Verizon Denies DSL Because of Subscriber's Name

mikek2 writes "When retired Philadelphia-area doctor and Vietnam veteran Dr. Herman I. Libshitz went to upgrade his dial-up connection to Verizon DSL, he was informed they wouldn't complete the order because his last name contained an expletive. Repeated calls to several levels of management at Verizon failed to resolve the problem, with several managers suggesting he change his last name. It all worked out in the end, after the Philadelphia Enquirer intervened."

Comments

Monopoly

[Alex Belits]

Next time someone will claim that monopolies' power over the market does not negate the very mechanism that is supposed to implement the market, refer him to this.

Then punch him in the face.

Re:Monopoly

[teh moges]

If they wouldn't let him sign up, he would of gone elsewhere. With a monopoly, this isn't an option.

Re:Monopoly

[armareum]

Oh, so you think that it's a failure of the market which caused him this problem? No, it's just a crude obscenity filter on the email address he wanted to use when signing up. A problem related to the Scunthorpe problem.
Yes, monopolies are overall not good, but not everything bad they do is *caused* by them being a monopoly. That's just a stupid position to take.

Re:Monopoly

[MindlessAutomata]

Heh, and someone else said SpeakEasy is a competitor in his area, and they provide better service.

"Monopoly"? You didn't even check; you just want to bitch about big business.

Re:Monopoly

[phulegart]

So how did that crude obscenity filter come into place when he spoke to people at Verizon... multiple times? People in the billing department... people in different parts of the country... people who suggested he Misspell his name, change his name, etc...

It wasn't until the press got involved that someone said "Well, this needs personal attention." Which is odd because he was talking to people all along, aside from the initial online signup attempt.

However, if as Verizon says, this can be worked around because it is indeed their name... why couldn't anyone else that this doctor spoke to offer him the same appropriate treatment? So, since Verizon could have fixed this all along but did not until the press got involved... it was not *just* a crude obscenity filter on the email address he wanted when he signed up.

I've got to wonder what his email address was with AT&T, since he was using AT&T for dialup first.

Re:Monopoly

[1u3hr]

This case occurred because they are a large company, and have a crude obscenity filter. NOT because they are a monopoly!

They had a crude obscenity filter because a monopoly doesn't need a better one. There is no economic incentive for them to spend the resources on things like that. They can't lose customers no matter how badly they treat them.

Re:Monopoly

[Jafafa Hots]

The problem was caused by a stupid obscenity filter AND a monopoly.

The obscenity filter made one company's product unsuitable or unworkable.

The fact that he didn't have plenty of alternatives to a company offering him what was for him a poor value or unworkable product was caused by them being a monopoly.

Re:Monopoly

[dyefade]

You're right, the filter being too strict was an honest mistake. What is less honest is the response he received from the company when he queried it. Suggesting he change his name to better comply with the whims of their computer is offensive, bordering on racist.

In anything but a monopoly he could vote with his wallet and let Verizon know what he really thinks.

Re:Monopoly

[jimicus]

So how did that crude obscenity filter come into place when he spoke to people at Verizon... multiple times?

I once had the misfortune to be a customer of an ISP with such an attitude. They'd essentially installed an obscenity filter on all their staff and if you said anything which tripped the filter, they'd put the phone down on you.

What made this particularly galling was that the service they were selling was filtered internet access for the benefit of the sort of organisation that wants one - schools, mainly. So you ring them up to say "There's a problem with your filter - it lets me visit www.hotteensluts.com" and they've hung up on you before you can finish the sentence.

Re:Monopoly

[DavidTC]

Ah, you must live in that part of the world where there's actually more than one company providing DSL over an area.

Re:Monopoly

[xeoron]

Sure there is. Most of the major ISP's offer DSL in the markets that Verizon does, such as Earthlink. Now with that said, in my experience, all this ends up being is Verizon DSL without dealing with Verizon, which works out well, because the Earthlink is a lot more friendlier

Re:Monopoly

[armareum]

The obscenity filter was on the email address he wanted to use. Which, as is fairly common, contained his name.

Re:Monopoly

[Rick Zeman]

Heh, and someone else said SpeakEasy is a competitor in his area, and they provide better service.

I moved and tried to bring my Speakeasy service with me...and ended up NOT being able to--not from being too far from the C.O., but because Verizon had a digital loop installed instead of copper coming into the neighborhood. Let me ask you this: Do you think they would have have taken that step if the area wasn't provisioned with FIOS? Doubtful.... So, in effect, by being a monopoly, they lowered the number of companies that can effectively compete for anyone here's Internet business to two: Verizon and Comcrap. And they both suck.

Re:Monopoly

[fm6]

You didn't check either. SpeakEasy doesn't try to compete with consumer ISPs. If you want a business type VoIP package, a lot of bandwidth, symmetric DSL so you can host your own server, they'll cut you a good deal. But if you want simple home DSL, they'll charge you maybe twice as much as the phone company.

Re:Monopoly

[MindlessAutomata]

That doesn't change the fact that there's competition.

The entire system is screwed up because of how the infrastructure is set up, but you cannot claim that Verizon is a monopoly if there is a competition, even if the competition charges more. Service does not have to directly mirror another company's in order to be considered "competition", if it did, there would be no point to competition anyway.

Re:Monopoly

[fm6]

"Monopoly" is defined in terms of a marketplace. If consumers don't have a practical alternative to a supplier, then that is a monopoly. The presence of impractical alternatives is irrelevant. It only Toyota were allowed to sell cars and small trucks, it would be a monopoly, no matter how many people bought Peterbilt rigs.

