They finally gave up and will work with ISPs to just send notices to people who appear to be sharing files.

Or more specifically, considering the very, very few people who actually have serious reactions to nuts, the serious reaction by restaurants and schools is nuts (har har).

Ha!

Regulators have handed down new rules that will curb some of the more abusive practices of the credit card industry.

They also restrict such lender practices as allocating all payments to balances with lower interest rates when a borrower has balances with different rates

Did you know they did that? Think store cards with those various interest rate deals that you have to pay off by a certain time or get slapped with fees. What if the store doesn't apply any of your payment to that PART of your debt? What happens? Yeah… it's not good.

The new rules prohibit:

_Placing unfair time constraints on payments. A payment could not be deemed late unless the borrower is given a reasonable period of time, such as 21 days, to pay.

_Placing too-high fees for exceeding the credit limit solely because of a hold placed on the account.

_Unfairly computing balances in a computing tactic known as double-cycle billing.

_Unfairly adding security deposits and fees for issuing credit or making it available.

_Making deceptive offers of credit.

Good start. Too bad we have to constantly be watching companies to prevent them from ripping us off, but that's capitalism…

Until the ruling, recipients of so-called "national security letters" were legally forbidden from speaking out. The letters, usually a demand for documents, or a notice that private records had been searched by government authorities, were criticized as a cover-all for FBI abuses.

It's a good start.

Specifically, the agreement between LifeLock and TransUnion will automate and streamline the processes through which fraud alerts and opt outs are set, confirmed to be in-force and credit reports are provided for LifeLock members. These enhancements will serve to further strengthen LifeLock's delivery of proactive consumer identity theft protection services.

In other words, Transunion has decided to allow Lifelock to place fraud alerts and opt-outs on behalf of customers instead of suing them for abusing the system like Experian did. Wooo.

They advertise this like it's some great thing, but all it does is make life easier for Lifelock and doesn't have any benefit to you as a customer at all.

There's been a lot of noise about (yet another) serious Internet Explorer flaw discovered recently that has Microsoft scrambling for cover.

People still use IE?

Lifehacker posted a new tip for easily downloading Youtube videos today. I've tried a few different options, but so far, this seems the easiest.

Though as one commenter points out:

As soon as youtube notices this, it is simply going to instantly break out of kickyoutube's frames.

We'll see how long this lasts.

I love the Christmas season (which starts AFTER Thanksgiving and NOT before) and I also love modern Christmas music (older than 30 years is a bit much for me).

One of my favorite songs is "Do they know it's Christmas" by Band Aid. It's fun to sing and it's got a great rhythm, but have you ever paid attention to the lyrics?

Lyrics
Video

It's hard to argue with a song that includes a lyric like:

And the Christmas bells that ring there
Are the clanging chimes of doom

It reminds me of another very popular, beautiful-sounding song that most people think is a love song, but is really a "stalker's anthem".

It's that time of year when companies are pushing gift cards again. Safeway is even selling gift cards for other companies (how convenient). Here are the top 5 reasons to reconsider before forking out cash for a tiny plastic card:

Disclaimer

I know that there are SOME cases where buying a gift card is a good thing. This is usually only when someone in your family wants something really expensive that no one can afford and everyone knows it so they pitch in with gift cards. I've never seen that go badly so long as it was under those circumstances.

The other thing I know people will beat me up for in comments if I don't say something first is how hard it is to get someone a good gift sometimes. Here's two tips:

1) Get them something AND a gift card. Make a damned effort you lazy bum.
2) Get you and your family on a gift registry. I made one of my own for my family on my website years back and it's been great! I always know what kinds of gifts my family would like no matter how scattered our time together or phone conversations may be. Even if I don't buy them exactly what they have listed on the site, I at least have an idea of what kinds of things they would like.

So with that said, have a happy and gift card responsible season!

The bailout from this year alone costs more than 3 wars and NASA's budget for as long as it's been in existence. Can we please stop talking about deregulation now?

Duh.

The 18-month survey found that most banks automatically enroll consumers in overdraft programs — some don't allow them to opt out — and then cover overdrawn transactions for a per-item fee of up to $38.

The part many people don't know about is that banks purposefully post all charges to accounts in reverse size-order so that you get over-drawn as quickly as possible and then every small charge left leads to an overdraft fee. Only THEN will they post any deposits meaning that in some cases, people will get overdrafts even if they deposited enough money that day to prevent it.

(H/T to The Consumerist for the link)