Warm Sushi? Phil Twitters

Phil Twittered:

Worst service and food ever from Irashiai today. Warm sushi? Yech! After manager's response, they're dead to me. Very disappointing.

Watch Phil Twitter.

LOL Chtulhu? No, LOLTHULHU!

It was just a matter of time before I stumbled across this.



I can't imagine the elder ones are amused.

qv: Lolthulhu.com

Charter Communications Adds Insult to Injury

There are so many ways that my cable provider sucks, that I really couldn't mention them all in a single blog post. I regard my relationship with them as "death by a thousand cuts." They are constantly, slowly, killing me and then sucking the life out of me. They fail to meet expectations in many ways, but one of the ways that they most consistently fail is in providing adequate DNS services to my laptop web client. I frequently try to bring up web pages and have their system say that it can't find the remote web page. 100% of the time I am able to make this same query work on an alternate client which is not using Charter's DNS. Just recently, however, Charter has added insult to injury, by first failing to find the path to a known good server and then offering me Yahoo sponsored advertisements for similarly spelled websites which it assumes I might be looking for.

I type in the well known (to me) http://baby.yanov.com , what I get is:



No, I wasn't looking for any of those other things. No, I didn't mean "YANOU." I wish at least that it would assume I spelled my own name correctly.

I'd use almost any other Internet Service Provider if I thought it would work any better. As someone else pointed out to me, Charter's customer service motto may very well be "They might bitch, but they won't switch."

Spoke.com attempts to shed it's evil image

While one business networking tool attempts to rid itself of a reputation for spam, another tries to make us think that they are not going to collect or sell our private information. Last year, we alerted the unwary (also below) of Spoke's practice of using your Outlook Contacts to create a database of people they could then sell to others. Spoke cried foul! Now, one year later, they have sent out a follow up email saying that they no longer require the use of their data collecting toolbar. Does that mean that they are no longer evil? We don't know about that, but we do rather hope that our warnings to people were not without effect. In this updated email, we couldn't help noticing that one year later, they are still selling the same 36 million contacts in 900,000 companies that they had for sale last year at this time.

Phil, give Spoke another try!

We noticed it’s been a while since you registered for Spoke’s business network, and you haven’t been using it. We wanted to let you know that Spoke membership is still free, and you no longer need to install our Microsoft Outlook toolbar to discover and access people in Spoke’s open network of 36 million people.

We know that some people were unable to take advantage of our free level of service in the past because it required Microsoft Outlook for Windows. If you were one of the people in that situation, we hope this change in our service will encourage you to give Spoke another try.

To make revisiting Spoke simple and easy for you, we’ve automatically enabled your membership using your existing username (xxx) and the password you chose during registration. Click here [link deleted] to come back and give us a look!

Best Regards,

Frank Vaculin
President & CEO
Spoke Software

Has anyone had any luck getting their information removed from Spoke.com? We've had a number of people say that they tried, but not one has mentioned that they succeeded.

Spoke.com is Evil

This post previously appeared in my personal blog. I am reposting it here so it may be easily referenced. The original post has received quite a number of comments, including a response from Spoke.com. I think the post continues to be effective in highlighting the potential abuse of any social network.

---

Spoke.com has built a scheme to capture and then sell the personal contact information of practically everyone connected via e-mail. The plan is genius -- evil genius. Read on...

Spoke.com says it is growing rapidly. Their press release claims:

Since introducing its free service in August 2006, Spoke Software has added more than three million new contacts to its database and has enabled more than 6,000 sales and marketing professionals to improve sales productivity with higher quality, more targeted leads. With no requirement to track points, make trades or give away the direct contact information of colleagues, users are flocking to Spoke's online business contact information database which now provides access to more than 35 million people and 900,000 companies -- more than any other online business database.

This means that over 6000 sales people now have access to 35 million other people using spoke.com. If you are in the business of selling stuff that sounds like a good thing. The problem is that as one of those 6000 people you have entered into a real Faustian bargain.

How the devil will get your soul...

Spoke says that it launched it's free service in August and that they have added 3 million new names since August. How did they do that? It was easy! To get access to Spoke's "free" service, you must install the Spoke toolbar. The Spoke toolbar then copies all of the information from your address book into the Spoke database. It's at this point you should be able to smell the burning sulfur.

If, for example, I pressed the button for Spoke's free service, the Spoke toolbar would install and then copy the roughly 2100 names, phone numbers, and email addresses out of my Outlook Contact database and then add them to Spoke's database. Spoke would then be able to sell those names, titles, companies, addresses, and email addresses to direct marketing organizations. Participating in this scheme is a sure path to hell.

Consider the horrors:

• You will be submitting the unlisted phone numbers of family, friends, and confidants that may appear in your address book.
• You may be submitting passwords, PIN numbers, and other private, privileged information stored in your address book because you think no one has access to it.
• If you are in sales, you've just given away the contact information (and trust) you have worked to develop with your best clients. Now every S&M (sales and marketing) person in the Spoke universe will be bombarding your best clients with calls and potentially competitive offerings.
  

Instead of joining Spoke, you should be asking congress to outlaw it.

Video: WYFF - Buyer Beware - Toolbar can grab personal information

WYFF posted the video of the interview I did last week about spoke.com. Take a look and see what you think.


[Watch the video]

Your Data for Sale -- On WYFF-TV Tonight

Tim Waller called and asked if we could talk a bit about my blog post and the privacy issues created by Spoke.com. The answer was, of course, yes. Look for it tonight on the 6 PM News on WYFF-TV.

Photo by JL Watkins.

Spoke.com is Evil

Spoke.com has built a scheme to capture and then sell the personal contact information of practically everyone connected via e-mail. The plan is genius -- evil genius. Read on...

Spoke.com says it is growing rapidly. Their press release claims:

Since introducing its free service in August 2006, Spoke Software has added more than three million new contacts to its database and has enabled more than 6,000 sales and marketing professionals to improve sales productivity with higher quality, more targeted leads. With no requirement to track points, make trades or give away the direct contact information of colleagues, users are flocking to Spoke's online business contact information database which now provides access to more than 35 million people and 900,000 companies -- more than any other online business database.

This means that over 6000 sales people now have access to 35 million other people using spoke.com. If you are in the business of selling stuff that sounds like a good thing. The problem is that as one of those 6000 people you have entered into a real Faustian bargain.

How the devil will get your soul...

Spoke says that it launched it's free service in August and that they have added 3 million new names since August. How did they do that? It was easy! To get access to Spoke's "free" service, you must install the Spoke toolbar. The Spoke toolbar then copies all of the information from your address book into the Spoke database. It's at this point you should be able to smell the burning sulfur.

If, for example, I pressed the button for Spoke's free service, the Spoke toolbar would install and then copy the roughly 2100 names, phone numbers, and email addresses out of my Outlook Contact database and then add them to Spoke's database. Spoke would then be able to sell those names, titles, companies, addresses, and email addresses to direct marketing organizations. Participating in this scheme is a sure path to hell.

Consider the horrors:

• You will be submitting the unlisted phone numbers of family, friends, and confidants that may appear in your address book.
• You may be submitting passwords, PIN numbers, and other private, privileged information stored in your address book because you think no one has access to it.
• If you are in sales, you've just given away the contact information (and trust) you have worked to develop with your best clients. Now every S&M (sales and marketing) person in the Spoke universe will be bombarding your best clients with calls and potentially competitive offerings.
  

Instead of joining Spoke, you should be asking congress to outlaw it.