I’ve been harvesting spam referers and trackback attack IPs on a daily basis, but while the number of new spam referers is down, the trackback IPs seem to be up.  I had one single IP in Cambodia hit the trackback script 424 times yesterday.  Before that I’d had another IP hit it over 700 times in a day.  There have been 434 trackback attempts today, none of them valid.  The problem is that even though they don’t succeed, they still require invoking PHP, making a database query to check the “token”, then issuing a response. 

I hate to do it, but I’m disabling trackbacks for a while.  I’ve also disabled anything with “referrers” in the request, since that is no longer an active page.  Anyone hitting that page now is presumed to be a spammer.

I had to do a bit of searching to come up with just the right .htaccess incantation to do this, since my installation of PHP requires the use of the CGI GET separator (”?”) instead of using “clean” URL’s like most installations of Expression Engine.  The following looks at the parameters passed to the script and returns a 403 to any caller who passes “trackback” or “referrers” anywhere in the query.


RewriteCond %    ^(.*)trackback(.*)  [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %    ^(.*)referrers(.*)  [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) - [F]


It does have the danger that if I ever use the word “trackback” or “referrers” in a post title it wouldn’t be accessible, but that’s a small risk I’m willing to take.

As I wrote yesterday, I’ve been suspecting that my wireless network is getting interference from a nearby AP. 

Yesterday afternoon the problems started again and I was able to get outside with my WiFi finder and snoop out the house where the signal seems to originate.  Interestingly, I’ve also noticed that I always see the 2Wire AP in conjunction with the other AP on channel 6.  That AP, no so coincidentally, has an SSID that is the name of the owner of that house.  So I think I’ve got a good handle on where the problem is coming from.

But I was a bit puzzled that I only see these AP’s intermittently.  As far as I could tell I wasn’t doing anything to change the RF access path like opening windows or doors.  After thinking about it a bit, my suspicion is that this guy has two AP’s, one of which is the 2Wire, and he’s trying to operate them at the same time and they’re interfering with one another.  I also suspect that the 2Wire may be increasing its power to try to “burn through” the interference it’s seeing from the other AP on the same channel.  The pattern of interference probably coincides with him fiddling with the equipment and then shutting it off for a while.  My WiFi detector also showed a 2.4GHz phone being operated there, so I suspect his network is all over the floor. 

I’m still curious as to why he has two AP’s, though.  If he was using the 2Wire previously and just got Fios, I suppose that could be one reason.  Another could be that he seems like one of those “more power” guys who’d search out something like the 2Wire (see next paragraph).

Anyhow, I now need to figure out how to approach him without making him defensive.  I’ve only dealt directly with him once, when his dogs broke through the fence and came into my yard.  But his demeanor during that incident, his subsequent treatment of the dogs, and the way he yells at his kids don’t give me much hope that he’s the type that one can work with.  An offer to help him “fix” his network might be interpreted as a threat to his pride/manhood. 

In my continuing saga with wireless networking I’ve learned quite a few things.  I’d previously mentioned that I was having trouble keeping my wireless network up and running.  I originally suspected interference from a wireless phone, perhaps in the house next door (which had new residents).  It turns out that it wasn’t a wireless phone, but a combination of faulty equipment and other interference.

After waiting about three weeks for my Wifi Detector(¹) to arrive, I was finally able to use it to get a reading during an outage.  What I found surprised me.  I was getting no signal whatsoever, because the router/AP was going offline.  The router I was using was a Linksys WRT54GS v2 that I purchased in late July to replace my old WRT54G v1 that had died while I was on vacation.  The old one had been rock-solid up to its untimely death after two years of service.

