My company has a phone system that allows people who work at home to have their company phone routed to a home phone.  Further, there are ways to set it up so that your home phone can dial directly into the internal phone network.  But to avoid interfering with the existing home phone service they recommend getting a second phone line.  All that’s required is a basic local phone line.  You don’t need call waiting (the system routes callers to voice mail if you’re already on the line) or voice mail (they actively discourage using non-company voice mail systems). 

So I called Verizon yesterday afternoon to inquire about the costs of a second phone line.  Their most basic service is $21.25 per month (before all of the fees, surcharges, and other annoying overhead crap).  I also wanted to get Caller ID to deal with the annoyance of telemarketers (I got three of them within an hour while working at home on Wednesday).  If you want Caller ID ‘ala carte’, it’s an additional $7.95 per month (bringing the total to $29.20).  Further, if you get just the basic service there will be a $50.00 “installation” fee (which is just for connecting the outside wire to your network interface box; no inside wiring is included).  However, if you get their handy bundle of services for $34.95 per month you can get free installation and it includes Caller ID (along with a bunch of other crap I didn’t need).  This is a great scam.  It entices you into spending more per month for services you don’t really want and for services that don’t cost them much to provide.  I have a hard time believing that it costs them anywhere near $7.95 per month to provide Caller ID.  But by pricing it there it helps steer people into their bundled services, which provides them with a nice monthly revenue stream.

I also asked them about having their technician run a new jack into my office.  I’ve done my own phone wiring in the past, but it’s kind of a pain in the butt and I don’t like traipsing around in the attic.  They told me that they can do it, but they charge $91.00 for the first half-hour and $53.00 for each half-hour after that.  Damn.  At that rate I suppose I’ll just do it myself.

This concept vehicle from Bombardier reminds me of something from Star Wars (although you’d have to scuff up the smooth finish and make it look like it’d been beaten with a hammer to get it exactly right).  But I’m left wondering what would happen if the gyros failed?  I suspect you’d be roadkill…

It appears that Belkin stepped into a big pile of public relations crap with the latest firmware update to one of their home router/firewall devices.

The marketing geniuses at Belkin, the consumer networking vendor, have dreamed up a new form of spam – ads served to your desktop, by way of its wireless router.

Uh Clem. a former Belkin wireless router user, was perplexed to find machines on his network redirected to an ad for Belkin’s new parental control system, following a software update. (emphasis added)

Belkin has created a new content filtering system to their routers (censorware) that requires a subscription to their service (the list of blocked sites resides in their central servers, which the router uses to get updates).  Someone at Belkin thought it would be just spiffy if the router would automatically route a user’s web request to their ad page which tried to get the user to sign up for the six month “free” trial.  The user would be forced to hit an “opt-out” button to stop this from happening in the future (the router will hijack a web request every eight hours until the user either activates the content filtering trial or opts out). 

Belkin’s initial reaction was to try to control the damage by responding to the Usenet post.  This didn’t go over very well with users, who rightly thought that it was a bunch of marketing spin.  Someone (most likely at Belkin) deleted the response, but it was too late since the response was mirrored all over the place.  Belkin then created a rather curt and defensive announcement on their website (claiming that only people who cancelled a window during installation without opting-out of the redirect would get redirects; i.e. it’s your fault that we keep hitting you in the face because you never asked us not to).  They later changed to a more concilatory one.  The current statement says that a firmware upgrade will be available on November, 17th “to allay customers’ worries”. 

I don’t own any Belkin networking hardware and I’m not likely to do so in the future, given this little fiasco.  A home firewall/router should never redirect a user’s request without the user’s consent, which is what was happening here.  Not only is it dishonest and annoying, it could potentially mess up an online transaction (not to mention cause untold trouble for any non-web HTTP traffic over the router; e.x. SOAP/RPC over HTTP).  But there’s also a great big gaping security hole in their process (at least as I see it).  When the user selects the “opt-out” link on the redirected page, the a flag is set in the router to turn off redirects.  This means that an unauthenticated path exists for a request to be sent to the router to change its internal state from outside the secure side of the network.  Granted, it’s just a flag, but it makes you wonder what other little backdoors the marketdroids at Belkin have inserted into the firmware.

Link via Slashdot. 

Yesterday’s follow-up from Slashdot.

This is potentially good news.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has just decided to fund multiple human clinical studies to test the reovirus. This naturally occuring virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells.

It appears that almost all of us have a natural immunity to this virus due to it being so pervasive in the environment.  However, a cancerous cell does not have the same immune response as a healthy cell, which means that the virus ends up killing the cancer cells and propagating itself to other cancerous cells.

