Category: Business

Cable Company F%$#ery

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South Park got it right

HBO Go is a service that allows subscribers to the HBO channel to view content on PCs, tablets, and other devices.

The kicker is that for now, though I expect this to change as it renegotiates contracts, in order to use this service, you need to have your cable/fiber company certify that you are an HBO subscriber in order to get the service.

Guess what? Comcast, the most loathed company in America, is refusing to provide this information for its subscribers:

One of the more dubious Comcast practices brought up by opponents of Comcast’s planned $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable is the cable giant’s sluggish refusal to support certain internet video services and platforms running over its broadband network. Case in point is the HBO Go app on Roku, which Comcast hasn’t supported since around 2011 or so for no coherent reason. To get the app to work, it needs to simply authenticate with the cable provider to prove you are a cable subscriber (since, at least until next year, there’s no HBO Go standalone option).

Much smaller cable companies haven’t had a problem in getting this to work, but Comcast, with its limited resources, somehow just can’t seem to spend the time. Roku’s neutrality filing with the FCC expressed concern that cable authentication systems could be used as yet another way gatekeepers could extract tolls from streaming services. As we noted when Comcast similarly refused to support HBO Go on the Playstation 3, the company — when it can be bothered to comment on the issue at all — usually trots out the excuse that getting this stuff to work is well, gosh — time consuming:

“With every new website, device or player we authenticate, we need to work through technical integration and customer service which takes time and resources. Moving forward, we will continue to prioritize as we partner with various players.”

It certainly does appear to be a case of priorities. With Comcast looking to eliminate any and all justifications to reject its merger, the company this week announced its network would finally support HBO Go on Roku — some three years later. It couldn’t possibly be that Comcast intentionally stalled on supporting HBO Go on the country’s best-selling third-party streaming device because it wants to keep customers contained within the Comcast set top ecosystem and away from other options, could it?

I really think that if a politician of either party were to say that his goal would to make Comcast, “Squeal like a pig,” he would be elected President.

But we still have politicians going to their knees to “service” the cable giants.

And Just to Prove that there is No Event that Uber Won’t Use an Excuse for Price Gouging………

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The internet based limo service jacked up its rates in Sydney in response to the hostage crisis there:

Uber briefly charged its users in downtown Sydney a minimum $100 to escape an armed hostage crisis, a result of automatic surge pricing meant to get more drivers online.

An executive in the city’s Central Business District (CBD) sent Mashable screenshots of the Uber app that showed the company was charging up to four-times the normal rate because “demand is off the charts.”

“I have never, ever seen it at four-times [the normal rate] and I’m a 1% top Uber user,” said Matthew Leung, the user in contact with Mashable. “I understand the way the business works — higher the demand, higher the charge — but four-times at $100 minimum is ridiculous. Almost price gouging at its worst.”

Another customer shared a screenshot of their “wack” fare estimate that showed a trip from an area just blocks from the siege to the airport would cost $145-185. That journey would normally cost less than $100, according to Uber’s website. “This is price surging,” he wrote in a comment to Mashable.

After Mashable published a story on the price hikes, the company reversed course and announced that all riders in the area would be free, and that anybody who had been charged the higher amount would be refunded.

I can hear Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, saying, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”

Seriously,  Uber, and its Ayn Rand worshiping CEO are simply too evil to trust with your money.

F%$# Uber, Part Infinity

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We now have a report of a person who had a job interview with Uber, and was granted the ability to view the complete travel history of any Uber Customer:

………

Now add that all this location data was not held by a battle-hardened company with tons of lawyers and security experts, such as Google. Instead, this data was held by a start-up that was growing with viral exuberance – and with so few privacy protections that it created a “God View” to display the movements of riders in real-time and at least once projected such information on a screen for entertainment at a company party.

And let’s not forget that individual employees could access historical data on the movements of particular people without their permission, as an Uber executive in New York City reportedly did when he pulled the travel records of a Buzzfeed reporter who was working on a story about the company.

………

Then there are the personal travels of government officials and their families. A person who had a job interview in Uber’s Washington office in 2013 said he got the kind of access enjoyed by actual employees for an entire day, even for several hours after the job interview ended. He happily crawled through the database looking up the records of people he knew – including a family member of a prominent politician – before the seemingly magical power disappeared.

“What an Uber employee would have is everything, complete,” said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the company.

I can see how the employee would fear retribution.

The CEO is an Ayn Rand loving sociopath, and he, almost any employee at the central office, or an enterprising hacker, can pull up your travel history.

How do you know that some tabloid reporter doesn’t have an Uber employee on their payroll?

Do Not Do Business with Psychopaths, Even if They Appear to be Hip and Edgy

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A CURRENT senior executive at Uber suggested opposition research against unfriendly journalists, including going after their families:

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

Michael, who has been at Uber for more than a year as its senior vice president of business, floated the idea at a dinner Friday at Manhattan’s Waverly Inn attended by an influential New York crowd including actor Ed Norton and publisher Arianna Huffington. The dinner was hosted by Ian Osborne, a former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and consultant to the company. At the dinner, Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick, boyish with tousled graying hair and a sweater, made the case that he has been miscast as an ideologue and as insensitive to driver and rider complaints, while in fact he has largely had his head down building a transformative company that has beat his own and others’ wildest expectations.

