It may come as a shock to some people that tech companies are corporations–charged first and foremost with making money. Still, it sometimes seems like it wouldn’t hurt Big Tech to treat us just a little bit better. Here are some of the ways companies try to screw you… and how a savvy customer can avoid them.
1.Draconian Contracts:
The Problem: You too can get a “color cameraphone” for free! All you have to do is sign away the next two years of your life to unresponsive customer service and dropped calls. And when your shoddy phone inevitably breaks, you better believe they’ll nail you down for another two years when you walk in that store to get a replacement. And then you have to pay for an “upgrade” to the latest and greatest phone — which is just like your old one.
The Solution: First stop: Celltradeusa or CellSwapper. You can pawn your unwanted contract off to someone who it might be a better fit for. Or just buy an unlocked cell phone. Companies like Samsung and Nokia now sell them directly to consumers. It’ll cost you more without the carrier subsidy that keeps most phones cheap, but it’s a small price to pay to not be somebody’s bitch for the next 24 months. And a bonus: For unlocked phones like the Black Carbon, Samsung provides customer service so you don’t have to deal with your carrier when things go bad.
Worst Offender: Umm… Cell phone carriers everywhere?
2. DRM
The Problem: You get the privilege of paying a licensing fee for a crippled version of “Who Let The Dogs Out” that won’t even play on an off-brand MP3 player.
The Solution: Get music from DRM-free download sites like emusic.com. And if you rip your own CDs into iTunes, make sure you change the default setting from Apple’s proprietary sometimes unsupported AAC format to the uber-flexible MP3. Somebody also told me about something called BitTorrent. You might want to Google it.
Worst offenders: Apple, Microsoft, Sony (rootkit, anybody?)
3. Feature Crippling
The Problem: You’ve got a Bluetooth phone, but your service provider decided they don’t want you to use it as a modem. In fact, there’s a good chance your phone’s Bluetooth is disabled for everything except wireless headsets.
The Solution: Research your fave phone before you sign up for a service provider or lay down cash for a phone is the only real option. Visit PhoneScoop for full phone specs and look for features like DUN, Dial-up Networking, if you want to use your phone as a modem.
Worst Offender: Verizon is pretty notorious for this everybody has done it
4. Unfriendly Customer Service
The Problem: You wait on hold 20 minutes, only to find they can’t help you because you don’t have four different serial numbers in front of you.
The Solution: Check out GetHuman for the direct line to a human voice. And for the best service, get the cancellation department on the phone (see #6).
5. Format Wars
The Problem: The inability of a few companies to get along could turn your next-gen DVD player (not to mention your brand new copy of Little Man) into a very expensive Betamax.
The Solution: This one’s easy — sit it out. The movies on HBO HD are better than anything that’s been thrown on either Blu-ray or HD-DVD yet. Or just get a cheap upscaling DVD player and max out your Netflix subscription. Expect a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD hybrid player in the next year or so and then wait another year for the price to come down to non-millionaire levels.
Worst Offenders: Sony, Toshiba
6. Companies Suing Their Customers
The Problem: Nothing says “We appreciate your business” like a subpeona. Seriously though, when you’re suing old ladies and 12-year-old girls for downloading Fergie songs, you’ve got issues.
The Solution: Use your neighbor’s Wi-Fi — the RIAA will come knocking on their door! When you download those tracks you already own, make sure you’re not using a six-year-old version of Kazaa. Use something like Azereus. We have no idea what it is, but it seems like a good product.
Worst Offender: RIAA
7. Overzealous Retention
The Problem: CrunchGear readers are probably familiar with the case of Vincent Ferrari — the man with the AOL account that he didn’t know he needed. His recording says it far better than I ever could.
The Solution: Take advantage of the hard sell. In the name of keeping up accounts, cancellation departments have enormous power to chop zeros off your monthly rates, add on bonus features, and generally give you better bang for your buck. Don’t dilly-dally with the customer service line—threaten to cancel the second you get someone on the phone and they’ll do your bidding.
Worst Offender: AOL
8. Pushing Extended Warranties and Protection Plans
The Problem: Most shelf-fillers give big box stores razor-thin profit margins. It’s add-on waranties and protection plans (the modern equivalent of rustproofing) that really pay for corporate bonuses. Of course they’re usually a rip-off.
The Solution: Just Say No. Even better — stick it to them and only buy their loss-leaders — those advertised items they sell for a loss to get you in the door. Anything that costs less than it does online is a loss leader.