Another detail: the landline companies clearly do have a monopoly on the copper "last-mile" networks that all DSL providers use. In theory, these networks are equally available to all ISPs. But by an amazing coincidence, the dominant ISP in any given market is always the one that belongs to the local landline company. that's just not consistent with the idea that the DSL market is "open".

Re:Monopoly

[mi]

You did not read the article... And neither did the submitter nor the editor...

The argument was not over providing him with service. It was over his choice of the user-name:

informing him that he could not have the user name because it didn't comply with company rules.

So the couple returned the Verizon DSL kit.

See? There was no problem ordering — and getting the "DSL kit" delivered. It was, when he wanted to use something like "hlibshitz" for login, that the problem began — the computer auto-rejected his choice of login.

Not that it is a particularly smart rule either (especially leaving the tech-support unable to overwrite it), but neither his being a Vietnam vet nor Verizon's special monopoly status have anything to do with it.

Then punch him in the face.

I think, you owe that guy an apology and a couple of beers... Unless he already had you knocked-out in response, that is.

Check and triple-check your facts next time — especially if the subject is "big business" and the posting editor is kdawson.

Change of name

[Fred_A]

In the end he changed his name to "Harold I. Libshitz" and everything finally went through.

Re:Change of name

[Anonymous Coward]

I could be wrong, but I think that the joke is that the problem was with is first name, Herman, and not his last name, Libshitz.

Re:Change of name

[jamesh]

I remember it as a skit from a Monty Python or Not The Nine o'Clock News or something from that era. The joke is probably much older. It goes something like:

A man walks into the office of the department of name changes:
Man: I'd like to change my name please
Clerk: Okay, what is your name?
Man: Colin Tittybumface
Clerk: I see. And what would you like to change your name to?
Man: Roger Tittybumface

Most famous Lipshitz

[BadAnalogyGuy]

People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.

Re:Most famous Lipshitz

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Surely the most famous Lips(c)hitz is
Rudolf Lipschitz after whom Lipschitz continuity is named. Come on guys lets stick ti "stuff that matters".

By the way it looks like Herman should have kept the "c", if indeed his family did at some time drop it for ease of spelling.

Re:Most famous Lipshitz

[me at werk]

I thought the most famous Lipshitz ever was Dr. Lipshitz from Rugrats

Re:Most famous Lipshitz

[jollyreaper]

People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.

The second-most famous Lipshitz changed his name to Dirty Sanchez.

Re:Most famous Lipshitz

[swv3752]

I remember working tech support and getting a call for a Harold Bawlz. "Go ahead and call me Harry, everyone else does."

Re:Most famous Lipshitz

[illegalcortex]

The most unbelievable one I've ever personally run into was this one. Would have been much better if he'd went into urology, though.

Wait, what?

[untaken_name]

So, let me see if I have this straight: Verizon wanted someone to change their last name in order to get DSL, and that person didn't do it??? What, are you going to get a cablemodem or something? Just change your name, already. This is internet connectivity we're talking about here. It's important. It isn't like you haven't been getting libshitz for yoru name all your life, anyway.

Re:Wait, what?

[Standard User 79]

I read the article. They wanted him to change his verizon email address. They were fine with giving him dsl service, etc.. Most likely it was a problem because some programmer hard coded a prof filter in email creation.

Re:Wait, what?

[untaken_name]

Very true. However, it's funnier for Verizon to want him to change his last name, so I prefer to believe that version.

Re:Wait, what?

[unlametheweak]

In the end it doesn't really matter. This person had to go through various levels of management to get his problem resolved. This indicates to me that this is not just a programming problem, but an inherent problem with upper management. People (Managers) need to be fired for this incompetence. It will likely never happen because incompetent (upper Management) is unlikely to fire incompetent lower Management.

This has nothing to do with his name..

[XaXXon]

It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[OldManAndTheC]

Oh come on. Don't defend these losers. He asked for an email address based on his name, just like millions of other customers.

It's a perfectly reasonable request, which Verizon denied solely because some arbitrary filter detected a naughty word buried in the address, a word that would only be noticed by someone with a juvenile mindset. The filter is obviously intended to screen out truly nasty phrases, like "verizonisfullofshit@verizon.com", but like most such filters it is crude and inflexible, and unsuited for its purpose.

And to make things worse, no one at Verizon had the authority or inclination to override this zero tolerance policy for the substring "shit". The only choice they gave him, if he wanted DSL, was to select an email address that was not based on his name. Naturally he refused, as would anyone with an ounce of pride in his family name.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[Auckerman]

They were also giving the reason that he couldn't have an e-mail address with his name in it was because it was offensive. That's not a valid reason to decline an e-mail address based off a person's name and he was quite reasonably offended by that. It's unreasonable to ban an e-mail address based off the clients name merely because you find a few select letters in his name fit a banned word. I know that, you know that, he knew that and now Verizon realizes their mistake.

You can be cut and dry about what went on, but seriously, life shouldn't be that way. If we all looked at and dealt with each other on that level, I think it would be time for me to find another country to live in.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[MichaelSmith]

If I moved to Israel I would hate to be told that "Michael Smith" sounds like a rude word in the local language and I couldn't use my normal email address.