A BuzzFeed editor was invited to the dinner by the journalist Michael Wolff, who later said that he had failed to communicate that the gathering would be off the record; neither Kalanick, his communications director, nor any other Uber official suggested to BuzzFeed News that the event was off the record.

………

Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.

………

Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

Michael at no point suggested that Uber has actually hired opposition researchers, or that it plans to. He cast it as something that would make sense, that the company would be justified in doing.

In a statement through an Uber spokeswoman, Michael said: “The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them.”

………

[Uber Spokesman Nairi] Hourdajian also said that Uber has clear policies against executives looking at journalists’ travel logs, a rich source of personal information in Uber’s possession.

………

At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber.

Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”

(emphasis mine)

He said, “Nobody would know that it was us.”

Yeah, no threat there.

Wanna trust that guy?

The Uber spokesman admits that they have logs of your personal travel that they could use against you, but they double pinky swear that they won’t, even though they could.

Particularly when this still employed at Uber senior executive said that he, Prove a particular and very specific claim,” about the personal life of Uber foe Sarah Lacy?

Gee, I wonder where he got that bit of information.

Wanna trust this company with your data about your comings and goings?

I think not.

A journalist is reporting on unflattering stories, and is further opining that the company and its senior executives are unethical in their business practices, and Uber wants to go after her family.

If Uber wanted to go through her professional behavior with a fine tooth comb, I would agree that it’s fair game, albeit a bit petty.

If she goes after your business ethics and competence, and you go after her business ethics competence.

You don;’t go after her family.

FWIW, Ms. Lacy has penned a blistering response, one which seems to imply that whatever Mr. Michael thinks he has, it’s not about her, but it’s about her family.

Do not give these motherf%$#ers your money.

Do not give these motherf%$#ers your personal information.

Do not give these motherf%$#ers your attention.

Delete the f%$#ing app from your phone.

Seriously.

Well, This is Just Ducky

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It appears that some ISPs are stripping the encryption out of their user’s email, even when connecting to outside servers:

Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco’s PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.

This type of STARTTLS stripping attack has mostly gone unnoticed because it tends to be applied to residential networks, where it is uncommon to run an email server2. STARTTLS was also relatively uncommon until late 2013, when EFF started rating companies on whether they used it. Since then, many of the biggest email providers implemented STARTTLS to protect their customers. We continue to strongly encourage all providers to implement STARTTLS for both outbound and inbound email. Google’s Safer email transparency report and starttls.info are good resources for checking whether a particular provider does.

STARTTLS is not a particularly strong, but it does filter out metadata like addresses and subjects.

What was (when discovered, the ISP in question, AIO Wireless, stopped doing this) is all about is an attempt to resell user data, or serve ads to the users.

As the good folks at Golden Frog observe:

Neither the old or the new proposed Internet rules being debated by the FCC would stop wireless providers from blocking encryption technologies. That is very frustrating and one of the key points in our FCC filing. The FCC is a government organization and tasked with protecting national security when it comes to electronic communications. They are part of the same government that surveils its citizens. It’s not unreasonable to think they are getting pressure to curtail encryption.

 Furthermore, ISPs have incentive to block privacy technologies like VPNs. They want to profit as much as possible from the way you use the Internet. Privacy services that are independent of their offerings don’t allow them to do that. If they aren’t selling the service to you, they aren’t making money and that frustrates them. However, when they are blocking privacy services, they are dangerously putting businesses’ confidential communications and individual customers’ privacy at risk.

 We strongly believe that the same Open Access rules that should apply to wired Internet providers should also apply to mobile Internet providers, especially considering this specific encryption-related incident that affects online privacy.

Unfettered free market capitalism ……… Gotta love it.

H/T naked capitalism.

I Guess You Cannot Buy an Election if You Blow Up the Town ……… Twice Thrice

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Richmond, California, whose town is dominated by a Chevron oil refinery, had local elections, and Chevron’s dumping $3 million into the race netted them nothing:

Richmond voters handed Chevron a resounding rejection in Tuesday’s election, defeating all four candidates supported by the oil giant despite Chevron outspending its opponents by a 20-to-1 margin.

Voters elected City Councilman Tom Butt as mayor and outgoing mayor Gayle McLaughlin, incumbent Jovanka Beckles and retired teacher Eduardo Martinez to the City Council, giving the panel a potential 6-1 left-leaning majority.

“It’s extraordinary. This is a celebration of democracy,” said San Francisco State political science Professor Robert Smith, who studies Richmond politics. “This means that big money doesn’t always win, that ordinary people can defeat huge corporate power.”

