May 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Geek Week: Comcast's hit by vandals; an end to HP spying scandal
Throttle this. Bit Torrent blocking Comcast got an education in the ways of the Net this week when hackers gained access to the ISP's domain name records and redirected Comcast.net traffic to a vandalized site. Teenage hackers with the handles "Defiant" and "EBK" pwned the site for several hours. According to a report in Wired:
...the intrusion gave the pair control of over 200 domain names owned by Comcast. They changed the contact information for one of them, Comcast.net, to Defiant's e-mail address; for the street address, they used the "Dildo Room" at "69 Dick Tard Lane."
The same digital delinquents are "connected to recent defacement of the MySpace.com profiles of Justin Timberlake, Hilary Duff and Tila Tequila," according to a security researcher. (I believe CEO Brian Roberts dated Tila Tequila once, though I may be confusing him with Chad or Bo.) Memo to Comcast: Don't think of it as vandalism, think of it as creative "traffic management."
This call may be monitored for quality assurance. It seems the Hollywood cliche about private eyes always being down on their luck is really true. Investigators hired by Hewlett Packard to spy on reporters in 2005 have been fined $67,000 by the FTC for illegally obtaining phone records. But the company, Action Research Group, is kaput and its principals are apparently broke, so the FTC settled for a $3,000 fine. Two other private dicks who worked for Action Research have been levied fines of $428K and $110K respectively; we'll see if they plead poverty as well. Meanwhile, former HP Chair Patty Dunn -- the alleged instigator of the spy ring -- walked away untouched. So is that what they mean when they say "crime doesn't pay"?
Hacked any Web sites or tapped any phones? Confess your crimes below or email them to me here - cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. I promise to prosecute only those who lack money or power.
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Posted by Robert X. Cringely on May 30, 2008 07:06 AM
May 19, 2008 | Comments: (0)
HP, AMD, and XP SP3 -- three things that don't go well together
Microsoft finally released XP's Service Pack 3 to the masses last week, which is a bit like telling someone on death row you finally got around to fixing their car. Then it turns out your car may not really run, and if you have the wrong model you'll never get out of Park.
That's the case for some unlucky Cringesters who are stuck in an endless reboot cycle. Apparently the snafu primarily affects owners of HP desktops with AMD inside, which were mistakenly imaged with an Intel-specific build of the OS that doesn't play nicely with the update. (The paranoid conspiracy theorist inside me wonders, does Intel have friends deep within HP's manufacturing line?)
HP has told customers with AMD machines to avoid installing Service Pack 3 until it comes out with a fix for the problem. Of course, if your machine is set to automatically update, or you're a Windows Live subscriber and you can't turn automatic updates off, you're screwed. (Though there are ways to escape Endless Reboot Hell.)
Microsoft says a) the problem is not its fault, though the same thing happened four years ago when the company released SP2 (so you think maybe they might have been prepared for it), and ii) it is also working on a fix.
Somehow, that notion gives me cold comfort. Cringester D. C. reports that, when comes to SP3, Microsoft can't seem to get its FAQs straight. He downloaded the update from Microsoft's site and burned it to a CD, then decided to read the FAQ before installing. He reports:
The page is entitled "More information about installing Service Pack 2." (emphasis mine) It tells me how long it will take to install SP2 and about the new security features of SP2. It doesn't mention SP3 at all. Is this QC problem or does that mean SP3 is really just a rehash of SP2? At least it appears to have worked and the PC doesn't go into a continuous reboot cycle. I guess the QC guys were too busy watching/ducking furniture flying around Ballmer's office.
On the other hand, it's only been about four years since SP2 came out; I understand that under its new accelerated software dev program Microsoft requires at least five years to update its FAQs.
I have some good news to report, however. Cringester E. H., who's been waiting since late March for HP to deliver on its promise of a "three-day turnaround" for fixing his son's laptop (see "HP: Bad motherboards, broken support, and the black arts"), is no longer waiting. Last week HP finally did turn around and shipped him a brand new laptop with more or less the same configuration as his son's 2-year-old model. E. H. says he's happy with it, though he didn't say what he'd do with the new machine, as he already bought another one for his son. Let's hope it doesn't have an AMD chip on it.
Got hot tips or more OS snafus? Share them below or email me direct: cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. Top tipsters qualify for cool swag.
Think you've got the right stuff to pass our tech quizzes? They're not as easy as they look:
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Posted by Robert X. Cringely on May 19, 2008 06:53 AM
April 30, 2008 | Comments: (0)
HP: Bad motherboards, broken support, and the black arts
Things have been kind of quiet lately on the Hewlett Packard front. There have been no recent spying scandals, no daily kerfuffles over what the CEO is doing, saying, or wearing. Bill Hewlett and David Packard have stopped spinning in their graves at 7200 rpm.
But if the letters I've been getting lately from Cringesters are any indication, there's something rotting in HP's den, or at least giving off the distinct aroma of toe cheese.
The first story comes from Cringester E. H., who purchased a Compaq laptop for his college-bound son along with an HP Care Pack that promised a three-day turnaround on all repairs. Last March his son's machine died, and he sent it in to be revived, fully expecting to see the machine again before the end of spring break. One month and many promises later, the laptop is still AWOL. Apparently it needed a new motherboard, but the part was strangely unavailable.