Jewish people here occasionally have a chuckle at the name of our Friends Of The Zoos society.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[DaedalusHKX]

I usually tend to use this angle when it actually applies. If he had already paid for service, they were being scum by denying him a legitimate email and violating THEIR contract. I have a feeling that being Jewish, this fellow would have been educated on the issues of contracts (the Torah seems to be quite specific that contracts are the way things are done, between humans and between them and their god(s), devils, etc). I'm fairly sure it wasn't just dragging them through the mud that did the trick. However, the Constitution has no provisions for "large corporations violating contracts into which they entered voluntarily wanting someone's money but failing in the providing of full service as paid for"... stuff like that. Laws and rules about that precede most national governments, and tend to be grandfathered in, since they work.

This is just your typical bureaucratic monkeys being bureaucratic monkeys, that usually get attracted to bureaucratic jobs (management, government, etc...) and doing exactly what and WHY they are hired. Being bureaucratic monkeys, with just enough firing neurons to be annoying bureaucratic monkeys, but not enough to actually be reasonable men... this is usually why you hear of bureaucratic monkeys, or monkeys obedient to bureaucrats tazering paralized kids 19 times or shooting old ladies full of juice even though they're wheelchair bound. Bureaucratic monkeys are examples of scumbags that would've been aborted (post natal if need be) by any self respecting parent, long before they got to breed more bureaucratic monkeys... until they bred and over bred to the situation we have today.

Again, the Constitution of the USA or for the USA (depending on which one you take an oath to when you get sworn in to your bureaucratic job) has nothing on this issue... this is purely a contract law issue, and that precedes the Constitution by several centuries at the least.

Also, his name containing an expletive can easily be explained as NON expletive, and can be interpreted as such by any lawyer or judge with enough functional brain matter. Why, you ask? Simple. Cultural difference. If a man who is a DOCTOR can carry that name and not change it, you can be fairly sure he has traded on it.

That being said i've seen some screwy names in the past, so while I want to believe this article is bogus, I am unsurprised if it is true. Bureaucratic monkeys make every part of the world miserable, where the locals allow them to infest. Voting has never been a cure. It wasn't when they did it in the name of the king, or the oligarch, or the tyrant (in the greek meaning of word) or the dictator or "the people's party" or any other reason for which bureaucratic monkeys perform their unquestioning duties. People to whom "duty" is a primary prerogative, should concern you, worry you, and scare you. These are the monkeys who shot kids in the back of the head for merely not complying with the new "party" or for their parents being rich (see Che and Cuba literature on this issue). Sure, here they're obeying a different "letter of the law", but its all the same. Monkey see, monkey do. We don't need "less abortions", we need a lot more. They should be looking for bureaucratic monkey genes, but who would be doing the legislating but other bureaucratic monkeys... the sense of survival is strong in the bureaucratic monkeys.

MUD: Thou canst not put this genie back into the bottle. The genie reads a scroll of rules and regulations. Thou art Screwed... royally, and without vaseline.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[timmarhy]

"bad words"? what are you fucking 5 years old? this whole thing is insane and anyone who defends it needs to be quarantined and watched closely.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[jeremyp]

The filter is obviously intended to screen out truly nasty phrases, like "verizonisfullofshit@verizon.com"

FFS stop posting my e-mail address on the Internet. Now I'm going to get spammed.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[Anonymous Coward]

This drama was brought to us by the very same people who brought the world Verizon math (http://www.verizonmath.com). Is Verizon trying their very best to humiliate themselves at every turn?

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[rolfwind]

Cultural habit, sorry:) Otherwise, I really don't give a shit.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[pla]

All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine.

Any name but his own. That seems fair, right?


I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.

True. But when you "want" your own name, following the same standard template as 47 million other Verizon customers, it just makes Verizon look like callous monopoly-abusing bastards to say "No".

Don't defend BS like this - Let Verizon (and the rest) know that we won't forsake our own names for their convenience, period.

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[dotancohen]

If I moved to Israel I would hate to be told that "Michael Smith" sounds like a rude word in the local language and I couldn't use my normal email address.

What does Michael Smith sound like in Hebrew? I cannot think of a single dirty Hebrew phrase that sounds like Michael Smith, especially since Michael is a Hebrew name ("Mi CaEl"- "Who is like God?" in Hebrew).

Jewish people here occasionally have a chuckle at the name of our Friends Of The Zoos society.

Potz is more of a Yiddish term than Hebrew, though I do believe that most American Jews are of Yiddish-language decent. In any case, nice one! The Kia car company is another funny one in Hebrew, the name means "vomit".

Re:This has nothing to do with his name..

[netwiz]

Having worked for Verizon, and directly supported the system responsible for this bullshit, I can confirm the idiocy in the story. It is physically impossible to get anything done through customer service, the development teams run by Verizon IT are made of failure and shame, and they really do reboot every system at midnight so that it passes Sheygan Kheradpir's (the IT company's president) 1am "system check," where he logs in to everything personally to make sure it's working.

It is a culture of scapegoatism and "we made the date" development, with zero regard for code quality or robustness, or even "does it work?" Ever pay your bill online? Ever wonder why there's now only a single path through the website that will actually get it paid? This is why. Anecdote: The support team on which I worked hired a Java programmer to assist with the forensic troubleshooting of the "netservices.verizon.net" site, since development never delivered the documentation of the site's design and function (I am certain it didn't exist), and after he solved two major problems by inverting two lines and reducing a 200 line module to 11 lines, he was locked out of the CVS repository, presumably to keep him from making the IT developers look bad.