Guessing that something was amiss with the router, I went ahead and obtained a WRT54G v5 (²).  This one had the exact same symptoms as the other one.  I started doing some Google searches and ran across some interesting forum entries about the WRT54G[S] line.  Some people had been experiencing overheating that caused intermittent wireless outages and reboots.  They cured it in some cases using fans and heatsinks (and one guy even tilted his router up so that heat would flow better).  Another thread found that there appears to be a bug in the ethernet driver in the router that causes it to lock up after a certain amount of data had flowed (and/or when it was under heavy load).  Many users were able to very accurately predict failure by copying large files.  The router would lock up in the same place each time (although the amount of data flow varied).  Finally, one user found that there was a certain byte sequence in the data stream that would cause the router to lock up and reboot.  He was able to reproduce the problem with only a 1600-byte file.

Needless to say, I was less than thrilled with this, so after a morning spent with intermittent disconnects I went over to Staples and acquired a Belkin Pre-N router.  Installation was not pain free, as the thing has some weird quirks with regards to setting it up in AP-only mode (I found myself having to use a laptop with an ethernet cable and switch cables between the LAN and WAN ports after changing to AP mode).  It turns out that it needed an upgrade to the firmware to work correctly as an AP³.  Once I had that ironed out it seemed to work quite well, though.  The MIMO technology seems to provide better signal coverage as my office bridge was reporting 100% signal, where it had only gotten 76% with the Linksys. 

All seemed well for about a week.  Then I started having intermittent slow-downs and an occasional disconnect.  Some browsing on the bridge showed that during these periods it was seeing other networks in the area:

What’s interesting is that these networks don’t show up most of the time.  At the time this snapshot was taken, the bridge was working fine, even with the other networks visible (note the 100% signal strength).  What I noticed during the outages is that the signal strength on my network will go down to between 70% and 50%, and the 2Wire network will show up.  If the 2Wire isn’t visible, I don’t have any problems. 

A little digging on Google unearthed a possible explanation.  Some 2Wire AP’s are capable of transmitting at 400mW.  It is my understanding that “normal” AP’s transmit somewhere between 100-200mW.  However, it would seem that since my network is on channel 1 and the 2Wire is on channel 6 that there shouldn’t be a problem.  It turns out that this isn’t completely true.  The typical bandwidth for wireless-g is 44MHz (or so I’ve been told), which means that it uses frequencies from 22MHz below the channel center to 22MHz above the channel center.  This means that for 802.11b/g that channels 1,6, and 11 almost touch each other (e.g. channel 1 is at 2412MHz and channel 6 is at 2437MHz; adding 22MHz to channel 1 gets you to 2434MHz).  Here’s a diagram (borrowed from the IEEE 802.11b-1999 document) of the channel layout in North America.

Typically, the adjacent signals should not interfere with each other, because the IEEE specification shows a -50dBr signal strength at +/- 22MHz from the channel center, as shown in this diagram:

However, since I only seem to have trouble now when the 2Wire is operational, and since it’s capable of transmitting at much higher power than usual, I can’t help but wonder if something is out-of-spec on the 2Wire that’s causing interference on channel 1.  Although -50dB is a significant difference in power, it should be noted that it is a relative measurement.  If you take a 400mW signal and attenuate it by -50dB, it’s still greater than a signal at 200mW attenuated -50dB.  I’m not a radio expert, though.  I know just enough to be dangerous.  But my empirical observation is that the 2Wire is the likely culprit, and I’ve seen some information via Google that suggests that others are having similar problems.

Now it remains for me to see if I can pinpoint the house with the 2Wire unit and encourage the user to move the device to channel 11.  At least that would give some breathing room for my network, and perhaps show once and for all whether the 2Wire is the problem. 

Previous entries:
Channelling Annoyance
Wired to the Channel

¹ I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, but I think Amazon’s free shipping has spoiled me for free shipping offers from other companies.  Amazon usually delivers early on their free shipping offer (or at worst they will be right on time with their estimate).  In this instance, with Buy.com, I thought perhaps the item was lost, since I got a shipping notice on 10/12 and didn’t get the package until 10/28.  In fact, I was just about to initiate a “lost package” request with them when I read their conditions.  You have to wait 21 days on a “budget shipping” item to report it lost.  If I was more cynical I’d suspect they do this on purpose to encourage you to purchase their other shipping options…

²  Linksys has a habit of keeping the same model number and just adding a revision code on the bottom of the router to indicate what hardware revision you get.  With the WRT54G[S] series, sometimes those revisions can be fairly drastic.  Version 5 of the WRT54G series has a much smaller motherboard, less flash memory, and a new operating system (VxWorks instead of Linux).  Further, because of the changes, it will not work with alternate firmware, such as DD-WRT.