Chevron spent more than $3 million supporting Charles Ramsey, Donna Powers and Albert Martinez for council, and longtime Councilman Nat Bates for mayor. Butt won with 51.4 percent of the votes, with Bates trailing at 35.5 percent.

Seeing as how that refinery has had fires and explosions in 1989, 1999, and 2012, (along with a long history of toxic emissions, and litigation over taxes, which Chevron lost) and the fact that the Richmond City Council was working on a lawsuit over the last fire, it’s pretty clear what this massive dump of election cash was about getting a “friendly” city council.

Unfortunately, I cannot see how this could be applied more general.

I Have to Give an A for Inventiveness

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The European Union has classified spyware as a restricted item requiring an export license, much like weapons:

Companies which make spyware will have to apply for permission to export the software once new EU regulations come into effect in late December.

Officially referred to as “intrusion software”, the software will now be included on the EU’s list of “dual use” items, defined as “goods, software and technology normally used for civilian purposes but which might have military applications or contribute to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

The restriction means that companies will have to apply for a licence to export spyware, although it doesn’t affect the sale of the software within the UK. Inclusion on the dual-use list places the technology alongside nuclear reactors, ultra-high-resolution cameras, and rocket fuel.

While the regulation is implemented by the European commission, the British government supports the restriction of spyware. “The UK has made it clear over the last two years that we believe that while these kind of technologies do have legitimate uses, they also pose threats to national security and to human rights and should be subject to export controls,” said a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Hopefully, this the export of such software to repressive regimes, as FinFisher did with its FinFish spyware, which it probably exported to Egypt, Bahrain, Ethiopia, etc.

Additionally, I hope that it will serve to also restrict the use of such programs by commercial entities.

Things like tracking cookies, and Verizon’s new “super cookies”, should be included in this category.

I Think that This is an Indication that Glenn Greenwald’s New Employer is Circling the Drain

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First, Matt Taibbi has left First Look:

Matt Taibbi, the star magazine writer hired earlier this year to start a satirical website for billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, is on a leave of absence from the company after disagreements with higher-ups inside Omidyar’s organization, a source close to First Look confirmed today. (UPDATE: Taibbi has left the company. See statement below.)

Taibbi’s abrupt disappearance from the company’s Fifth Avenue headquarters has cast doubt on the fate of his highly anticipated digital publication, reportedly to be called Racket, which First Look executives had previously said would launch sometime this autumn.
………
UPDATE:  Omidyar announced on Tuesday night that Taibbi has left the company. Here’s the full statement posted on FirstLook.org:

I regret to announce that after several weeks of discussions, Matt Taibbi has left First Look. We wish him well.

Our differences were never about editorial independence. We have never wavered from our pledge that journalistic content is for the journalists to decide, period.

 We’re disappointed by how things have turned out. I was excited by Matt’s editorial vision and hoped to help him bring it to fruition. Now we turn our focus to exploring next steps for the talented team that has worked to create Matt’s publication.

I remain an enthusiastic supporter of the kind of independent journalism found at The Intercept and the site we were preparing to launch. As a startup, we’ll take what we’ve learned in the last several months and apply it to our efforts in the future.

Above all, we remain committed to our team and to the First Look mission.

The word for Mr. Omidyar’s claim about it not being editorial independence is best described as a lie.

When this enterprise was announced, Taibbi noted in interviews it would be “focusing on financial and political corruption,” while Omidyar described it as, “A new digital magazine with a satirical approach to American politics and culture.”

These are not the same things, and Taibbi’s understanding was that he would be going after people who are very much like Pierre Omidyar friends and business associates.

There is also the issue of Marcy Wheeler’s brief tenure with First Look, which appeared to be caused by her writing about entities linked to Pierre Omidyar being linked to the coup in the Ukraine. (Though Wheeler denies that this the proximate cause of her exit.)

When all this is juxtaposed along with Omidyar’s own statements about how First Look was moving from news organization to news platform, (think eBay for journalists) will leave him with very little in the way of a news organization:

I mean, I get it. Editorial is expensive. Christ, it’s so expensive… But it gets worse: Not only is editorial expensive, but nobody wants to pay for it. Readers, we’re told, don’t want to pay for it (I’ll deal with that bullshit another time). And investors certainly don’t want to pay for it… No investor of sound mind thinks he or she will make money from a magazine, any more than they think investing in restaurants or airlines is a smart move.

A platform, on the other hand… well, that’s the answer to everything. Noone ever went broke building a platform. For one thing, a platform doesn’t need to commission editorial: some other sap takes care of that — either clients (Atavist, Punch!) or Joe User (GOOD magazine).

First Look is not going to mature into an internet news org like Pro Publica,  Talking Points Memo, or Pando, and I expect to see further staff defections in the not too distant future.

This is a Huge and Well Deserved F%$# You to the CIA and the NSA

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It’s well deserved too.

You see the Federal Trade (FTC) commission has hired hired Ashkan Soltan as their new Chief Technical Officer.