They are colossal failures inside Verizon, and the company as a whole has been working to drive out every last bit of talent since Chuck Lee sold GTE to Bell Atlantic. The executives are completely disconnected from every aspect of production. Anecdote: the group president was down for a "meet the troops" day, and had been touring the Verizon Online NOC when she had to get on a conference call. Her assistant sat down at one of the work stations (visualize a NASA Mission Control-type layout) and used one of the duty phones to dial in. She then handed the phone to the local executive (which is fine, that's her job). The exec attended the call, and when she was done, rather than simply hang up the phone (which was literally within arms reach), the executive handed the phone back to ther assistant!

The bureaucratic structure is openly worshiped by every member of management (ask me how I know) regardless of the detriment to the business.It was absolutely unreal. Manipulation of performance statistics is commonplace. There is zero management accountability in any department. Check out some of the deeper pages in the "pay my bill online" section of the web site. The "Help and Support" section pages generate 404 errors. There is no way to actually order service over the phone, so if you don't already have some kind of internet service, you can't order anything from Verizon.

The only thing keeping these guys afloat is the fact that the FiOS product genuinely slays every competing technology available, and they know it.

Summary and Title are highly misleading

[rolfwind]

They gladly gave him DSL. What they didn't do was allow a username/email address with 'shit' in it and he insisted since that was part of his name. I'm glad he got his way in the end, but he wasn't being denied the service itself.

Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading

[Dan541]

But "Shit" is not normally considered to be a rude word.

I can understand if the name was Cuntington but "shit" is an everyday word (So is "cunt" where I live) and part of someone's name.

I've never understood the whole profanity thing, why would someone want to be offended by a word, you would think people would have better things to do than create reasons to be offended.

Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading

[martin-boundary]

Some (really stupid) anti-spam systems scan email addresses for rude words. It's likely that their accounts system prevents the creation of email addresses containing these kinds of words, eg because the IT people couldn't be bothered to fix their deployed anti-spam software.

Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading

[rve]

My friend mister Koksukhar had no such problems

Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading

[YttriumOxide]

I grew up in Southern New Zealand, where the word "cunt" certainly wouldn't be used in "polite society", but is (or maybe was) very common amongst teenagers and people in their 20s.

Pretty much to the point where we didn't really consider it a "bad word". Someone beats you in a game on the console du jour, then acts all smug about it, you'd call them a "smarmy cunt". Or you greet a friend you haven't seen in a while with, "Good to see ya you old cunt, how's things?". Or even referring to a third person as a "good cunt" if you think they're someone very reliable and friendly. And so on ad nauseum. It's just a word...

(also, it's more common to use it for males rather than females, whereas in places where it's exclusively a "harsh insult", it tends to be used for females only)

Re:Summary and Title are highly misleading

[Shadowlore]

See, that is the problem: we don't. It seems to be the natural result of what appears to me to be a fundamental driving fore of humanity: make things better.

Parents refer to wanting "a better life" for their children, and generally work toward that goal. Non-parents tend to identify what they believe to be better things for society, and work toward those goals.

This process has in general served us well, but like most evolutionary changes will eventually become a detriment, if it has not done so already, to the human race. At this juncture in our societal and possibly human evolution we have attached priority to feelings. Why? Most real and physical problems are either solved or determined to be insolvable. With fewer big problems the mind turns to smaller problems, and perceived or invented problems. Offensive behaviour or talk, or even thought become problems of historical import that need to be solved.

A factor in this is that people are as general rule under less survival pressure. Take a brain wired to make things "better" and remove things to make better. It will invent new things that are bad. Slavery: bad. Once slavery is abolished there will the next step: continued violence against the former slaves and the slavers (aka both sides). When that for the most part abates ("problem solved for vast majority of cases"), those who thrive or depend on the continuing of the efforts (what today we call a "war") will then "see" new problems. Hence, offensive words, phrases, etc.. There will always be gullible people and wussies - people for whatever reason can't seem to stand on their own. So the cycle persists down further and further.

Combine this with another fundamental aspect of humanity: conflict. Looking around at this planet we see conflict. Predator and prey, for example. Vegetative growth and natural fires, for another. The dynamic of this planet is centered on conflict. it is thus no suprise that humans reflect that dynamic in our natures - it would be suprising if we did not. Time and again we see that abundance leads to stagnation when conflict is not present or is lessened.

So as we "solve" our physical priorities and move up the pyramid from food, water, shelter to emotional and intellectual "needs" (wants become needs when the needs are no longer a concern), I expect we will discover more and more "needs", more and more "problems and ills". I believe this has an effect on our literature and escapist entertainment. People in general gravitate toward stories that have conflict, hardship, and of course eventual human triumph. Being offended by the word "shit" in a name is but one small but common example of the lack of this release valve.

This is one of the many reasons mankind needs a "new frontier". Something that provides an outlet for those of us with the drive and wiring to seek that conflict. Not all conflict has to be interpersonal (war, arguments), it can be conflict of man vs. environment (man vs. the sea being a driver not that long ago). This brings in my mind the most logical choice to be space exploration and expansion. I think a solid case can be made for a biological imperative to do so. Animals search new places for food, and generally only when their food is scarce. Mankind appears to be unique on this planet in that he will search new and difficult areas out of sheer curiosity. Absent major conflicts and devastation on Earth, there is no driving source of inspirational conflict serving to unite the people behind a goal.

Day to day most of the world is falling into a corporate, governmental, or business slackery. We go to work, we do our jobs, we come home and we play or do more work, or sit around and vegetate. We are becoming tamed. Yes, we are taming ourselves. Therein lie the seeds of our downfall.

Tell me about it

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't even get dial up and had to wait until my neighbors had wireless to steal it.