³  Why would you buy a router and use it as an AP?  Fios TV requires me to use the D-Link router they supplied, and it’s a wired unit.  Further, it turns out that it’s often less expensive to buy a wireless router than a AP.  I’m not sure why it’s that way, but that’s the way it is in the marketplace (perhaps because in the home/home-office segment more people buy wireless routers than AP’s?).

Sony is being sued by the State of California over their nefarious hidden rootkit that is installed from some of their music CDs. 

I hope Sony gets a good spanking over this.  It’s not that I advocate stealing music, but that I am absolutely opposed to having (buggy) software installed on my system without my permission.  What’s worse is that this software will only inconvenience regular users.  Anyone who is really interested in stealing and reselling the content will be able to get around the copy restrictions.  And this will remain true as long as CD-Audio remains a viable format.  There is a well-defined format (Redbook) for how audio CDs must be arranged so that they can be read by CD players.  As long as Redbook audio is on the disk, there will be a way to access it and rip it.  The Sony rootkit worked by hooking the CD driver so that Windows can’t see the audio portion of the “protected” disks.

This sort of thing is one of the main factors in my decision to strictly use my Linux system for ripping CDs.  The Linux CD driver is not confused by having both data and music on the CD, and my ripper (Grip) uses cdparanoia, which is also capable of overcoming bad sectors and other disk anomalies.  It’s not as user friendly as iTunes, but it’s much safer and robust as well as being immune to silly Sony rootkits.

I rip every CD I buy, and so far I have not encountered one that would not rip.  If I ever do, I will return it as defective.

Update:  Well, that didn’t take long.  A trojan has already been spotted that takes advantage of the Sony rootkit to hide itself.

Sony-BMG’s rootkit DRM technology masks files whose filenames start with “$sys$”. A newly-discovered variant of of the Breplibot Trojan takes advantage of this to drop the file “$sys$drv.exe” in the Windows system directory.

“This means, that for systems infected by the Sony DRM rootkit technology, the dropped file is entirely invisible to the user. It will not be found in any process and file listing. Only rootkit scanners, such as the free utility RootkitRevealer, can unmask the culprit,” warns Ivan Macalintal, a senior threat analyst at security firm Trend Micro

The malware arrives attached in an email, which pretends to come from a reputable business magazine, asking the businessman to verify his/her “picture” to be used for the December issue. If the malicious payload contained in this email is executed then the Trojan installs an IRC backdoor on affected Windows systems

One of the problems with the constant referrer spam battle is that it takes manual examination of some of the links to determine if they are spam or legit.  If the referred link has a high reference count or it obviously contains a product name, it’s easy to deal with.  It’s the ones with lower reference counts on Blogspot or Tripod or other free hosting services that are more difficult.  I don’t want to forbid a legitimate referrer.

I made the mistake of examining a link that started with “anatolia19.”  It turned out to be some kind of teen sex link.  Unfortunately, I’ve seen a ton of these, but what I wasn’t expecting was what I saw at the bottom of the page.  There was a girl on there who couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9!  Bloody hell!  What kind of sick twitch looks at an 8 year old and sees something sexual?  I’d love to get hold of the sick bastard who sent me this referer and the scum who runs the site and kill them slowly and painfully. 

So consider yourself warned.  If you see this link in your referrers, DO NOT VISIT IT.  Blacklist it immediately.

As someone who has to spend time on a daily basis hunting down and removing spam attacks on my website, I have absolutely zero sympathy for this guy, should he be proved guilty.