Worst Offender: Best Buy
One correction:
The default ripping settings for CDs in iTunes doesn’t add any sort of DRM as AAC is not an Apple proprietary format. It’s a standard MP4 audio format developed as a replacement for MP3.
Another correction:
First stop to solve Draconian Contracts should be Cellswapper.com!
http://www.cellswapper.com
7. Overzealous retention.
If in doubt, create a parody video and post it online…
Cancel my Playboy account…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbjUnz64ywc
just to let you know hbo hd is crap compared to hd dvd from toshiba. i have both. dont have blu-ray but assume its way better than any cable or direct tv hd. sports on tv come close but still not up to hd dvd caliber.
I used celltradeusa.com per my provider a few weeks ago and it did in fact work smoothly. I had no problem and would recommened celltradeusa to anyone looking to get out of a cellphone contract.
My 2 cents :)
Another good drm free site that sells music is http://www.audiri.com/ With them most of the money goes to the artist, which is nice. Plus they have a lot of free music
Doesnt matter if you buy a unlocked phone, you still have sign a 1 year contract minimum if you want cingular service.
Unless youre on month-2-month (payasyougo) i think they call it, in which case it doesnt matter.
AAC is not Apple’s proprietary codec. And using your neighbors wifi to bypass getting sued is just being cock gobblers.
What a fucking joke of a site….
You are completely correct Jason. AAC is also a higher quality compressor than mp3. Only AAC files bought from the iTunes store are DRM’d. They’re also compressed at 128kbps. AAC or mp3, I can still hear compression artifacts at that level. Come on, Steve! We aren’t living in the dial-up dark ages anymore. 320kbps FTW!
Vivek –
Cellswapper.com offers the latest unlocked phones bundled with short term contracts (as short as 1 month) with no activation or signup fees.
http://www.cellswapper.com
This is why the USA economy is going to collapse. People want to screw over the big retailers and the big retailers want to screw over the customers. In a word, greed. Too bad that all the small retailers are going out of business slowly but surely. How can we complain that jobs are going abroad when we basically want to put ourselves out of work by paying the cheapest possible price? So much for capitalism.
Dammit! Another person who thinks iTunes uses proprietary formats! The only place you’ll come across DRM with iTunes is if you download songs, and anyone who actually does that is nuts. I guess this is on Digg now, so the Mac Evangelists are sure to come out.
I am a videographer (and phtoographer) and I suffer directly from the format wars. I refuse to upgrade my cameras and editing equipment just to make Sony richer. But clients will eventually want it, so all I can do is hope that a new format comes out before I have to upgrade my equipment.
This will all end with crying.
We don’t have ‘Best Buy’ in the UK, but we do have Dixons which looks to be similar.. they’ll sell you the box, sell you a rip-off warranty extention and lose interest as soon as you need any customer service.
The shop assistants are under huge pressure to sell you the extended warranty so you can use this against them. Just ask them if they will knock $35 off the (say) iPod video if you take out the 3yr extended warranty for $200! They nearly always say yes.. Then you simply cancel the warranty before the legal 14 day ‘cooling off’ period. It’s the only way you’ll get a discount on an ipod!
Alternatively wait for a Zune to be discounted in January as stores desperately try to move stock..
Better idea for dealing with music sharing online — share music from artists who want to share with you, for example, by letting you download their music from their own site (like Harvy Danger) or putting it under a license that allows ANYONE to share it, like any one of the many Creative Commons licenses. Hanging off your neighbors wifi and pinning your britney spears downloads on him doesn’t sound too neighborly… check out http://www.jamendo.com for creative commons stuff (or http://www.magnatune.com, which lets you share at least a little)
Point 2’s advice is poor in two ways:
As many commenters above have mentioned, AAC (aka .mp4) is not a proprietary Apple format. It is a more recent and more efficient audio codec from the MPEG group that supercedes MPEG-1 Layer 3 (aka .mp3) – the audio format originally designed as far back as the VideoCD.
Most objective listening tests give a significant bit-rate vs quality edge to AAC over other formats at the same bit-rate, including both WMA (closer in quality) and MP3 (somewhat further down in quality).
AAC is also good at lower bit-rates, and bitrates around the 56kbps mark are used in satellite radio.
Secondly, if you ARE going to rip into MP3 for this supposed non-proprietary benefit (bearing in mind that Sony, SanDisk, even the Zune player support AAC), it would be better to use a LAME-based encoder rather than the one built into iTunes. The MP3 encoder in iTunes is said to be not as good.
Also, for storing in MP3, choose a higher bit rate, as AAC will sound better at lower bitrates than MP3. So, instead of 128kbps AAC, rip at least 160kbps MP3 or better. For classical type music, both codecs should be pushed higher.
