Wow. Symantec has always been a fairly reputable company that I've had little issue with other than that their security software is historically bloated and a resource hog. But now that they've partnered with Lifelock, I can only assume one of two things: Symantec is willing to throw their customers under the bus for money or they have no quality control. Either way, I think it's definitely time to stick with McAfee.

If you want to stay safe while working on your computer or browsing web sites, you can get Norton Internet Security or Norton AntiVirus with a 30-day LifeBook service and 10% off the subscription, along with two movie tickets. After the trial period ends you will be charged automatically with $9 a month, or $99 annually.

Granted, McAfee also does this "free trial" BS in order to trick customers into subscriptions that they didn't know they were getting, but at least the free trial is for their anti-virus software and not some shady ID theft insurance deal.

A mother of 4 who was hit with a massive fee for sharing music online a while back finally won a new trial, but somehow ended up with a fine almost 10 times as high!

Even though there was no proof of any harm done to the recording companies since there's no way for them to show that anyone actually downloaded any music from her, she was slapped with a nearly 2 million dollar fine for her immense crimes (which were never proven).

Even if 100,000 people had downloaded each of the 24 songs she supposedly shared online (which probably wasn't even intentional as filesharing software generally shares what you download by default), that JTAG ERROR: http://the-great-copyright-holder-lie-music doesn't appear to be a post_name, link_note, or url! This is a tragedy and I don't understand it. At best, it might be a judge's way of getting attention on the issue by pushing the verdict to absurd extremes.

A while back, I was educated on the various ways that Gamestop is one of the worst businesses in the world (either as a customer or an employee). Now here's more evidence of how rotten they are in the form of how they screw their own employees out of their paychecks using a fee-loaded "pay card" system.

Obama's administration is calling for a cap of $500000 per year maximum for any executive of a company that's receiving federal bail-out money. So, if you suck at your job and had to ask the government for a handout, you can't be making bonuses and millions per year. They must be so sad.

Read about it at the New York Times.

(H/T to The Consumerist for the link)

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

Classmates is constantly annoying us with those bogus ads that claim that someone is looking for you on classmates.com. Someone finally signed up, checked and found that no one was actually looking for him, and is suing them.

Good.

I hope the rats go out of business and that Reunion.com is next.

All I can say is "good". There needs to be consequences for companies that manipulate people for greed.

From the "well freaking duh!" department comes a news story that Washington state (and Microsoft) are suing companies that use those fake security alerts to trick people into downloading and using their products. You know the ones. They usually say something like "Warning! Your computer is infected with viruses and you must download a quick security update to stop it".

Your first warning should be when they ask for your credit card number, but I don't hold that mistake against anyone. The real problem is the scumbag companies who utilize this kind of manipulation. It makes you wonder how they've gotten away with it for so long in the first place.

(H/T to Schneier's Blog for the link)

When this guy tried to sign up for Comcast cable without providing his Social Security Number, they harassed him saying that they were required to ask for it under the Patriot Act.

Deal with this by first finding out what they're going to do with it and how they're going to protect it. I would most likely use the '0' trick or just make sure your credit reports are frozen and they wouldn't be able to run credit on you even if they tried.

Now if the lawsuits would propagate throughout the world, we'd finally be getting somewhere. From the article:

In his order, the judge found that the church had used “personality tests void of scientific value…with the sole aim of selling services or divers products.??

No kidding.