The reason that this is a giant f%$# you to the US state security apparatus is because (wait for it) he helped the Washington Post do its news stories on the Snowden affair:

The Federal Trade Commission has hired privacy and technology expert Ashkan Soltani to serve as the commission’s chief technology officer. But security experts and former senior U.S. intelligence officials are questioning the FTC’s decision, given Soltani’s very public role as a consultant for The Washington Post, where he co-authored multiple articles based on classified documents stolen from the National Security Agency by former contractor Edward Snowden.

 The FTC said in a press release that Soltani will join FTC in November and will replace Latanya Sweeney, who is returning to Harvard University, where she founded and directs the school’s Data Privacy Lab. His job will be to advise the commission on evolving technology and policy issues, a role similar to one he held previously at the FTC before leaving government to become an independent consultant.

Needless to say, Michael Hayden and His Evil Minions™ heads are exploding:

The news has elicited wails from NSA’s mail mouthpieces, Stewart Baker and Michael Hayden.

“I’m not trying to demonize this fella, but he’s been working through criminally exposed documents and making decisions about making those documents public,” said Michael Hayden, a former NSA director who also served as CIA director from 2006 to 2009. In a telephone interview with FedScoop, Hayden said he wasn’t surprised by the lack of concern about Soltani’s participation in the Post’s Snowden stories. “I have no good answer for that.”

[snip]

Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel, said, while he’s not familiar with the role Soltani would play at the FTC, there are still problems with his appointment. “I don’t think anyone who justified or exploited Snowden’s breach of confidentiality obligations should be trusted to serve in government,” Baker said.


I find Hayden’s wails especially disgusting, given the way — it is now clear — the government spent so much effort covering up how he extended the illegal wiretap program in March 2004. I mean, I’m not trying to demonize the fella, but he’s a criminal, and yet he’s complaining about the press reporting on abuses?

………

At FTC, Soltani will be in a role where he can directly influence the kind of regulatory pressure placed on data collectors to protect user privacy. He understands — probably far more than we know from the WaPo stories — how NSA is capitalizing on already collected data. Which means he may be able to influence how much remains available to the spooks.

I do not expect Soltani to actually get the job.

It’s clear that Obama is very much in the pocket of the US state security apparatus, and he will find a way to stop this.

But still, it is very well deserved push-back against the what can only be described as the forces of evil in America’s shadow government.

This is the Best Idea that I have Heard all Day

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The canvassing board in Michigan has just certified the language for a petition to prevent hospitals to overcharge the uninsured:

The Board of State Canvassers on Monday unanimously approved the form a statewide ballot initiative petition that aims to prohibit a health care provider from charging a higher price to some for medical goods or services.

A group called Stop Overcharging is backing the “citizen initiated” legislation, which would limit a hospital or provider to charging somebody any more than 150 percent of the lowest amount the provider had accepted as payment in full.

The example they give is if somebody was charged $2,000 for an MRI but the provider accepted $600 as payment in full, the provider couldn’t force an uninsured person or auto accident victim to pay more than $900.

It’s something that has come up in the discussion of no-fault reforms. The petition is designed to incite action from the state legislature on that topic.

“We would hope that they would, we would wish that they would, but we’re preparing if they wouldn’t,” said Rocky Raczkowski, a former state lawmaker who is heading up the petition drive.

………

The Board of State Canvassers unanimously approved the petition as to form, meaning it meets state guidelines and can be circulated.

The group can start collecting signatures after the Nov. 4 election, and Raczkowski said they plan to move quickly. Asked if paid circulators would be circulating the petitions, he said the group was still examining its options.

There is some political baggage along with this, it seems to be associated with insurance “Reforms” that favor the auto insurance industry, but the idea that part of the healthcare delivery problem in the USA is the price of healthcare appears to be gaining currency, and this is a good thing.

The idea that, for example, the cost of an identical service can vary by over an order of magnitude at the same hospital in the is much, if not most of the problem here.

The New York Times revealed something very similar recently, when it discovered that many hospitals employed ER physicians who were out of network, who then price gouged patients, since they were not covered by any agreement with insurance carriers:

When Jennifer Hopper raced to the emergency room after her husband, Craig, took a baseball in the face, she made sure they went to a hospital in their insurance network in Texas. So when they got a $937 bill from the emergency room doctor, she called the insurer, assuming it was in error.

But the bill was correct: UnitedHealthcare, the insurance company, had paid its customary fee of $151.02 and expected the Hoppers to pay the remaining $785.98, because the doctor at Seton Northwest Hospital in Austin did not participate in their network.

“It never occurred to me that the first line of defense, the person you have to see in an in-network emergency room, could be out of the network,” said Ms. Hopper, who has spent months fighting the bill. “In-network means we just get the building? I thought the doctor came with the E.R.”

Patients have no choice about which physician they see when they go to an emergency room, even if they have the presence of mind to visit a hospital that is in their insurance network. In the piles of forms that patients sign in those chaotic first moments is often an acknowledgment that they understand some providers may be out of network.

