in the future.
I've made calls into service support because I was *certain* they were screwing up. I even had a list of things they should probably check. When the Tier One support started walking me through the steps to diagnose the problem I was thinking, 'schmuck, I need to get to a real tech', until the T1 guy in his checklist had me check my DNS where I had transposed numbers. I was the idiot. Now, I applaud the service I got because they were set up to help me locate and fix the errors I caused.
All companies that service customers need to realize this and not dump it back in the customers lap. When I do something stupid to my car, my mechanic doesn't shake his head and say 'it is something you did, it isn't my responsibility'.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I don't know, but this sounds a whole lot better than the heavily scripted "tech support" that ISP's are currently offering. I'd appreciate a guy with an actual brain inside his cranium instead of these marginally fluent morons filling in positions at the desk.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Even if you think @Home is correct in this case, it is absolutely horrifying that the law has been set up to default to allowing companies to silence their critics. I mean, we have a Court System. This is why we have it. If @Home sued to have those pages removed, and their case was reviewed in a public court of law, and the judge decided that they were within their rights to request that the material be removed, that would be one thing. I might disagree with the law, but the process makes sense, and it has natural checks to prevent abuse (public opinion, presumably impartial judiciary, etc.)
I find it very scary that the system has been set up to make it so easy for a company to get pages removed, without any public review.
-Dan
I have written a truly remarkable operating system which this sig is too small to contain.
He has no right to republish the documents. I don't particularly like @home's draconian behavior, they are within their rights.
Wesley didn't author those documents, therefore he has no right to publish them as he did. The documents contained @home's speech, not Wesley's. Thus @home has the right to control their publication.
Just posting stolen documentation is not protected speech. He could have put up a commentary citing the leaked documents. He could even quote any relevant sections. The point is Wesley's speech is protected. If he was speaking or was the author of a document which he had posted, then @home would not have been able to do what they did.
Sorry, but because @home was controlling infrormation that belonged to them. This is not censorship.
gwonkCorporations -- big or small -- exist to make a profit & constantly increase profits.
But don't take my word for this. Ask any Republican or Libertarian why a given corporation should be allowed to get away with some inethical behavior (e.g., cheap products, substandard service), & once you pin them down on the facts that what was done *is* inethical, they end up whining ``Well, they're just doing what every other comapny is doing. And they have to make a profit."
Gee, if an individual down the block abuses his children, treats his spouse like a servant, abuses alcohol or drugs, & someone were to say ``Well, he's busy making more money so we'll forgive him", that would be a lame excuse to me. So why do we allow fictive individuals -- which is what a corporation actually is -- to use this excuse?
Seems to me corporations have more rights than the rest of us already. And none of the responsibilities.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
When you sell stuff to consumers, it should work when it's plugged in and it should be obvious how to use it. It shouldn't require reading lots of manuals. That's not just because it's a nuisance, but if the thing is so complicated to use that it requires reading a manual, it just won't be very useful. The manual will get lost, other family members won't bother, the person who originally waded through the manual will forget, and within six months, it will get tossed or it will be obsolete, repeating the cycle all over again. Consumer devices are supposed to make life easier and provide fun; and these days, that means a minimal investmnet of itme. I've returned consumer devices that required reading the manual: it's a sign of poor design and poor value.
In fact, the same ought to be true for stuff sold to professionals, but professionals have less choice in the matter because for them, stuff they get sold is needed to get a job done.
If @Home pushes platforms (Windows, MacOS) that require tricky installations and can be misconfigured in a myriad of ways, they have to pay for that in terms of support costs. If they don't, they won't get a lot of customers, of course. In the short term, that's the way business works for everybody. In the long term, maybe that will provide sufficient incentive for @Home to support consumer friendly hardware and software (and, no, I don't mean Linux either).