INeedAttention.com

The United States Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are created equal, but in practice, no two people are treated equally by law.  In fact, one is not even expected to understand how to apply the law themselves, instead they are expected to hire a lawyer to navigate the complexities and subtleties of the law whenever the need arises. Despite that Miranda rights guarantee a defendant’s right to a lawyer, even if they cannot afford one, lawyers that are forced to take on these pro-bono cases are often already handling other paying cases, and thus have no financial incentive to prepare and present a proper defense in court for their poor clients.  Conversely, someone with a lot of money can hire an accomplished attorney that will be willing to spare no expense in order to achieve the desired outcome.

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One sunny spring afternoon, a congregation of Verizon technicians descended upon the cul-de-sac deep in the heart of suburbia that I call my neighborhood.  These technicians were not here to read the telephone meter, mind you, they were outside digging holes and pushing cables into places I never knew cables could go, in order to deliver their new Fios fiber-optic home installation.  Shortly after they finished installing the underground cables, we noticed intermittent electric power outages.  Apparently Con Ed also noticed, because one of their technicians discovered that there was damage to the underground utility lines in the neighborhood, so the electric power lines were replaced.  Cablevision, “home of Optimum Products and Services, for your home and your business,” also joined in on the frenzy by replacing their underground coaxial cable line.

It just so happens that my front lawn is used as a right-of-way where a fiber-optic head end converts the Cablevision fiber optic network to the coaxial cable feed that we know and love. And despite that the cul-de-sac has fewer than 8 homes, there is a second underground utility pedestal across the street on my neighbor’s yard that splits that coaxial signal.  For some reason, when Cablevision returned like the other utilities had, they didn’t replace their underground line immediately.

Instead, they took some coaxial cable, terminated it in the box on my lawn, then ran it out of the pedestal…

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Insurance of any form is rarely a compelling value proposition for consumers. Take, for example, life insurance. Life insurance is the one product that people buy that they hope to never have to use. From the insurer’s perspective, it’s a safe bet: you don’t want to die, and you’ll do whatever you need to in order to avoid it. On the other hand, life insurance can present a compelling value since, as they say, it provides peace of mind. That peace of mind comes from the assurance that when you die, your loved ones will be well supported in your absence. Insurers help manage risks in our lives. Homeowners risk losing their homes in natural disasters, floods, and fires. Automobile drivers risk being crashed into and also crashing into something or someone and thus being exposed to considerable amounts of liability.

But insurers can help you manage other less significant risks, as well. My adventure in obscure insurance services started when I found out that I was eligible for a discount on any Verizon Wireless service thanks to arrangements between Verizon and my employer. When I went to apply the discount to my account, I found out that I couldn’t apply the discount because the account wasn’t in my name. Our entire family was on one plan, and my mother’s name was on the account. So we switched the account to my name. At that time, Verizon had me change my plan around. This proved to be in our favor, and we ended up with a comparable plan for much less per month. One key change to save money was to switch my data plan from unlimited to per-megabyte, since I figured I would rarely spend as much as the cost of the unlimited plan in a single month. A few days later the changes went through, and my discount was applied, lowering the bill even further.

Things were great. I received the first bill, and then noted that on two of the five handsets, a charge appeared: “TEC INSURANCE”, $5.99 per month. TEC, or Total Equipment Coverage, replaces your phone if it is lost, stolen, or broken, for a modest $50 deductible in addition to that $5.99 per-handset monthly premium. My phone wasn’t completely broken, but the online phone claim website allowed me to file a claim for the intermittent failures I was experiencing.

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It would be impossible to argue that there isn’t a lot of hype around Facebook. Microsoft’s recent purchase of a mere 1.6% stake of Facebook for a total of $250 million means that Microsoft believes Facebook to be worth a whopping $15 billion. To put things in perspective, that means that Facebook has a higher valuation than the Ford Motor Company (whose market cap is about $13 billion).  And here, we’ll discuss ways to get information you’re looking for despite the best efforts of their programmers.

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This morning I found out that RateMyCop.com, a new site that just launched with the purpose of rating police officer’s performance, had been taken down by its hosting provider and registrar GoDaddy. The site launched to mixed reaction, with a sharp contrast between the negative response of law enforcement and mass media and the relief to armchair constitutional scholars posting on Internet message boards. With over 4200 diggs, and nearly 1400 votes on reddit, it’s clear that there’s a public interest in the story here.

As a GoDaddy VPS customer, and amateur tutorial author and reviewer, this upset me, so I wrote a note on GoDaddy’s public relations feedback page.

“As a GoDaddy customer, I am extremely concerned about GoDaddy’s behavior in deleting DNS records for ‘RateMyCop.com’. Continued behavior in this regard will force me to switch to another domain registrar & host.”

This is the sad state of affairs at the moment — other sites have had GoDaddy lay down the law, as extensively documented by NoDaddy, a site about alleged GoDaddy abuses. GoDaddy also notably took down DNS records for computer security site SecLists.org alleging violations of their terms. Similarly, in this case, GoDaddy responded that the user had exceeded its alloted bandwidth, and thus they were cut off for that reason. Here’s their reply:

The situation with the Web site RateMyCop was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way.

The site’s operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy’s concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.

This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire ‘shared server’ accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.

Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck.

The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.

While the “censorship” allegations certainly make for an edgy “story,” they simply had nothing to do with this situation.

– Go Daddy
Office of the President

I’m inclined not to believe this, since GoDaddy charges for bandwidth overages and would be more than happy to let you pay the overage unless you specify that you want overage protection.

Clearly, the topic of RateMyCop.com is politically charged. Cops don’t like being called out, and historically never have — that’s why they’re cops (so they can call others out). In my community in particular, police criticism isn’t welcomed, after all, we’re the second safest city, and we have great schools, and that’s why our property taxes grew 40 percent and the Palisades Mall’s rose 8 percent, even though the Palisades Mall was supposed to pay lots of taxes to keep our taxes down. Sometimes our police deserve some criticisms despite our incredible performance in arbitrary lists compiled by politicos. It’s only natural to deserve some kind of criticism, nobody is perfect, we understand that, but if we pay high taxes, we deserve high quality service, and that means being held accountable when the law isn’t properly followed.

The Internet has delivered a cornucopia of police abuse videos. More than ever, we are confronted with amateur videos of police brutality and plain old lack of professionalism. Way back in 1992, was one of the most prominent examples of this, with the amateur taping of the Rodney King beating. Without police oversight, guys like like this guy (below), continue indulging themselves and getting high on their own power. Watch as this cop from Baltimore tells a 14 year old that his behavior will get him killed (2:05):

I think GoDaddy needs to step up to the plate, and publicly apologize for any wrong doing, and even if they weren’t wrong, make right on the bandwidth issue — a now highly public issue — by offering the RateMyCop.com authors some massive hosting package for a year. Bob Parsons, a former marine, once fought to protect our freedoms — so it sure would be a shame to see his company do just the opposite.