A 20-year-old man accused of using thousands of hijacked computers, or “bot nets,” to damage systems and send massive amounts of spam across the Internet was arrested Thursday in what authorities called the first such prosecution of its kind.

Jeanson James Ancheta, who prosecutors say was a well-known member of the “Botmaster Underground”—or the secret network of computer hackers skilled at bot attacks—was taken into custody after being lured to FBI offices in Los Angeles, said U.S. Attorney’s spokesman Thom Mrozek.

I’ve heard it said by spam apologists that it’s nothing personal that they attack your website.  To them, it’s all business.  Your PC is simply a commodity, to be infected with a bot and traded amongst spammers.  Your website is another commodity to be used to gain hits for their clients.  And it would appear that despite our best efforts, there is still money to be made:

Mrozek said Ancheta, who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, was thought to have made nearly $60,000 from the planted adware, using the money to pay for servers to carry out additional attacks, computer equipment and a BMW.

However, the government takes a dim view of these actions, as I think they should.  Perhaps, if convicted, he could serve as an example to others:

Ancheta has been indicted on a 17-count federal indictment that charges him with conspiracy, attempted transmission of code to a protected computer, transmission of code to a government computer, accessing a protected computer to commit fraud and money laundering.

Ancheta, who was expected to make an initial court appearance late on Thursday or Friday, faces a maximum term of 50 years in prison if convicted on all counts, though federal sentencing guidelines typically call for lesser penalties.

I would not cry for him if he got the full sentence.  What these people are doing is THEFT, pure and simple.  They are stealing resources from people’s PCs as well as from their websites.  If I don’t stay on top of these bastards on a daily basis, I run the risk of overusing my shared hosting plan and being forced to upgrade to a dedicated server if I want to stay online, which would cost me about $100 per month.  When you look at the amount of resources that are being used up by spammers, it doesn’t take many of them to have a significant effect.

If I believed in all that religion stuff I’d say that he and the rest of his ilk should rot in hell.  Short of that, though, perhaps we can make his time on Earth very unpleasant.  I believe I mentioned the use of small caliber weapons on body extremities in the comments on someone’s weblog.  If that proves impractical, then perhaps staking them over a fireant bed would be sufficient.

Verizon has now completed its quest for communications hegemony at my house.  I have phone, internet, and TV all provided through Fios. 

I’d had phone and internet through Fios for over a year and it had been pretty good, with only a couple of minor outages.  Upon seeing the prices and options for their TV service, I determined that I could get HD service with a dual-tuner DVR (and a second STB in the bedroom) for less than it would cost with Charter. 

The installation window was scheduled for 1:00-5:00pm on Wednesday and the techs showed up around 1:45pm.  I showed them where everything was, and while they were working out the coax runs, I disconnected the Charter cable box and the Tivo and hooked up some component video cables to my TV.  This was the first place where experience was different from theory.  I’d asked the Fios people on the phone what model of DVR they would be bringing.  I was told that it was a Motorola 6416.  I found that the 6416 wasn’t shown on the public part of the website yet, although it was supposed to be functionally the same as the 6412 (just with a bigger hard drive).  The diagram in the manual shows that it has composite, S-video, component, HDMI, 1394, and DVI-D outputs.  I already had a DVI-D cable I was using with the computer, so I was planning to just yank that and connect it to the DVR.  Unfortunately, the actual device does NOT have DVI-D, just HDMI.  It was fortunate that I had a set of component cables to use for now.  Later I will get the correct cable and give full digital a try.

The only other annoyance to the install was that it required changes to my home network.  Fios TV is a “hybrid” architecture.  It’s not IPTV, but instead uses an RF overlay on the fiber (and the ONT has a coax output) and uses an IP connection through my router to download program guide data and handle pay-per-view transactions.  Verizon INSISTS that you must use their router and cannot use one of your own.  Of course, they insisted this for Fios Internet as well, but I ignored it and plugged in my Linksys as soon as they left.  It turns out that this DOES NOT work for Fios TV.  So I had to dig out the old D-Link they’d left me and get it working again.  The installers then upgraded the firmware (using a proprietary version, unique to Verizon). 