  -- John Fuckinson

WTF?

[Stanislav_J]

It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.

Are you serious? Why in the hell should he have to -- IT'S HIS NAME. It's on his birth certificate, his Social Security card, his drivers license. It's probably in the phone book, and on every check he's ever written. And now he can't use his OWN LEGAL NAME that he has had since birth for his e-mail address because it "contains an expletive?" It's not even like he's some anarchistic goofball who somehow managed to legally change his surname to "Shit" in an attempt to be cute or radical -- it's his family name, borne by his ancestors, and it just happens to contain that four-letter sequence in the middle of the name. And, what, he can't use it because somewhere, somehow there might be some handful of insanely moralistic wackos who would be offended by it?

I'm sorry, but this is just about the most ridiculous thing I've heard of in my life. And, given what I've witnessed in my half century on this planet, that's really saying something.

Re:Obviously..

[RDW]

Good thing he didn't live in Scunthorpe.

What's in a name?

[unlametheweak]

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

- Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare

Of course that quote would have serious humour ramifications with a name like "Libshitz". Shakespeare was however cognizant of the political ramification of mere words and, alas, names. My theory that bad and stupid people primarily get into management positions has once again proven to be correct.

Re:Obviously..

[unlametheweak]

Good thing he didn't live in Dildo, Newfoundland Dildo, Newfoundland

Re:Obviously..

[MrNaz]

Good thing he didn't live here

Re:Obviously..

[srjh]

Or Fucking, Austria.

What about these names?

[KH]

Does Verizon also refuse email addresses to those who have such last names like: Takeshita, Fukuoka (common Japanese names), Dikshit (common Indian name). There must be more unfortunate names.

Sorry to say: typical American

[Teun]

Indeed a sorry preoccupation you guys in the USofA have.

Nearly any dickhead can (without serious checks on mental health etc) have guns but the moment someone has a misunderstood name it becomes a management issue.

I know many US ISP's don't allow hosting your own (mail)server at home, what would Verizon have done in case the man registered iamaturd.com (still free!) and pointed libshitz@iamaturd.com to his own server on a Verizon line?

Well at least someone finally had the good taste to not levy a fine for Janet Jackson's titty incident and now the name of Libshitz can be used on Verizon, there is hope!

Oh, and in a couple of months please go out and vote!

Re:Sorry to say: typical American

[Tony Hoyle]

Keep the people focused on the trivial and they won't notice the important stuff.

It works so well we don't realize that it's being done a lot of the time. And it's not just the US - here in the UK it's just as bad if not worse.

Ouch!

[beadfulthings]

The "National Enquirer" is a notorious scandal sheet.

The "Philadelphia Inquirer" is a respectable daily newspaper.

I just felt the need to point that out.

not the National Enquirer...

[cigaretteroutine]

Speaking of names that have bad connotations... plz fix our newspaper's name to its correct spelling of Philadelphia INquirer rather then ENquirer. (we have our many flaws here, but our newspaper is at least mildly legitimate)

Re:Obviously..

[unlametheweak]

Meh, you are redundant by perhaps a few seconds. Too bad (although I wish Moderators would double-check time-stamps before downgrading a person's Karma).

Re:the name fits here

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing inherently liberal or socialist about objecting to monopoly power. Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.

Headline/summary/article mismatch

[pedrop357]

Pointing out the obvious:
The headline and summary aren't really accurate to the linked article.

Has anyone considered the impact this sort of thing has on Slashdot's credibility?

Maybe I'm looking at it through rose colored glasses, but I used to like reading through all the summaries and linked articles on Slashdot. Now it seems like in the last 8-12 months, more and more headlines and their accompanying sumamries are deliberately misleading and inflammatory. I skim the RSS headlines and have found myself assuming that any headline that says "Microsft does X", "Comcast now doing Y", "Verizon did Z" etc. is probably off the mark and just nother boy crying wolf. It seems that I'm right about hald the time; which is about 45% more then I should be.

Most of these "inaccuracies" seem to pander to various anti-insert-company-here sentiments - ie., Verizon has been shown to have done a bunch of shady shit regarding spying or Comcast with it's throttling/filtering/P2P blocking or whatever, so now they do something stupid and it gets twisted into something much larger and more sinister.

Yes, Verizon is moronic for not allowing customer serivce people a little latitude or for having simplistic filtering, but nowhere did I read they denied DSL. They did deny an email address though. Verizon should also probably work on dealing with people-telling someone to misspell their name in order to avoid some stupid email address name filter misses the point. BUT, everything I read suggests that he would have been ok with an email address like DrHermanIL@XXX; not that he should he have to do that though.

If Slashdot's motto was something like "It's not news, it's Slashdot", I'd make a little one line post about how the headline and linked article disagree. But with a motto of "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters", I'd expect accuracy and a little less hysteria and/or pandering.

Re:Headline/summary/article mismatch

[kaos07]

Yet again the answer lies with kdawson. I'm not trying to flame, but every point you've mentioned is valid and the vast majority of cases regarding mis-information, poor headlines, shoddily edited articles and the general "Anti-company" tendencies come from kdawson.

Lately I've been playing a game with myself. I'll read Slashdot articles and try and guess who "edited" them. Strangely, the only guesses I get right are the stories posted up by kdawson.

Scunthorpe

[cliveholloway]

Coincidentally, nobody in the town of Scunthorpe has Verizon service either. Reps are apparently mystified...

Ahh memories...