And buy a higher capacity player, as your songs will take more space for the same given quality.
AOL is evil. They’ve stolen millions of dollars from people by just not cancelling accounts when requested.
Worst Buy (my favorite name for the giant yellow/blue pimple), blatantly
sells mainstream products with substandard warrantees.
For example – Viewsonic monitors always came with a standard, 3 year
warrantee, and they were good for it too.
At Worst Buy they sell the same, exact items as elsewhere, but with a
1 year warrantee – and if you want to get the standard coverage back
you have no choice but to buy their scam of an add-on policy, which is
about 100% assurance of dealing with their horrible customer ’service’
later on.
(And in addition to paying extra for a standard coverage, this pushes
the price you originally liked up into not being so good anymore…)
Do yourself a favor if you find an item you want at a good price there -
go across the street to the nearest CircuitCity and get the same item
for like $5 more, with the standard factory warrantee, AND, if you want
even better coverage, add theirs, because unlike Worst Buy, they don’t
exist to hassle the consumer, and personally, I have had some very good
experiences there, despite the fact that they ARE just another box store.
(And no, I do not work for them, or in sales/retail of any sort.)
I disagree with the worst offenders you have for DRM. It should be the RIAA.
This article would be a lot more useful if it wasn’t just picking on a few companies who have been in the news recently. For example, AOL has recently gotten sued over aggressive retention of customers, but companies like Cendant and Match.com are just as bad and just haven’t gotten the same amount of publicity.
Worst offenders = all retail. Best of the worst = Staples My views are from both sides of the counter. Good example = I walk into Compusa Thanksgiving night for their early early bird sale. I stand in line for 45 minutes get to the CS desk, and say Hi I bought this router a few days ago which you seem to have for a $20 instant saving $70 MIreabate. I would like my LPG, I’m sorry we dont offer that tonight, Then here I would like to return it and then buy it again. No I cant sell it back to you it has to go back to the manufacturer. Two days later, so what do you do with this unoppend merchandise. Put it back on the shelf!!! This was only the tip of the iceburg so to speak. We used to have some honor in retail, now your lucky if they honor a price clearly marked with the model and sku number on the tag under the item in question.
AAC is not a proprietary format moron.
Seems like most of the complaits are over service companies.
The biggest problem with large companies is the leverage that marketing has over R&D. R&D usually seeks to generate the best product, however marketing drives to make the largest profit.
Pretty good article there dude, but here are a couple things I noted:
Point 2: Magnatune is also a pretty awesome site for buying DRM-free music. It lets you choose how much to pay, and in which format to get it (CD, Ogg Vorbis, several lossless formats etc…).
Point 6: You said people should use their neighbour’s WiFi. Aside from that being a pretty dishonest thing to do, it’s illegal, and people have been arrested for doing it. +/- a year ago, I read an article, on Slyck.com I believe, that said you had a higher chance of getting hit by a car than you had of being sued for file sharing. If you’re still paranoid though, you could use an anonymization network like Tor or I2P (Look at Wikipedia), but it’s generally concidered rude to push large amounts of data through those networks, as they are volunteer-operated. There are also things called P2P darknets. Darknets are encrypted, anonymized P2P networks. This category also has two subcategories: Private and public. Public darknets are large networks to which any user has access, and they use various tricks to make it impossible to tell for sure who is uploading and who is downloading. Take GNUnet (gnunet.org) as an example, it’s a highly encrypted P2P network, and it includes proxying features that all clients have to have enabled, which give plausible deniability. “I was just running in proxy mode.” (Which is basically what any Tor server operator will say). Other public darknets include Nodezilla, ANts P2P, Rodi, Entropy.
Now, private darknets on the other hand, also known as F2F (Friend to friend), are networks such as WASTE (And its derivative PadLockSL, which was made by the chip producer Via), GNUnet with certain options set, and a series of other protocols, are far more secure – They’re basically like DirectConnect hubs, except there’s no central server (as is the case with public darknets as well), and everything is encrypted with public key cryptology, which means nobody can get in without being approved, no matter how skilled of a hacker he/she might be (unless there’s a serious bug in the software, that is…).