Using the D-Link meant that I had to do some fiddling with my Linksys to use it more as an access point than as a router.  But I got it working with a little fiddling (and some reconfiguration as I discovered various failing devices).  The installer tested the internet access using his laptop and pronounced it good.  But after hooking up the DVR and the STB we discovered that the program guide data would not load.  The installers kept fiddling and testing and working with the support center, but to no avail.  Unfortunately, I had to be at a meeting at 7:00pm, so we gave up and I sent them on their way around 6:45. 

The next day I started fiddling and digging…  (always a dangerous thing )

I did some research and learned about the “hidden” technician menu and was able to access it to learn more about the configuration.  I also learned that the DVR and the STB both had integrated cable modems and were using Motorola’s Whole Home Media technology.  There is a separate device that attaches to the coax and then to my router that provides the IP path out of my house.  It was after looking at the WHM configuration in the DVR that I noticed something odd.  A long time ago I had defined my network as 192.168.2.0/8, instead of the Linksys default of 192.168.1.0/8.  The DVR and the STB were trying to use addresses of 192.168.0.50 and 192.168.0.52, which got my attention, since D-Link uses 192.168.0.0/8 as their default network.  I remembered this, since I’d encountered it while changing the D-Link to 192.168.2.0/8 the previous day.

I took a guess that the DVR and STB were brain-damaged devices that made the faulty assumption that the network would always be 192.168.0.0/8, since Verizon gives out D-Link equipment.  I reconfigured the network back to the default and suddenly the damn things were getting their guide data.  Interestingly, both devices appear to be trying to use DHCP, but in a bad way.  Instead of simply requesting a lease for a new address, they appear to be requesting specific addresses in the 192.168.0.0/8 network that will be “out of the way” of the addresses usually returned from the router (D-Link defaults to returning addresses between 192.168.0.100 and 192.168.0.199).  Of course, all this is speculation, but it’s based on observation and troubleshooting.  Examining the DHCP clients table on the router (as well as the WHM configuration in the DVR’s tech menu) after unplugging and plugging in the bedroom STB showed that one particular MAC address had moved from 192.168.0.50 to 192.168.0.51.

After going through all this, I then called their customer support and explained the problem to them and suggested they add an article to their Knowledgebase about this situation.  I also suggested that they should try to make the devices a bit more standards-compliant (or at least use the standard in a reasonable way), but I don’t know how much good that will do.  Often, the level 1’s just ignore this stuff and close the ticket.  I suspect most people won’t have fiddled with their network configuration like me.  Still, though, it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Just for grins, I decided to map all this crap out into a diagram.  I didn’t realize until I was done just how much techno-crap I have in this house…

(click for monster)

I’ve been pondering whether to change cell phone providers.  I’ve grown increasingly more dissatisfied with Cingular over the past year or so.  My main concern with Cingular is that despite their constant advertising about “more bars” after the acquisition of AT&T*, I am having more difficulty making and taking calls.  As I go about my daily routine I find that there are MANY dead spots around town.  Further, I have come to conclude that my phone lies to me about the actual signal strength.  Many times I have lost a call despite having three or four bars.

My primary concern is having a phone that actually works as a phone.  Cameras and games and ringtones are nice shiny little toys, but they add nothing to the actual business of making phone calls.  I wonder at times whether all the attention given to add-ons isn’t distracting the wireless companies from their core business of providing phone service.