[sleeponthemic]

I used to amuse myself by ordering free stuff from the internet using abusive names. It was great receiving hand written postal pickup notices for Peter Cuntbridge.. I could see the turmoil the employee had clearly suffered in writing that surname. The slight "squiggle" at the un to cloud the perception just in case ole Pete's name had been mistaken.

Jason Vomit has been receiving his victoria's secret catalogues for quite some time.

Mario Luigo Bowserpeach entered the readers digest sweepstakes. Believe it or not, he has in his possession a genuine cheque for 1 million dollars*

I guess they might want traceability in this particular instance but in general, from working in a mailing house and my exploits of immaturity I think it's pretty clear that businesses mostly have a "whatever" attitude to this sort of thing.

*This is not a real cheque.

Re:Obviously..

[hvm2hvm]

He actually posted first. Take a look at the post ID. 24454787 versus 24454791.

I had a company website blocked for the same thing

[Lord Byron II]

Back in the early days of the WWW, I was doing IT for a small business whose name was RTS Executive Services. Their phone number was 1-800-RTS-EXEC, so they wanted their website to match: www.rtsexec.com, but that lead to a "sex" in the middle of the domain name and I can't tell you the number of customers we had who couldn't access the website because the blocking software they installed on their computers to stop their kids from accessing porn had determined that our website must be porn too.

Re:Obviously..

[bhima]

I don't live all that far from Fucking. It's a tiny, tiny village and they can not afford to replace the signs that get stolen... mostly by tourists from the UK.

So when you go to fucking, please just the pictures of the Fucking Signs and do not steal the fucking signs.

Really.

You Americans and your "morals"

[Cathoderoytube]

Here's a personal story about profanity and a content company... My user name for my cable account is an expletive describing my feelings about the cable company. What's interesting though, is that apparently I'm not the only one who feels this way about the company, since 'fuckyourogers' has been taken and I've had to add numbers on the end of it.
What's even MORE interesting though have been my attempts to get technical support on my account. But during my somewhat angry registration process I didn't hit any snags where the cable company thought my username was inappropriate.

Funny how life works...

NPR

[Pancake Bandit]

This was on NPR last night. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93218205&ft=1&f=7

nom nom nominative determinism

[huwgently]

What's in a name? Ask Bobby Tables

'Swearwords' outdated

[twazzock]

The whole concept of 'swearwords', IMHO is terribly outdated anyway. As someone else mentioned above, while these select words are considered taboo, their synonyms are not. Why is it okay to say 'crap' or 'poo' and not 'shit'? They mean the exact same thing. I can only imagine it was taboo to say 'shit' in public because of what it meant, but no-one seems to care about that any more. Everyone remembers it's a taboo word, but not why.

Re:'Swearwords' outdated

[GearheadX]

It's because words such as this are derived from a 'lower' dialect of English than the English which was spoken by the nobility when the French took over England. A lot of the words we consider swear words today are words derived from the language of the peasants that no noble would be caught dead saying.

Re:'Swearwords' outdated

[jamesh]

I also find it interesting how the word 'nigger' has actually become more taboo than it was 20 or so years ago (unless you actually happen to have black skin, then you can say it all you like). Watching some old episodes of The Goodies they made reference to black South African persons as 'Nig-nogs'. They'd never get away with that these days, despite the fact that the whole episode was poking fun at the whole idea of apartheid(sp?) anyway.

Also, does anyone remember reading a book called 'The Faraway Tree' by Enid Blyton? One of the characters had the name Fanny. Recent editions of the book have had her name changed to Franny.

Funny old world isn't it?

Re:'Swearwords' outdated

[Austerity Empowers]

But if you think about it, 'nigger' is actually highly offensive and using it is likely going to brand you as a terrible person (unless you are black, in which case you are just ignorant). It's probably one of a few words my potty mouth will never use, it bothers me to type it. Pretty much any racial slur falls in to that category. They're mean spirited words intended to cause hurt. Yet there was a time when they were everyday bad words.

Shit on the other hand is just a "bad" word. Why it's bad has been lost to time. At most using it is impolite and brands the speaker as such...but that's a designation most people can tolerate.

I think all it says is today we're more sensitive to heredity than to social status. Insulting someones background is the most crude thing you can do. Perhaps in the future words like fag/queer/dyke/heshe etc. will also become taboo for the same reason. For the moment they're impolite words, best not used at work, but pretty common.

It's because the word "shit" has become LESS taboo

[dpbsmith]

Petty officialdom is no different than it has ever been. There's nothing new about bureaucrats rigidly implementing regulations and claiming that there is no way to make an exception in cases where the rules are patently inapplicable. "The computer made me do it" is just a variant on "Sir, we cannot do anything about it because of our policy."

But I don't think this would have been a problem five decades ago because the word "shit" was truly taboo... because nobody would have been willing to admit that they noticed the English-language vulgarities lurking within a name like Libshitz.

It couldn't have been done by computer, because no executive would have been willing to dictate such words in a specification that an (almost-certainly female) secretary would have to listen to, no secretary would have been willing to type them up, and, very likely, coders would have been unwilling to key them in.

Sure, in those days people might change the spelling of their surname from "Fuchs" to "Fewkes" but nobody would ever dare way why!

(Come to think of it, did Bible translations start using the phrase "gopher wood" in place of "shittim wood?")

 

Re:I had a company website blocked for the same th

[Tony Hoyle]

I can only guess what the owners of Pen Island especially if they need a therapist

Re:the name fits here

[Archtech]

Monopolies destroy the market mechanisms vital for capitalism to work.

Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work.

