Category: Sign of the Apocalypse

Uh-oh. And I quote:

“Security researchers have discovered a new type of rootkit they believe will greatly increase the difficulty of detecting and removing malicious code.

“The rootkit in question, called Backdoor.Rustock.A by Symantec and Mailbot.AZ by F-Secure, uses advanced techniques to avoid detection by most rootkit detectors.

“The rootkit is “unique given the techniques it uses,” Symantec’s Elia Florio wrote in a recent analysis. “It can be considered the first-born of the next generation of rootkits.”

“Rustock.A uses a mixture of old techniques and new ideas to make it “totally invisible on a compromised computer when installed,” including a beta version of Windows Vista, Florio wrote.”

[via CIO Tech Informer]

Those impetuous scamps at the US Patent Office have done it again, awarding Friendster a patent on social networking methods. From a piece on Beta News:

“Called ‘A System, Method and Apparatus for Connecting Users in an Online Computer System Based on Their Relationships within Social Networks,’ the patent seems to give the site the rights to methods used to describe degrees of separation between users.

“According to Friendster, the patent covers methods to calculate and display this separation, as well as providing a way for the user to act upon it. It claims that the invention spurred the uptick now occurring in the social networking industry.”

Does this make “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” prior art?

On the heels of last week’s Comcast customer service (and public relations) debacle, the Sunday NYTimes had another “fun” tale about AOL. A guy called to cancel his service and got a badgering from the CS rep worthy of a cult recruiter. Luckily, the customer made a recording of it and posted it on the Web. The MP3 page got hosed after the Times piece and a Digg item, but it’s been mirrored here.

After the Comcast story, I was talking to a friend on the phone and we were sharing harrowing customer service stories. I was saying that crappy customer service has become so pandemic, we need to figure out a way of using the leverage of the Web to fight back. This is how we can do it — use audio and video recording of our CS experiences and post them to the Net. You know how we always have to listen to that recording on THEIR end telling us that the call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance, I want to make a similar recording on MY end and I want to start recording the calls to Comcast, Verizon, Carefirst and some of the other companies that I’ve had frequent troubles with. If lots of us did this, I bet things would change pretty damn quick, don’t you?

Thanks, Kate!

One of the error message dialog boxes we had in the Beyond Cyberpunk! HyperCard stack offered the user two choices: “Obey” or “Comply.” A lot of people got a kick out of this and it was mentioned in several reviews. In the context, there really only was one choice, so it worked as a joke, not as a painful interface conundrum.

The same cannot be said of one of Windows XP’s worst user-surly interface annoyances (and there are PLENTY of them in XP). Does this look familiar:

Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?

[ ] Restart Now [ ] Restart Later

If you don’t want to stop what you’re doing to restart and you select Restart Later, it’ll ask you again every ten minutes until you restart. Total pain. Well, there is a fix. Daniel Turini posted this how-to tip on The Code Project.

Well, you knew it was going to happen. Comcast has fired the cable guy who was caught on camera sleeping on the job. They fired him for delivering an “unsatisfactory customer experience.” Way to miss the point, Comcast! Sure, sleeping on the job is not the best way to instill confidence in your company’s service mojo, but he was put on hold with the home office for “over an hour” (according to the customer). What was he supposed to do while he waited for his own tech support, make balloon animals? I certainly know that I’ve been known to nod off while waiting on endless hold for you guys to talk to ME.

If you think that firing him is going to make people stop bitching on all the blogs and boards about how universally deficient your customer service is, you’re wrong, it’s only likely to increase the perception that Comcast is about as far from “Comcastic” as that coinage is from a corporate slogan that doesn’t make us want to drive a sharp No. 2 into our frontal lobes.

Give the guy a slap on the wrist, his job back, and do the honest heavy lifting that’s required to create a TRUE “satisfactory customer experience.” That starts with knowing where the problems actually are. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

Okay, so we here at The Labs were all down with the terminally hip Mimobots. As far as the whole USB pets, and iPod character cases, and MP3 robots go, these things are pretty bitchin’. But then they had to go ruin it with a Hoodie accessory (US$10), which instantly got itself tossed into our “Make it STOP! The Cutesy-Puke” file. The hoodie does add a keychain, which is a plus.

This adorable viral video is such a hoot (LOVE the Eels soundtrack). It shows a Comcast tech who’d come to a guy’s house to replace a cable modem and then fell asleep on the couch after being on hold for over an hour with the home office. As the vid puts it:

Thanks Comcast for:

Two Broken Routers
Four Hour Appointment Blocks
Weeklong Internet Outages
Long Hold Times
High Prices
Three Missed Appointments
Promising to Call Back and Then Not Calling
Thanks for Everything

The sad thing is that, the cable guy probably got fired for sleeping on the job (and embarrassing Comcast), while their customer service will likely do nothing to change as a result.

[Via Boing Boing]

Gawd, and here I thought geeks were supposed to be smarter than everybody else. According to a piece on CNN, a group of techies — software engineers, IT types, etc, get together twice a month in Menlo Park and beat the rivets out of each other:

“Kicking, punching and swinging every household object imaginable — from frying pans and tennis rackets to pillowcases stuffed with soda cans — they beat each other mercilessly in a garage in this bedroom community south of San Francisco. Then, bloodied and bruised, they limp back to their desks in the morning.”

WTF!? Listen up, my pencil-necked brothers, that high dome of yours just doesn’t have the same hit points as a meat head. That’s why he carries the battle axe, chain mace, and wears the big furry boots, and you wear a shiny mu-mu and a pointy hat and cast spells. Are we clear now?

Thanks, JT!

I might think this was an April Fool’s, if we weren’t halfway through May. A British company name Communic8 is hawking the BabyMo, a mobile phone for toddlers. And we’re not talking about a Fisher-Price special that makes cute little ring-a-ding sounds while junior drools into the handset. We’re talking about a working, pay-per-minute, “let’s do Vienna sausage and strained peas for lunch” mobile phone. It can be programmed with five numbers and those numbered are dialed by the three buttons on the phone. This looks to be a basic repackaging of a phone for kids that showed up in the UK several years ago, but went ‘bye-bye” in the wake of phone radiation hysteria. Wouldn’t want the little tykes to scramble their eggs while tooling around on the Big Wheel. After all, that’s what TV is for.

Gabriella Papic has a hysterical piece on Salon about the Core Duo MacBook Pro and how that’s “core” as in nuclear core, molten lava core, hard-core HOT. She writes:

“At first, I thought those guys at Apple were geniuses for making the built-in DVD burner smell like my favorite low-carb treat. Then I felt a stinging in my thigh muscles, although stinging isn’t quite the word I’m looking for to describe the burning sensation. It was more of a scalding, or a scorching, that felt worse than a rug burn but not as bad as, let’s say, reentry heat.”

Trying to determine if anything is wrong, she consults the User’s Guide and finds this statement:

“Do not leave the bottom of your MacBook Pro in contact with your lap or any surface of your body for extended periods. Prolonged contact with your body could cause discomfort and potentially a burn.”

So, it’s a laptop that can’t go near your lap, or any other part of your body.

Thanks, Kate!