Anyhow, I’m considering Sprint or Verizon.  Oddly enough, I’ve actually come across a couple of people with nice things to say about Verizon (which when you consider most people’s overall feeling about their cell provider, is something of a rarity).  I suppose if I choose Verizon they will have completed their quest for total domination of my communications services (Internet, landline, TV, and cell).  Talk about all your eggs in one basket…

I see that cell companies are now starting to offer more information about coverage area on their websites, as well as a 15-day grace period where you can take the phone back and cancel the contract.  This is one of the things I’d always wanted in the past, because you never knew when signing up with a company exactly what kind of signal and sound you’d get.  Now I can try them out before being permanently locked into any committment.  The other thing I’d like to find out, but which would be harder, is how well the provider handles 911 calls.  I tried calling 911 with my Cingular phone from the intersection of Bourland and Keller Parkway after a traffic wreck a couple of weeks ago and ended up getting the Fort Worth 911 center.  It took them about three minutes to transfer my call to the Keller 911 center, by which time the wreck had already been reported by several other people.

Here are the requirements I’m going to have in mind as I’m comparing companies and plans:

• Good signal coverage.
• Good call quality (signal strength isn’t the only indicator of quality; the level of compression used and the quality of the equipment matters, too)
• Must have a “trial” period where the agreement can be cancelled.
• Should get the correct 911 center.

I suspect Google is going to be my friend while I’m doing these comparisons.  I’m going to have to research not only the companies and their coverage, but the phones.  It’s kind of a daunting task, considering that searching for a cellular company on Google usually results in lots of references to very unhappy people.

* I ditched AT&T several years ago and switched to Cingular (except they weren’t Cingular yet) because of AT&T’s horrid customer service.  It only takes one instance of being treated as a nuisance in the store for me to give up on a company (in this case, the sales drone in the Denton store couldn’t be arsed to discontinue his phone conversation in order to sell me a phone upgrade, at which point I left and began looking for a new company).

Given my usual antipathy towards customer tracking technology, many would be surprised to know that I have a vehicle with OnStar.  They would be further surprised to know that it’s actually active and subscribed!  What can I say?  I guess we’re not always rational or consistent.  However, it should also be stated that I went into this knowing the full capabilities of the equipment, and further, knowing how to disable it if I so desired (i.e. I found some simple instructions on how to disconnect the unit).  Anyhow, I decided that the features of the service were worth the privacy tradeoff, but this isn’t the primary point of this post.

I recently saw that OnStar was offering regular diagnostics via email (i.e. you get a periodic email showing the overall state of several vehicle systems).  Since it was free I went ahead and enabled it to see how it would work.  Along the way I was looking at their FAQ and noticed some interesting things about the equipment.  In 2008 the FCC will allow cellphone carriers to discontinue service for analog cell service.  OnStar systems produced before 2004 are mostly analog, and in 2004 they introduced digital-ready systems.  The latest OnStar systems are analog/digital.  This means that there are three possible outcomes for the OnStar user in 2008:

1. Analog only system.

   Cannot be upgraded.  Service will end in 2008.

2. Digital-ready

   System will require an upgrade to the equipment to continue working

3. Analog/Digital

   System will work without interruption and no upgrade is needed

Since my truck is a 2004 model, it is possible that it has either the digital-ready or the digital system, depending on exactly when it was built.  The FAQ states that I should contact OnStar to find out exactly which it has.

Q2. What kind of hardware does my OnStar-equipped vehicle have?

A2. To determine the equipment type in an OnStar-equipped vehicle, you may:

1. Press the blue OnStar button in the vehicle and ask the OnStar Advisor to identify which equipment type was factory-installed in the vehicle.
2. Call OnStar toll-free at 1.888.206.0031, or to contact us online, click here. (Please have your OnStar account number or your vehicle identification number (VIN) available.)

 

IMPORTANT NOTE:

In November 2002, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled that wireless carriers will no longer be required to support the analog wireless network as of early 2008. As a result, beginning January 1, 2008, OnStar service in the U.S. and Canada will be available only through dual-mode (analog/digital) equipment.

For more information about the analog to digital transition, click here.

I actually like the idea of online support forms, since it allow an asynchronous communications method for answers to questions that aren’t high priority for me.  It means I don’t have to sit there on the phone and take up a lot of time waiting.  Unfortunately, I’ve noticed a trend for companies to answer online request forms with a message to call them.  I find this infuriating, since the whole point of online support forms is to get questions answered without calling.