Note that this sort of shenanigans is why ER doctors income has gone up in recent years.

ER’s are going Wall Street, and the only people who win in this game are the worst among us.

The Universal Nature of Humanity*

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I can think of nothing that unites us more than the fact that even the Dalai Lama is pissed off about telemarketers:

Tibet’s spiritual leader has delivered an extraordinary rant about the things that do his head in.

The Dalai Lama’s rare display of belligerent human frailty occurred in London, during an acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize for ‘affirming life’s spiritual dimension’.

He said: “I am not a special person. I spend my days mostly in quiet contemplation.

“It is during these moments, when I am tantalisingly close to nirvana, that the phone always rings.

“‘Hello,’ says the voice on the line, ‘can I speak to Mr D Lama?’

“‘He’s not in,’ I always reply, because it is fine to lie in these situations, ‘and if he was he wouldn’t be interested.’

“Then they go, ‘surely he’d be interested on saving 25% on his monthly heating bills with double glazing’. For Zen’s sake!

Now, everyone link hands, and start singing, All we are saying, is telemarketers suck.

*Yes. I know. It’s a parody site, and this is fake news, but it really should be real.  After all, who amongst us does not hate phone sales calls?

People I Never Expected to Cite, Better Business Bureau Edition

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Generally, I find the BBB to be kind of useless.

There is an inherent conflict because the organization rates its dues paying members, and there have been repeated instances where being a dues paying members have been cut slack by virtue of this status.

Still, I have to note that the BBB just gave the Uber car service an “F”:

Uber, the smartphone-based hail-a-ride service, often claims it is cheaper than a ride in a taxi. It looks as if some Uber customers do not agree.

The company received an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau on Thursday, the lowest possible rating given by the organization.

The grade is based on, among other criteria, more than 90 Uber customer complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau over the last three years, most of them centering on Uber’s so-called surge pricing.

Customers still feel misinformed about how they are charged for their rides, according to complaints at the bureau’s website, and say they are not able to receive adequate customer service when they try to complain about their fares.

With its surge pricing, Uber’s temporarily increases fare prices anywhere from one and a half to 10 times the normal cost of taking an Uber ride, based on the demand for drivers. When many people in a particular area request Uber at the same time, for example, the price of rides in that area goes up.

“I never knew about surcharges until after the fact and was unaware, confused and uninformed,” one customer wrote on the bureau’s site.

Uber has a long, tricky history of its surge pricing. When Manhattan was hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, for example, many people complained that Uber was using a natural disaster to price gouge its customers.

Yes, it is price gouging, and yes, Uber’s structure and behavior, as well as the Objectivist statements of it founder, indicates that it has a contempt for both its employees contractors and its customers.

Not surprising.  Much of the philosophical underpinning of Objectivism blaming the victim.

Muck Farvel!

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Marvel Comics is cancelling the Fantastic Four comic book, largely because Marvel Studios does not have the movie rights, having sold them to Fox during their broke as hell days:

That, as a result of Disney’s highest single shareholder and Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter’s anger with Fox Studios over negotiations regarding the film-and-related rights to The Fantastic Four, that Marvel would cancel the Fantastic Four comic rather than provide any promotion, however small it might be, towards the Fox Studios film. Merchandise and licenses were scrapped and even Fantastic Four posters in the offices were pulled down lest Perlmutter see one and have his ire raised. It may not have been logical, but it was a decision born of personal emotion. It was steadied by sense. X-Men wasn’t cancelled, for example as the Xbooks sell so well. But Fantastic Four? It may have been the first book of the Marvel Universe, but its sales have continued to drag, even after multiple relaunches with high profile creators. There would be less of a hit to the bottom line if this comic was dropped.

Our story was pooh-poohed by all and sundry, save for CBR who independently confirmed that it was intended for the Fantastic Four to be cancelled. Then the letter about sketch card artists being forbidden to use Fantastic Four characters was made public, Mondo talked about being forbidden to use Fantastic Four characters and today, we we were already planning to run another story about Diamond Select Toys confirming that they are unable to make any Fantastic Four toys.

Right now we are not able to make characters from the FF, but as soon as that changes we will consider them.

But events moved on too quickly. Now the catalogues of Hachette, Marvel’s bookstore distributor, seems to confirm the cancellation at least. With June’s solicitation for James Robinson and Leonard Kirk‘s Fantastic Four: The End Is Fourever.

I get it that Marvel Studios wants the FF back, but they sold the rights when they were nearly bankrupt before they got bought by the Mouse, and killing off the Ff comic book in a fit of pique sucks.

Wall Street: It F%$#s the Airlines Even Worse than the Airlines F%$# the Airlines

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Aviation Week, in reporting a leadership change at JetBlue, notes that much of the impetus for removing the current CEO was because he was too passenger centric: (paid subscription required)

When the JetBlue Airways Board of Directors decided not to renew CEO Dave Barger’s contract but instead elevate airline President Robin Hayes to the top spot, it implicitly endorsed a view held by many on Wall Street that the carrier, while profitable, lags too far behind its rivals.