The markets - and capitalism - go on working all right, but not along the lines of Adam Smith's fairy-tale "hidden hand". Oh no.

Free markets go either of two ways. Either they remain entirely free and unregulated, in which case they sooner or later evolve into "robber baron" markets dominated by players like Microsoft and IBM. Or else governments step in to regulate them, in a process that soon comes to resemble the Ptolemaic system of astronomy - adjustments to adjustments to adjustments, while the whole thing becomes steadily less stable and credible.

Our current system is a compromise between raw capitalism and socialism. You can argue that it has the strengths of both, or the weaknesses of both, or both. One aspect that has recently hit the headlines is the tendency to privatise profits and nationalise losses, thus giving rich speculators a free run at even greater wealth.

Well, if you were an influential politician, what kind of friends would you have - rich ones or poor ones?

mod parent insightful

[unity100]

thats the very thing im trying to tell a lot of 'invisible hand strokes all' fairy tale conservatives here all along. this guy just put it in a VERY short and neat form.

This reminds me of Japan

[erroneus]

Are we REALLY that stupid? Apparently so!

In Japan, it's nearly impossible to order something from a restaurant if it isn't on the menu. (I say nearly, because I haven't been to every restaurant in Japan, so this only applies to EVERY SINGLE restaurant I've been to in Japan) IF, on the menu is a ham sandwich and a cheese sandwich, and you try to order a ham and cheese sandwich, they will look at you funny and/or tell you that it is not available to order this item. This example, of course is fictitious, but a real life example was at an "italian" restaurant I went to in Japan. (Most of them are pretty good, but this one was not!) I wanted spaghetti with italian sausage. Not on the menu. So I ordered spaghetti with sauce and the sausage as two items that WERE on the menu. I thought I had successfully solved the problem. Nope! Failure: The two orders came out SEPARATELY at COMPLETELY different times. It was considered an appetizer and came out first... people started eating from it and was gone before my spaghetti with sauce arrived. I didn't know how to say anything but "Dame!" which would have been very rude so I said nothing. I was defeated.

And every time I see human minds get trumped by a script or something in software, I get offended. Perhaps it's odd that I, as a "technology professional" would be offended by technology, but I am. But then again, I would consider this to be a clear misapplication of technology and I find that equally offensive. To this day, I prefer going through a checkout line run by humans rather than the 'self checkout' lines where you scan and pay for your stuff by yourself. Humans are still better than machines... for now... and only when humans aren't acting like machines.

Re:Obviously..

[thasmudyan]

I don't get it. Why don't they just sell their Fucking signs to anyone who wants one?

Re:the name fits here

[morgan_greywolf]

Unfortunately for many theories and schools of economics, it turns out that capitalism destroys the market mechanisms supposedly vital for capitalism to work

I took a class in high school called 'social justice', which was ran by a very liberal teacher who said that communism works -- but only on a small scale and only if nobody cheats.

It turns out he was right. But that goes for any theory of economics.

Capitalism, socialism, it doesn't matter what system you use. The fact is that turn out that none of the theories and schools of economics work the way that economists theorize them. In the end, there will always be those who will find out how to abuse the system and those people will abuse it.

In the end, the only way to make any system work is to punish the cheaters.

Re:Obviously..

[bhima]

It's a couple of things... one they don't want the notoriety, two they don't have store in fucking to sell the signs in, and three they aren't that interested in the whole enterprise. My suggestion of Fucking Sign vending machine was greeted with odd looks.

There was a kid from a neighboring town who wanted to sell T-Shirts but I don't think that ever got approved either.

Re:Obviously..

[srjh]

Theft isn't as much of a problem any more, they've welded the Fucking signs to the posts.

Family Guy

[plutoXL]

"Thomas Jefferson." "Here." "Benjamin Franklin." "Here." "John Footpenis." "It's John Hancock now." "Why?" "None of your damn business, that's why!"

Re:Obviously..

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with a modicum of command in English grammar should know that "fucking" is a proper name, therefore it should be capitalised.

Re:Obviously..

[morgan_greywolf]

So, what you're saying is that Fucking tourists from the UK visit and then steal the Fucking signs. Since the Fucking village is so small, they can't afford to replace the Fucking signs.

And what you're asking is, then, for the Fucking tourists to keep their Fucking hands off the Fucking signs? Sounds Fucking good to me.

Bad summary

[Spazmania]

If you actually read the article, the problem wasn't that they wouldn't let him enter his last name. The problem was that they wouldn't let him include his last name in his -login- name because it contained a four-letter word as a substring.

Why would Verizon care what you put in your username? How about the fact that when you call support, the rep will have to say what you typed in multiple times. And then a troll is going to record it and upload it to Youtube. Why should their staff be subjected to that embarrassment?

Granted in this case the call should have been passed to an engineer with the ability to edit at a level past the word filter. But that's Verizon for you: compartmentalized to hell and back.

Re:Bad summary

[Shados]

The article said it was in their email address that they couldn't use bad language. I guess its to stop people from having stuff like "suck_my_cock@verizon.com" or something. And considering what the article said further, it seemed like it was configured that way in the system and they couldn't bypass it, thus they refused it. (But further down they DO state they make exceptions, and it was a big confusion that they didn't in this case...yeah, right).

Also Experts-Exchange.com

[Airw0lf]

I was told that experts-exchange.com used to be expertsexchange.com. At the time I had a bit of a laugh and dismissed it as a good story. However, Wikipedia confirms it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_exchange#History. So in all, I reckon that must be one of the more famous examples of an embarrassing domain name.