And Azureus is spelled Azureus. It’s a BitTorrent client, the most advanced one in existence. Technically, using Azureus, or any other BitTorrent client, doesn’t reduce your chances of being sued. From a technical point of view, it actually increases your chances, because BitTorrent uses a server system called a tracker. BitTorrent sites like ThePirateBay are trackers. What trackers do is when you download a torrent file and open it with your BitTorrent client, in it is the address of one or more trackers. It connects to the first one and asks it for the IP address of some seeds (peers who are uploading to others), and the tracker gives it a list of IP addresses. As you start downloading, you begin uploading as well. Every leech (users who are downloading) are also seeding. That’s where the famed effectiveness of BitTorrent comes from, but from a security point of view, it’s a disaster. Really, you just have to connect to the tracker and write down IP addresses, you can just write them down for anyone who’s there. Every torrent creates its own little P2P network, and anyone inside must participate in the information exchange to be able to download (again, you see that it’s focused on efficiency.). Of course, certain BitTorrent clients, including KTorrent, Azureus etc.. are capable of using a distributed hash table network, in many cases, Kademlia, which is often used by eDonkey2000 clients, Overnet and other P2P protocols. What this means, in practical terms, is that the tracker is eliminated and the clients do their own tracking. But the information still gets sent, so this has no practical meaning for security, it’s just there to protect against trackers going down. Usually you don’t have torrents with _just_ DHT, but the clients create a DHT layer on top of the torrent which makes the torrent “immortal”, as long as there are clients still connected with a 100% copy. So the tracker can go down, but people can still get the information they need. However, I said this is only from a technical point of view. Your chances of getting sued for using BitTorrent are in reality far lower than that of FastTrack (Kazaa), Gnutella (Limewire, Frostwire, Bearshare etc…), or eDonkey2000 (eMule and derivatives). This is because on BitTorrent, you don’t make a torrent for a single song track. You just don’t. It’s pointless. You make it for albums. And generally, people don’t want albums, they want individual songs that they choose. So they go to the aforementioned networks. There, the RIAA, the BPI & the IFPI are finding their prey.
The MPAA and MPA on the other hand don’t bother trying to sue individual users, they go for the trackers instead (which can easily be substituted with a DHT), as we saw back in the end of May this year, when they tried (and failed) to take down ThePirateBay.
Others, such as the BSA, really haven’t been very active in P2P pursuit lately, I don’t know how they do it.
Anyway, generally, using BitTorrent will make you safer than using the likes of LimeWire, but without encryption, there’s no certainty. Really, the safest way to do P2P is not to. Not necessarily quit downloading stuff, but not use P2P networks. What I mean by that is the Newsgroups, USENET. You can subscribe to a for-profit USENET server (the free ones aren’t worth the time… If you can find one that allows you to download from alt.binaries (where all the movies and such are), it’s bound to be incredibly slow.) That gives pretty much 100% security and very high speeds, however it isn’t quite as easy to use, and you pay a monthly fee…
Anyway, now I’ve spent an hour writing this and have gotten fairly bored of it. To the guy who wrote the article: If you ever need help with P2P stuff, just ask me. :)
Terry: No need to be rude, you could easily have said that without the word ‘moron’ in the sentence.
Tenpin wrote: “How can we complain that jobs are going abroad when we basically want to put ourselves out of work by paying the cheapest possible price? So much for capitalism.”
I have to pick you up on this Tenpin, sorry. A market that leads to the cheapest possible price is the very essence of Capitalism. It is lowest common denominator economics in a nutshell. I know that you have been conditioned to “believe in” capitalism and defend it to the hilt as an unconditionally “good thing”, but now at least you know what it *IS*
About “using your neighbours wifi”, I think it’s a sort of joke (like the reference to Azureus as something he heard about) to make us remember the woman that won the case against the RIAA in Florida because she said that her wifi wasn´t protected, so anybody (her neighbours) could use it to download music… so, unless they could prove that she did it, she was not responsable… Yes, she won.
I see everyone crying about how horrible Best Buys warranties are but I never see anyone praise it. My friend got a chunky ipod a while ago when it was new 40 gigs just music blah blah paid 300 for it.He had it for a long time than he dropped it and it no longer worked, went to best buy with it and was able to get an Ipod video 30 gig as a replacement for it. A great upgrade (considering wut he had before) for the price of the best buy warranty. Best buy warranties arent bad as long as you know what u get with them and you decide whether u want it or not.
best buy is easily the worst retail offender of bullshit there is. its not even the high prices, and the stupid rebates, and the crappy expensive warranties that they may or may not honor… its the blatant verbal spam you get when you try to buy things… you can ask someone a question without them suggesting you to purchase something else, you cant buy a usb drive without them suggesting geeksquad to come to your house to show you how to use it for a mere $100, and you cant go through the checkout with out having credit card and magazine subscription offers thrown at you. i cant stand it. great place to walk in, see what you want, and then go online and get it elsewhere.