Barger, an original JetBlue executive, took over in 2007 after the board determined the carrier’s visionary founder, David Neeleman, struggled at running day-to-day operations. Barger quickly fixed the operation, helping it recover from a devastating “valentine” that was delivered on Feb. 14, 2007, when the airline failed to properly prepare for and react to an ice storm that hit the New York area. But like Neeleman, who insisted JetBlue be more refined than its competitors, Barger kept the focus on the customer, preferring not to add baggage fees or seats to aircraft even when most other U.S. carriers adopted both practices.

His resistance to some revenue-generating ideas may have been Barger’s downfall. Despite signaling in recent months he might remain at JetBlue, Barger will be replaced on Feb. 16 by Hayes, a former British Airways executive vice president for the Americas. Hayes is not talking revenue—he has not been saying much at all—but Wall Street analysts say they are hopeful JetBlue will start acting more like competitors. In arguing this summer for a CEO change, Cowen & Co. analyst Helane Becker wrote: “JetBlue is an overly brand-conscious and customer-focused airline, which has resulted in lagging fundamentals.”

………

“What I see Dave Barger doing is leading the company through difficult times and not going into bankruptcy,” says George Hamlin of Hamlin Transportation Consulting. “If there’s something wrong with that, I am living in a strange world.”

(emphasis mine)

If you are wondering why flying sucks wet farts from dead pigeons, just look at this.

“Activist investors” have decided that JetBlue gives an excessively positive experience to its customers, and this must not be allowed to stand.

Hurray! Facebook Blinks!

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Facebook has apologized to cross dressing LGBT members who want to use their stage name, and looks to be allowing “Drag Queen” names in the near future:

Two weeks ago, Facebook was forced to address a firestorm over its real-name policy after “several hundred” drag queens and performers were targeted in a spree of user reports. On that day, Facebook responded by sending a message to those account holders: either switch their public Facebook names to “legal” names or convert their accounts to public “pages,” which lack certain normal-profile features. The affected users had two weeks to do so, which ran out today.

However, instead of disabling those hundreds of accounts, Facebook went in a decidedly different direction. A meeting between affected performers, including original complainant Sister Roma, and company officials took place at the Facebook campus today, and according to a Valleywag report, it ended with Facebook issuing an official apology and promising “substantive changes” to the real-name policy.

“Facebook agreed that the real names policy is flawed and has unintentionally hurt members of our community,” San Francisco Supervisor David Campos said to Valleywag. “Facebook apologized to the community and has committed to removing any language requiring that you use your legal name. They’re working on technical solutions to make sure that nobody has their name changed unless they want it to be changed and to help better differentiate between fake profiles and authentic ones.”

 Fabulous!

Good News Everyone!

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I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!

In response to yet another attempted shakedown by a patent troll, the courts,  in response to recent Supreme Court rulings, have started to issue significant sanctions:

This summer, the Supreme Court made it easier for defendants to collect fees when they win patent cases. The decision is starting to have an effect—the nation’s largest patent troll just got slapped with an order to pay $1.4 million in attorneys’ fees to NetApp, which it sued in 2010.

The case brought by Summit Data Systems, a branch of Acacia Research Corp., hinged on an accusation that NetApp infringed when its server-based software interacted with an end user on a Microsoft operating system. The two patents-in-suit, 7,392,291 and 7,428,581, relate to “block-level storage access over a computer network.”

But just two months before Summit filed its lawsuit, it sold licenses for those patents to 43 companies that were member companies of defensive patent aggregator RPX—including Microsoft.

“Nonetheless, Summit brought suit against NetApp barely two months after executing the Licensing Agreement,” wrote US District Judge Gregory Sleet in his order (PDF), which was unsealed on Tuesday. “It then took Summit 18 months to disclose the existence of the Licensing Agreement to NetApp.”

Summit’s expert said that Microsoft users infringe the patents, but he couldn’t determine whether Linux or UNIX systems infringed because he “didn’t have time.”

Sleet continued:

The facts of this case demonstrate that Summit pursued an action against NetApp without any basis for infringement, delayed disclosing the existence of the Licensing Agreement for eighteen months, extracted settlements from co-defendants worth a fraction of what it would actually cost them to defend the lawsuit, and then voluntarily dismissed its claims with prejudice prior to the court issuing a ruling on the merits… The claims were frivolous—Microsoft’s initiator software [was] licensed, so no system employing it could infringe the asserted patents. Summit’s motivation was to extract quick settlements that were dwarfed by the costs to litigate. Summit was objectively unreasonable in bringing a lawsuit against NetApp mere months after executing the Licensing Agreement that effectively eliminated its theory of infringement. Finally, the court is convinced that an award of attorneys’ fees in this case is necessary to deter this sort of reckless and wasteful litigation in the future.