E. H. says when he asked about that three-day turnaround he paid for, he was told it didn't apply when there was a parts shortage. (If HP can't lay its hands on a motherboard, it has bigger problems.) He also claims that an HP case manager promised to send him a brand new laptop if his son's machine wasn't fixed by April 24. Needless to say, neither of those things happened. As I write this, the laptop is now due to be back by mid-May.
Having had my own impossibly stupid and maddeningly circular experiences with HP support, I know exactly how frustrated he's feeling. But E. H.'s case pales in comparison to the report by frequent Cringe contributor D. F., a New York-based reseller who's experienced a disturbingly high failure rate with HP's DX2200 desktops and gotten the runaround from HP support.
As reported in Ed Foster's Gripeline blog earlier this month, D. F. recommended 24 HP DX2200s to a client, only to have six of them fail -- two bad motherboards, four dead hard drives. After a lot of wrestling with HP's offshore support techs, D. F. learned the hard drive problem was due to a known (but undocumented) manufacturing defect in the desktops' SATA cables. Despite having an onsite support contract for the systems, HP refused to send out techs to replace the cables, but offered to pay D. F. to do the job with her own staff.
She believes they were paying her to keep quiet. Guess that didn't work out too well, did it? And apparently this is just one of many examples. In an open letter to Mark Hurd, she writes:
I have dozens of stories which demonstrate that HP has been has been consistently unwilling to help out small business resellers and their small business end users....Right now I cannot carry the designation of “HP Channel Partner” with any degree of honor.
Parts shortages, defects, lack of quality control, unwillingness to support low end systems -- none of these are good signs. But Cringester S. M. may have stumbled onto what's really wrong at HP when he discovered a new type of networking device for sale at HP.com:
So it seems HP has been secretly taken over by a coven of witches -- mistresses of the black arts, probably left over from the Carly Fiorina era. That explains everything, don't you think?
Got hot tips or evil spells? Cast them below or email me here: cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. Top tipsters will receive wicked cool swag in return.
Posted by Robert X. Cringely on April 30, 2008 06:58 AM
August 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)
HP support: Cross-eyed and brainless
I have to admit, Hewlett Packard has kind of fallen off my radar lately. It hasn't had a spy scandal in months. (Though it is getting sued by four of the reporters who got snooped on.) It continues to sell PCs at a feverish pace, while Dell sinks further into the muck of its creative accounting practices.
Well, HP landed on my radar yesterday with a vengeance when my power went out during a freak storm, taking my computer (and my column) with it. You might ask, why isn't my machine plugged into a uninterruptible power supply? In fact, it is (thanks for asking). It's plugged into an HP 400VA battery/surge protector, purchased four months ago but apparently deader than a week-old mackerel. All my sweat-stained prose had vanished.
The dingus was covered a two-year warranty, so I decided to call the 800 support number printed on the box and get a replacement unit. That was my first mistake.
You know how they make you repeat and spell your name, your phone number, your product name and your problem every time you get transferred? Or how when you're talking to someone who speaks English as a third or fourth language across a crappy phone connection 10 time zones away you have to repeat yourself and/or shout – a lot?
I got transferred 12 times in 90 minutes. Every time the tech figured out I was calling about a UPS and not a computer, I was booted halfway 'round the globe to another support queue. I bounced from desktop support to notebooks to servers to pre-sales and back. Finally I demanded to talk to customer service so I could get a refund.
Now I've had really bad support experiences in my time – truly, mind-bendingly awful – and talked to some surly phone reps. But there is a special Circle of Hell reserved for Sanjit, the customer service drone who flat out refused to issue me a refund or escalate my call to his supervisor. Instead he kicked me back into the general support queue.
As I was languishing on hold between techies #9 (Manila) and #12 (Hyperabad), I began to experience a strange sense of deja vu. I had been here before. Like when I tried to buy memory for my HP laptop and bounced endlessly amongst HP sales reps, none of whom could identify the type of memory I needed. (A call to Kingston solved that one.) And when my HP laptop kept freezing up, and the only solution was a firmware upgrade that could only be installed via floppy disk, and HP didn't make my notebook model with a floppy disk drive! I was cheerfully advised to drop $100 on an external floppy so I could install my free firmware upgrade. That was a special moment.
After 90 minutes of frustration, I hung up. I dashed off an email to HP's media team, requesting some quality phone time with the company's director of worldwide support. A few hours later I got a callback from an HP fixer, whose job is to soothe the ruffled feathers of outraged VIPs. (He begged me to not identify him here or he'd be besieged by requests for help – including those from fellow HP employees.) Mr. Fixit is shipping me a new UPS. But when I asked him how mere mortals who are stuck in HP Support Hell could reach people like him, he was flummoxed.
As an aside, after my troubled HP laptop got too decrepit for day-to-day use I bought a nifty Lenovo desktop. When I ran into a couple of minor problems, I called Lenovo's Atlanta-based help desk and got terrific support – clear, calm, and competent. So it is indeed possible to deliver good service, if you make it a priority.
Judging by the letters I receive, I know I'm not the only one who's been run through the ringer by HP support. (Or Dell, Gateway, Sony, and so on down the line.) So let's hear it: Have you had a Kafka-esque experience with technical support? Have you undergone Trial by Phone?
Let's have a good old-fashioned bitchfest. Share your horror stories below or email them to me here. The sorriest tales may qualify for some Cringe swag as cold comfort.
Posted by Robert X. Cringely on August 22, 2007 03:00 AM
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