There ARE settings for that. Actually their settings seem to change over time -- probably a marketing thing...
Right now there seems to be only one such setting, under "Portfolio & Accounts" -> "My Profile" -> "News and Benefits". A year ago they had another one (for partners IIRC). I had to disable two such options and have never sent any email to an unsubscription address.
You may want to be more careful before calling someone a liar next time...
I have been a long time AmeriTrade customer and, like the author, used a unique email address for my AmeriTrade account. I never received any spam on that email address until a few weeks after the TD Waterhouse merger last year. Suddenly I started getting tons of pump&dump spam on that address.
Checking the "privacy" settings in my account revealed that somehow my account had been changed from "opt-out everything" to "opt-in everything" -- certainly not by me. I changed everything back to opt-out, assigned a new email address and have not received any spam on that new address since then. The old email address keeps getting spam, so I am hard-filtering it on my SMTP server now.
To me it looks like the TD Waterhouse merger triggered a change in their privacy policy or account handling that caused "opt-in" to be set on at least some accounts.
Don't blame that poor AACS-LA spokesperson. He is just doing what he is required to do, i.e. claim that AACS "has not been broken", is "very robust" and that they will "vigourously fight" those oh-so-evil hackers who distribute keys. If he did not do that then he might jeopardize their future chances in DMCA litigation, and movie companies would sue AACS-LA into oblivion. If he admitted the obvious, that AACS simply cannot effectively protect content then the movie companies would jump ship and he would lose his job. I petty that guy, really. He is in a no-win situation.
The real issue here is if movie companies will learn from this. Let's see... first they spent millions of dollars to finance the development of AACS and have it peer-reviewed, then they held back their movies past the optimum release date to wait until AACS is "ready" (whatever that means -- bus encryption still did not make it into the standard, so volume IDs are transfered in the clear -- ROTFL). Then they spent lots more money on buying new software, training their staff how to use AACS and on following AACS procedures (content-signing by AACS-LA etc.), next there were the inevitable DRM-related compatibility problems leading to recalls and bad press. Shortly afterwards (and long before HD ever reached critical mass in the market) AACS was broken. Now they are holding back movie releases yet again, hoping for some magic AACS fix, and in the case of Blu-ray hoping for BD+ to magically solve all problems. Exactly how much money did they spend on all of that, how much revenue did they lose by delaying releases while waiting for DRM, and how many movies could they have produced with that money instead ?
The funny thing is that they made all those bad decisions after they had already been burned by the DVD DeCSS fiasco, and after industry experts had predicted that exactly this would happen again. Bruce Schneier's May 2001 CryptoGram article should have been required reading for all of them http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0105.html#3. I wonder just how long it will take for them to learn. From what I have seen so far I fully expect the next round of AACS to be broken within one day, and BD+, once it is used, within one week, and no "technical measures" or take-down threats by AACS-LA will be able to stop that.
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There ARE settings for that. Actually their settings seem to change over time -- probably a marketing thing...
Right now there seems to be only one such setting, under "Portfolio & Accounts" -> "My Profile" -> "News and Benefits". A year ago they had another one (for partners IIRC). I had to disable two such options and have never sent any email to an unsubscription address.
You may want to be more careful before calling someone a liar next time...
I have been a long time AmeriTrade customer and, like the author, used a unique email address for my AmeriTrade account. I never received any spam on that email address until a few weeks after the TD Waterhouse merger last year. Suddenly I started getting tons of pump&dump spam on that address.
Checking the "privacy" settings in my account revealed that somehow my account had been changed from "opt-out everything" to "opt-in everything" -- certainly not by me. I changed everything back to opt-out, assigned a new email address and have not received any spam on that new address since then. The old email address keeps getting spam, so I am hard-filtering it on my SMTP server now.
To me it looks like the TD Waterhouse merger triggered a change in their privacy policy or account handling that caused "opt-in" to be set on at least some accounts.
Don't blame that poor AACS-LA spokesperson. He is just doing what he is required to do, i.e. claim that AACS "has not been broken", is "very robust" and that they will "vigourously fight" those oh-so-evil hackers who distribute keys. If he did not do that then he might jeopardize their future chances in DMCA litigation, and movie companies would sue AACS-LA into oblivion. If he admitted the obvious, that AACS simply cannot effectively protect content then the movie companies would jump ship and he would lose his job. I petty that guy, really. He is in a no-win situation.
The real issue here is if movie companies will learn from this. Let's see... first they spent millions of dollars to finance the development of AACS and have it peer-reviewed, then they held back their movies past the optimum release date to wait until AACS is "ready" (whatever that means -- bus encryption still did not make it into the standard, so volume IDs are transfered in the clear -- ROTFL). Then they spent lots more money on buying new software, training their staff how to use AACS and on following AACS procedures (content-signing by AACS-LA etc.), next there were the inevitable DRM-related compatibility problems leading to recalls and bad press. Shortly afterwards (and long before HD ever reached critical mass in the market) AACS was broken. Now they are holding back movie releases yet again, hoping for some magic AACS fix, and in the case of Blu-ray hoping for BD+ to magically solve all problems. Exactly how much money did they spend on all of that, how much revenue did they lose by delaying releases while waiting for DRM, and how many movies could they have produced with that money instead ?
The funny thing is that they made all those bad decisions after they had already been burned by the DVD DeCSS fiasco, and after industry experts had predicted that exactly this would happen again. Bruce Schneier's May 2001 CryptoGram article should have been required reading for all of them http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0105.html#3. I wonder just how long it will take for them to learn. From what I have seen so far I fully expect the next round of AACS to be broken within one day, and BD+, once it is used, within one week, and no "technical measures" or take-down threats by AACS-LA will be able to stop that.