I guess you can see where this is going now.  I followed their FAQ and submitted a question online to find out what kind of equipment I have.  The answer was less than helpful (I removed the rep’s name to be nice).

Dear Mr. Turner,

Thank you for taking the time to contact OnStar. Our goal is always to provide the safety, security and peace of mind that OnStar offers.

In order to properly identify your vehicle’s hardware and eligibility for the analog to digital hardware upgrade program, please press the blue OnStar button or contact us at 1.888.4.ONSTAR (1.888.466.7827).

Sincerely,

<name>
OnStar Information Specialist

I’ve heard this kind of excuse before from some companies.  They claim that in order to verify my identity I should call.  However, this problem is easily correctable by putting a contact form behind the member login.  I’ve seen companies that do this so that they know they’re dealing with the right person.  Still, though, if I have the account number and VIN, it wouldn’t have been a national security breach to tell me what kind of equipment was in the truck.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased, and wrote back to him that if OnStar isn’t going to accept online inquiries, then they should at least remove the instructions from their FAQ.  Amazingly enough, he replied to my email with the information I was seeking! 

Dear Mr. Turner,

Your vehicle was built with Analog/Digital-Ready hardware. This hardware is currently eligible for an upgrade to digital hardware. This upgrade will be required for your vehicle to be eligble for service beyond OnSatr’s analog sunset date of December 31, 2007.

A non refundable three year subscription purchase is required.

Payment for the three-year subscrioption is due to the dealership at the time the dealer performs the digital upgrade.

The pre paid subscription is tranferreable.

Please contact your dealer for an appointment.

If you have any other concerns, please feel free to contact the OnStar Customer Care Department at 1-888-4ONSTAR (1-888-466-7827), prompt 4, between the hours of 6am and 1am EST.

Sincerely,

<Name>
OnStar Information Specialist

(Interesting.  Anyone else notice the hours for calling?  Is this a mistake or a subtle hint to call at some time when he’s not there?  )

Hmm….  being peeved gets results for a change.  And no, I wasn’t rude to the rep, although I was a bit miffed and allowed the tone to come through.  My email is in the extended entry, though, just to show I’m not hiding anything in the exchange.

My response to the initial OnStar response:

From: <My email address />
Date: 10/19/05
To: <OnStar Email Address />
Subject: Re: Question [#<CaseNum />]

I hate to say this, but I was kind of expecting this answer,
because I have noticed a trend of companies giving this
response to online questions.

Frankly, I find this answer infuriating. Why?  Because your
own customer FAQ says that the online inquiry form is a
proper way to ask this question.  What’s the point of
having it if you can’t use it?

Specifically, let me quote from your own technical equipment
FAQ, Question 2, Answer 2, Section 2:
http://www.onstar.com/us_english/jsp/explore/onstar_basics/helpful_info.jsp?info-view=tech_equip

“2.  Call OnStar toll-free at 1.888.206.0031, or to contact us online, click here. (Please have your OnStar account number or your vehicle identification number (VIN) available.)”

Notice the “click here” link.  I followed the instruction by clicking
the link and providing my account number (on the form) and the VIN (in
the text of the inquiry).

If you are not able to answer questions online, then please remove this
from the FAQ.

However, I will admit that the priority of the answer to this question
has dropped after I read other sections of the FAQ that stated that
the only way to get an upgrade for a digital-ready system in 2008
would be to purchase a three-year prepaid subscription.  If that’s
the only option, and if my system isn’t digital, I will end my OnStar
subscription at that time, as I will NOT pay for three years up front.

This technique is an interesting security measure.

Finnish scientists have invented a device to make it harder to steal mobile phones and laptops by enabling them to detect changes in their owner’s walking style and then freeze to prevent unauthorized use.

The first thing to enter my mind was what happens if you sprain your ankle?  It turns out they’ve included a password challenge if it detects that you’re “walking funny.”