Look at all the poor mac fanboys getting all tiffed “AAC is not proprietary! You suxors!” For all normal purposes anything you buy off of iTunes is DRM’d and only plays on an iPod. That sounds proprietary to me. Funny these guys hate the closed Windows systems but love to be choked out by their beloved Stevie J. Me, I hate all closed systems no matter what company it comes from. Bottom line, if your company has to profit from a closed system, you won’t profit for long. Good riddance.
1. Buy an unlocked, contract-free phone.
2. Get DRM-free music encoded in a free*, patent-less format ((OGG) Vorbis). When putting audio CD’s in your computer, use a free* operating system (GNU/Linux). If you want to stay without trojans from companies like Sony, NEVER use Microsot Windows (insert CD, rootkit installs). When ripping, encode in a free*, patent-less format.
3. Buy an unlocked phone with free* software. If the software doesn’t have the features it could easily have, change the source code yourself or install third-party free* firmware.
5. Just wait. And ask for a DRM-free format (that means (I think) neither HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray).
6. Get only free* music. Do not buy music that the Recording Industry Ass. of America has anything to do with.
7. Who wants AOL anyway… Stay away from companies with that kind of reputation.
By knowing what’s digital freedom and what’s not, you can avoid many of these problems.
* As in freedom, not necessarily cost.
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Oh my goodness I think I am about to go crazy. I need a new phone and a new contract but it makes me furious how backward and technologically retarded cell phones and providers are here in the US.
Firstly, why in the US is it acceptable to charge for both outgoing and incoming calls??? Just means the companies make twice as much money off us.
Two year contracts are too prevalent, who wants that!!
The choice of cell phones in the US is like ten years behind the rest of the world. Like its a big deal to give you a free phone with a camera with your contract!
I can’t beleive you can even still find phones in the shops that don’t have a camera or blue tooth or anything I used to take for granted.
I’m particuarly mad as I checked out phones in The UK where I’m from and not only do ALL phones have cameras etc..etc.. they now have TV!!
UK contracts are 1 year, and get this- THEY GIVE YOU A FREE PHONE UPGRADE EVERY YEAR!!!
Why are US consumers so impotent to sort this out???
I just cannot believe this. The USA is famous for being the best company in the world. I just cannot see any other backward counrty like the one I come from being way in advance of nearly everything. Thats why we see American tourist comming to our countries and bying our technology to sell as antiques back in the states. After all my own house is older than the Declaration of Independance. Its about time somebody ripped it down and built a new one like in America.
A pleasure to look at, go on with this! Thanks!
Sentimental and nostalgic. Great.
We should be punished as customers for wanting to find the cheapest price? Bull. Companies can survive by having good prices if they weren’t so damned GREEDY. When the price is too high, people won’t buy. When the price is too high people CANNOT buy. And when people cannot buy, everything else suffers (jobs, economy, life-line). By the way AVOID STAPLES and any other retailer that has a return policy that sucks. Such as when buying cameras or other elctronic devices- they only allow you to return it if it’s defective (and only for an identical item), never a $ back guarentee unless you make enough of a fit about it. If a product SUCKS you shouldn’t have to be stuck with it. “Well try it out in the store” (that does not give enough time or flexibility to actually see how something stands up). “Our policy is like this because how do we know you didn’t just buy that camera for 1 night to use at a wedding -like a wedding dress- then return a day later after you don’t need it?” Yeah, great policy–have no faith or trust in your customers right off, just because others MAY do that, and therefore have nothing called a “satisfaction guarenteed” policy that shows a company’s faith in it’s customers-it’s life-line! “Yeah well, how do we know you didn’t use that unopened bottle of Pepsi as a door stop last night, then don’t need it anymore so you returned it the next day??!!” CUSTOMERS ARE ALWAYS KING AND RIGHT regardless of the company’s bottom line or other friggin struggles. And when companies loose their trust, faith, and respect for their customers, then they are doomed.
How about companies that sell you a faulty product in the first place knowing it is faulty. windows XP doesn’t go onto standby if there is a process like antivirus running cost you money on your electrcity bill!
A new site called Cell Escape is set up a lot better than the rest, and its completely free. I have successfilly used CellSwapper, CellTradeUSA and even Craigslist to get free phones for my family, but they are all a lot of work. The sites are buggy and don’t offer enough detail. Also, the advertisers never respond. http://CellEscape.com seems to have overcome all these issues and are FREE.
Looking back at those old phones remids me of the bricks they were – Now stuck with a 3 year contreact – will see how out of date I am at the end of that