Re:I had a company website blocked for the same th

[jez9999]

And for some reason, the New York council's www.nystopchildporn.com website seems to be attracting a very different calibre of individual than they'd planned...

Girl Scouts

[Anonymous Coward]

Either they remain entirely free and unregulated, in which case they sooner or later evolve into "robber baron" markets dominated by players like Microsoft and IBM.

See Vanderbilt, Fisk, Hariman, and other 19th century railroad tycoons. Taught Rockefeller everything he knew and they made MS and IBM look like Girl Scouts.

Oh, and thank you for pointing out how economists don't have a clue.

Hey, Fuk U Do Me!

[cbowland]

My favorite name is the Chicago Cubs player Kosuke Fukudome. MLB won't let you put "cubs suck" on official merchandize, but you can get "Fuk u do me" (minus the spaces) with no problem. Plus, his number is 1, which could be interpreted as extending the one figure salute.

Re:Innuendo

[russotto]

Is it just me, or is English communication being progressively subverted by an incoming tide of innuendo?

No, just the opposite. It used to be all innuendo. Now there's a lot more outright swearing instead. Chaucer and Shakespeare are packed with innuendo, though much of it modern audiences don't get.

As for poor Uranus, I think you can blame Stephen Spielburg (E.T.) for elevating that joke out of elementary school.

false

[bussdriver]

All markets are regulated.
The free market does not exist and idealistically never has existed.

Somebody enforces and writes the rules by which the markets run; which INCLUDES fundamental things like ownership, law enforcement, a legal system...

Even the most free markets-- the black markets are defined by law (indirectly) and how those laws are enforced.

Re:Obviously..

[sukotto]

The less you get of something, the more obsessed you become. :-)

Re:I had a company website blocked for the same th

[Dirtside]

Let's just hope they don't work in the Italian energy industry.

Clbuttic

[AlpineR]

This is a clbuttic problem with automated censorship.

How to fix democracy.

[Kaenneth]

Well, if you were an influential politician, what kind of friends would you have - rich ones or poor ones?

Well, ideally in a democracy/democratic republic, since the poor usually outnumber the rich, I could get elected by having the larger number of poor friends. Unfortunetly, the poor are influenced by money spent in ways that don't benefit them, such as on advertisments for other politicians. Poor people are kinda stupid that way.

One possible way to fix this is to allow to buying and selling of votes. It would be like the 'economic stimulus' checks being sent out, except on every election year. That way, in order for rich people to gain power, they give money to the people, instead of other rich people. Voters have power (votes), they should be able to trade that for another form of power (money). Not being able to do so is an undo restriction on their freedom.

Each persons vote could be a source of income for them, potentially eliminating voter apathy. You could give each voter a difficult to counterfeit slip of paper simply verifying that they did vote, and they could take it around to the party offices and get paid and stamped/hole punched (so they can't take it to both parties!). The slip would NOT record their actual vote, simply the fact that they participated; that they voted a particular way is on their honor.

To keep everyone from voting one way, then claiming money from the other party, the partys could have an offer where they only pay if they won. So that they are essentially bidding on the districts block of votes, and should have enough money (perhaps in escrow) to pay for a landslide victory.

This would solve all problems with democracy. A campaign promise you can literally take to the bank.

Re:How to fix democracy.

[WNight]

I'd much rather have a gallows we could drag people to for breaking their campaign promises.

Re:the name fits here

[arth1]

In the end, the only way to make any system work is to punish the cheaters.

I agreed with your entire post, until this line at the end.
You are assuming a correlation that just isn't there.
To get a system to work, you want to reduce crime, and contrary to right wing beliefs, being hard on criminals doesn't deter people noticeably. Making easier available alternatives to crime works. Having meaningful rehabilitation of criminals works to prevent recidivism. But punishment doesn't really help -- it only causes criminals to go to greater lengths not to be caught.

Common sense is thoroughly misnamed.

[Tumbleweed]

It has everything to do with the EMAIL ADDRESS he apparently wasn't willing to change. They wouldn't grant him the address he requested. All he had to do was pick another email address and he would have been fine. I'm sorry, but you are not entitled to any email address you want.

1) He was already using his name in his email address for his dial-up connection. Keeping the same email username and merely switching domains is a good way to help your friends & family remember your email address. User-centered design. Look it up.

2) It's his fucking NAME, dipshit! All Verizon had to do was verify that's the name on his credit card, so they knew it really was his name. Unless the email username they want conflicts with formatting requirements or with another user already using it, yeah, you really ARE entitled to any email address you want when it's your name. You have the letter X (three times!) in your username; you're clearly talking about XXX porn, so we should refuse you the username you want. This is just as smart an idea as that.

Re:the name fits here

[arth1]

On the other hand, we really do have nasty socio and psychopaths behind bars. These people literally feed off the misery of others. It's as though a portion of their brain matter is missing that causes them to act like animals (violent rape, murder, serial killing...etc). For these individuals, nothing short of them being executed will change a damn thing. But as a compassionate society, we at *least* keep them behind bars. Exactly where they should stay...

Indeed, but then it's not punishment that is doing something good, but separation.

Punishment's only purpose is slaking people's thirst for vengeance. A harsher punishment doesn't reduce the amount of crime -- that's a false belief. If anything, it causes criminals to take more desperate measures not to get caught. If prison is a horrible place, people will do more to stay out of it, up to and including arson or killing witnesses or police. But not including staying lawful. Getting caught is something that happens to others, not oneself.