………

Acacia is a patent-holding company that’s publicly traded on NASDAQ, and it’s sometimes considered the largest “patent troll,” since its various subsidiaries have filed more patent lawsuits than any other single company. The NetApp fee order is Acacia’s second major setback in recent months. In July, an Acacia unit holding an old Polaroid digital imaging patent lost a big case in which it was seeking royalty payments from 31 companies.

Here is the pertinent bit about the recent Supreme Court decision:

The Supreme Court overruled the lower courts. In their unanimous opinion for Octane Fitness v. Icon Health & Fitness, the justices found the Federal Circuit had taken a wrong turn in 2005 when it rejected the “holistic, equitable” approach toward attorneys’ fees and took up a “more rigid and mechanical formulation.” In order to get fees in a case, a party had to show that a litigation is both “objectively baseless” and “brought in subjective bad faith.”

That’s almost an impossible standard to meet, Octane’s lawyer Rudy Telscher told Ars in an interview before the February oral arguments. “You’ve got to show that the plaintiff brought a ‘zero merit’ case, and they knew that’s what they were doing.”

Instead, the Supremes said today that fees should be awarded in an “exceptional” case. That’s what the statute calls for, and the word “exceptional” should be given its ordinary meaning. “An ‘exceptional’ case is simply one that stands out from others with respect to the substantive strength of a party’s litigating position… or the unreasonable manner in which the case was litigated,” wrote Sotomayor.

The “Federal Circuit Court” above is formally known as the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but is probably better known as the “Patent Court,” which has had a ridiculously broad view of IP rights, they have literally allowed the patenting of a rainy day.

Thankfully, SCOTUS has begun routinely overturning the more extreme rulings of the patent court.

The great charter school rip-off: Finally, the truth catches up to education “reform” phonies – Salon.com

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Bill Clinton weighed in on the debate over charter schools this week, warning that the publicly funded yet autonomous schools must keep their “original bargain” if they want support as alternatives to traditional public schools.

The Huffington Post reports that in remarks before a dinner hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative on Tuesday, the former president hailed the potential of charter schools, even as he called on them to be held to high standards. Clinton cited New Orleans, whose post-Katrina public schools are 100 percent charter. While casting New Orleans’ experience with charters as a success story, he added an important caveat. Charter schools aren’t worth supporting, Clinton suggested, unless they perform better than traditional public schools.

“They still haven’t done what no state has really done adequately,” Clinton told the group, “which is to set up a review system to keep the original bargain of charter schools, which was if they weren’t outperforming the public model, they weren’t supposed to get their charter renewed.”

Clinton’s statement is stunning once you consider its implications. Research shows that the vast majority of charter schools in the U.S. haven’t cleared that hurdle. A study at Stanford University last year found that only 25 percent of charter schools fare better than traditional schools in reading. In math, only 29 percent of charters do better. Nineteen percent of charters actually did worse in reading, while 31 percent were worse in math; the rest weren’t significantly different from traditional public schools.

While Democratic Party centrists in Clinton’s mold have been some of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for charter schools, Clinton’s comments come as many within the Democratic Party are pushing back against so-called education reformers who want to dismantle teacher protections and increase the number of charter schools. In response to the rise of such groups as Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice (chaired by Democratic trial lawyer David Boies) and Democrats for Education Reform, Democrats including operative Donna Brazile, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm this summer formed Democrats for Public Education. The group’s launch underscored that while many of the party’s financial backers support an anti-union, pro-charter agenda, the “reform” movement’s actions are starting to trigger a powerful reaction within the party.

Let’s be clear here. This isn’t about Bill Clinton having an epiphanies.

Bill Clinton isn’t the sort of guy who has epiphanies.

He is a very smart guy who surveys the terrain, and chooses a path, and chooses the best possible path forward for him.

What’s more, Clinton has a record of being just far enough ahead of the curve on these sort of trends to win politically.

My guess, (hope) is that the increasingly dubious claims of the charter school industry, will gain currency in the next year or so, and this is what Clinton has picked up on:

But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where charter schools are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan, where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that 73 percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools until the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full review of the charter school system.

I so hope that I’m not being a Pollyanna here,

The Eu Gets Real, Beotches

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The EU has routinely insisted that in accordance with EU rules, countries in crisis have to impoverish their ordinary citizens, cutting wages and the social safety net.

Well it looks like the EU will start going after money for the big guys now with Eurocrats going after Ireland’s tax deal with Apple, and Luxemburg’s and the Netherland’s deals with FIAT and Starbucks:

In a warning shot to companies shopping for tax deals around the globe, the European Commission publicly accused Ireland on Tuesday of giving illegal subsidies to Apple and cautioned that the country might need to collect back taxes from the company, which outside analysts said could reach into the billions of dollars.

These findings, which constitute a preliminary indictment of Apple’s past arrangements with Ireland, come as policy makers in the United States and Europe try to block some of the inventive maneuvers multinationals use to limit taxes in their home countries and reduce their worldwide payments as much as possible.