Further proof that spammers are evil.

I like the sound of this technology.  It’s a nuclear power plant that is sealed, requires little maintenance, and can’t go critical like the standard design.  Toshiba is offering to build the plant in Alaska for free to supply power to a remote area (which currently has to import diesel for its generators).  The biggest hurdle will be getting regulatory approval, which they estimate could cost as much as $600 million.  However, if they can get approval, future copies of the reactor could be built for $20 million each and delivered to remote locations.

ThinkGeek has a variety of interesting items (at least if you’re the geeky sort).  I bought a Powerball last week, which arrived yesterday.  It helps build wrist and arm muscles through the force of the gyroscope.  You start it spinning and then through wrist motion you impart more energy to the gyro.  As it spins faster it takes more and more force to make it go faster.  It’s kind of addictive because you end up trying to beat your own speed record (it includes a digital readout that records your highest RPM). 

I’m not sure how helpful it will ultimately be, but it’s fun to play with.

I heard about this yesterday morning on the local news.  I had no idea that such a device existed (although it’s probably fairly simple once you think about it).  What is it?  It’s a device that disables the starter system on a car unless the payment has been made.  It’s installed at the time of sale and programmed with the payment schedule (weekly, semi-monthly, monthly, etc).  Three days before the payment is due a red light starts to flash.  On the fourth day the starter will be disabled.  Upon making a payment, the lender gives the buyer a code that is entered into the system using a keypad, which resets it.

I know it sounds intrusive and annoying (I certainly wouldn’t want to have to deal with it), but it allows the dealers to sell to people whose credit wouldn’t have allowed them to obtain a car in the past.

I wonder if anyone has ever explored the idea of pay-per-view access to movie channels like Showtime.  My mother has DirecTV, but she doesn’t get Showtime (she gets HBO, Cinemax, and Starz).  I have Showtime and about all I watch on it is Dead Like Me.  It would seem like the technology is already there to handle this kind of thing, it just needs to be applied to this.  That way, I could watch just the shows I wanted and not have to pay for the channel when I’m not using it.  Of course for the economics to work out, the charges would have to be less than the typical pay-per-view movie.

Of course, I could just wait until I get back to Denton and watch it on the Tivo.

Has the technology that was intended to bring us together actually split us further apart?  This article seems to imply that this could be the case.

Tim Sanders has spent his career promoting the use of technology, and it’s in this quest that he experienced his darkest of moments.

Sanders, the chief solutions officer at Yahoo!, said his career was thriving in the mid-1990s, yet he began to feel increasingly empty. He noticed colleagues sending him instant messages from 5 feet away. He watched brilliant engineers slowly replace face-to-face relationships with lower-risk contact online.

“I saw a paradox,” he said, “a world of community with loneliness.”

Sanders came to define the condition as “New Economy Depression Syndrome,” a state of work-related stress brought on by information overload, constant interruption by technology (think e-mail, instant messaging and cell phones) and the increasing personal isolation that technology affords us.

And here’s something that bloggers might need to think about.

New research suggests that limiting our use of technology might be good for your health. A study by Chiba University in Tokyo found that spending five hours or more in front of a computer increased a person’s risk of depression, insomnia and other mental-health-related diseases.

The study, which monitored the mental-health changes of 25,000 Japanese high-tech workers over three years, found that employees who worked five hours or more in front of a computer were more prone to depression and anxiety. The results were published late last year in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

One thing I’ve noticed lately in my own workplace is the push towards “virtual teams.”  I’ve been working on a team for the past 16 months and I’ve only met two of the people on that team.  We do everything through conference calls, instant messages, emails, and web conferences.  We somehow manage to get the work done, but it’s not very satisfying.  I’ve worked on other projects where the team members were all located in the same place.  It just seems more efficient to walk into someone’s office and work something out, rather than trying to handle it via phone calls and emails.  You can’t wave your hands around and draw on the whiteboard via the phone.

I don’t see this trend getting any better, though.  There’s a rumor afoot that we’re going to have to give up our current offices and move upstairs (and into cubicles) (or we may have to move to another office altogether).  Given that my job entails a lot of time on the phone (that pesky virtual team business), being in a cubicle will be painful (even with a headset), so I may have to compound the isolation by working from home more often.  Some of the other people on my floor may even give up their offices altogether and work from home fulltime. 

The company may think it’s going to save money this way, and their bottom line will show a savings, but I think that there are intangible costs that they can’t track so well.  Our tediously anal hourly tracking system, despite having a zillion codes for everything, doesn’t have a code for ‘farting around trying to make someone understand something over the phone when I could explain it in 30 seconds in person.’ (At least not yet).