“The light bulb has gone off that trade wars by another name and conducted through the tax system are just as ruinous,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law and a former chief of staff to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

And from the European lowlands:

The European Union is to accuse US tech giant Apple of taking illegal aid from the Irish state through sweetheart tax deals over two decades, the Financial Times reported Monday.

A European Commission investigation into Apple’s tax affairs in Ireland, where it has enjoyed a rate of less than 2.0 percent, found that the company benefitted from illegal state aid, the FT reported citing sources close to the matter.

Ireland’s Department of Finance confirmed that the EU would be publishing a document on Monday but stressed that “the Commission has not formally decided that there is state aid” at play.

“Ireland is confident that there is no breach of state aid rules in this case and has already issued a formal response to the Commission earlier this month, addressing in detail the concerns and some misunderstandings contained in the opening decision,” the department added.

The European Union launched a probe in June into sweetheart tax deals negotiated by Apple, Starbucks and Fiat with three member states.

The investigation seeks to determine whether such arrangements offered by Ireland, Netherlands and Luxembourg give the companies an unfair competitive advantage and thus amount to illegal state aid.

Here’s a phrase that I did not expect to say, “Good job, European Union Bureaucrats.”

Follow this to its logical conclusion, please, and ban this sh%$.

Everyone but the corporations lose in this beggar thy neighbor strategy, and besides, Ireland really needs the money.

The Wisest Thing Said so Far this Year

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If regular Americans acted like corporations and the moneyed class, our country would collapse in a week from systemic theft, corruption and greed.

Donald Trump is going bankrupt for the 5th time, Richard Fuld is still a rich man, Goldman Sachs is still a going concern, airlines and other businesses routinely declare bankruptcy to cheat their workers.

It’s no surprise that recent studies have found the wealthy to be less ethical than the general populace.

And when a deal goes bad? They just walk away.

Basically, the much of the obscene levels of wealth that have been accumulated, particularly by the MBA class, come from their monetizing our ethics and their lack thereof.

For the Past two Decades or so, not Having a Substantive Conflict of Interest Policy has been Goldman’s Business Model

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In looking at the recent ProPublica and This American Life coverage of the capture of the Federal Reserve regulators by the Vampire Squid (Goldman Sachs) it’s important to note that they miss a basic point, which is that, as
Justin Fox so ably points out in the Harvard Business Review, Goldman Sachs has been using conflicts of interest as a mechanism to generate much, if not most of their profits.

I recommend that you read the ProPublica story, and then listen to the This American Life podcast, but Mr. Fox does make a legitimate complaint about the coverage.

Specifically one of the big reveals is that a Goldman executive said that consumer protection laws do not apply to rich clients.

This is in fact true under US law:

In the first, Carmen Segarra, the former Fed bank examiner who made the tapes, tells of a Goldman Sachs executive saying in a meeting that “once clients were wealthy enough, certain consumer laws didn’t apply to them.”  Far from being a shocking admission, this is actually a pretty fair summary of American securities law. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s “accredited investor” guidelines, an individual with a net worth of more than $1 million or an income of more than $200,000 is exempt from many of the investor-protection rules that apply to people with less money. That’s why rich people can invest in hedge funds while, for the most part, regular folks can’t. Maybe there were some incriminating details behind the Goldman executive’s statement that alarmed Segarra and were left out of the story, but on the face of it there’s nothing to see here.

The theory here is that the very rich, by virtue of having a lot of money, are assumed to be knowledgeable investors, and so are more able to protect themselves.

Simply put, they are saying that they are not the general public, because they either have, or can hire, financial knowledge.

In highlighting this, they underplay the 2nd reveal of the story, and what is clearly the reason for Ms. Segarra’s unjustified termination, the fact that Goldman Sachs never had a meaningful conflict of interest policy:

The other smoking gun is that Segarra pushed for a tough Fed line on Goldman’s lack of a substantive conflict of interest policy, and was rebuffed by her boss. This is a big deal, and for much more than the legal/compliance reasons discussed in the piece. That’s because, for the past two decades or so, not having a substantive conflict of interest policy has been Goldman’s business model. Representing both sides in mergers, betting alongside and against clients, and exploiting its informational edge wherever possible is simply how the firm makes its money. Forcing it to sharply reduce these conflicts would be potentially devastating.

(emphasis mine)

Mr. Fox makes another interesting point, that any organization that is responsible for the stability and the viability of the banks, such as the Federal Reserve, have an inherent interest in ensuring that those organizations are profitable, because profitable banks are more stable than unprofitable.

Carmen Segarra, in pushing for Goldman having a conflict of interest policy, was attacking the attacking the viability of a bank.

This raises a larger question, whether we really want to have an organization for which has unethical behavior at the core of both its culture and profits to remain viable.

This was the question that no one has asked about Wall Street in general, and Goldman Sachs in particular.

It needs to be asked.