DailyDirt: Ads Gone Wrong

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Commercials are always trying to get people's attention -- sometimes by being controversial and sometimes by being shocking. But even when a company tries to broadcast only sensitive and feel-good messages, there will always be some folks pointing out that companies don't really care about people as much as profits. Here are just a few advertisements that might have just missed getting their message across.

• Why is it that car companies seem to have a hard time NOT making offensive ads? Ford India recently apologized for some terrible ads depicting bound and gagged women in the spacious hatchback trunk of a Ford Figo. But Ford wasn't the only example, Hyundai and GM also had some horrible commercials to retract recently. [url]
• Dr Pepper posted an ad on Facebook with a common geeky joke, showing the evolution of humans -- starting with a chimp-like ancestor and ending with a modern upright person holding a can of his favorite beverage. Poking the beehive of anti-evolution religious folks might be a fairly safe way of creating some controversy, but it probably doesn't sell that much more sugar water. [url]
• The Economist once ran an ad for itself, asking "Why should women read The Economist?" Maybe publications written by -- and read by -- mostly men should be a bit more careful when trying to step away from being a "Maxim for nerds"..? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: ads, advertising, commercials, economist, failures, jokes, publicity
Companies: dove, dr pepper, ford, gm, hyundai

Ubisoft uPlay Launcher Exploit Strips DRM From All Publisher's Games

from the oopsie dept

Ubisoft's history of DRM use has been...interesting. One could nearly write an entire book on how to fail at DRM using nothing but examples from the company. DRM that allows hackers to take control of gamers' machines. DRM punishing only paying customers when Ubisoft decides to move their servers. DRM that is, seriously, comprised of f$#%ing vuvuzelas. What you'll notice as a trend in these examples, however, is that at least Ubisoft was content to punish only their own customers or themselves, depending on the situation.

Not so, any longer. Their uPlay client for PCs was built so poorly that a simple tool developed by hackers can fool the client into thinking users already own copies of games, allowing for completely DRM-free versions of games from other publishers to be downloaded for free from their platform. As an apparent sign of solidarity by Ubisoft, they also managed to offer up their own unreleased game via the exploit as well.

The vulnerability is allegedly present in the uPlay launcher, which when exploited gives DRM free access to gaming titles from almost all game publishers including the likes of EA Games and Square Nix. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, which hasn’t been released yet, is lying on Ubisoft servers which hackers have downloaded. As a proof of the exploit, hackers even posted an 1 hour 30 mins long footage of the game.

Typically, when one does something over a long period of time, one gets better at it. Ubisoft appears to be an anomaly in this respect, going so far backwards on the practice of DRM that even their own client software can strip it out with but a little assistance from hackers. Nevermind how stupid and useless DRM is to begin with; now publishers can't even trust the software that is supposed to deliver it. With enemies of DRM hidden everywhere, even in inanimate software, perhaps it's time to give it up entirely.

Filed Under: drm, failures, uplay, video games
Companies: ubisoft

Maybe E*Trade Should Stop Giving Four-Year Contracts To Its CEOs

from the just-saying dept

Like the four who held the job before him since its, er, difficulties began five-and-a-half years ago, Steve Freiberg did not do a particularly good job running E*Trade. But he’s been compensated handsomely for facing the wrath of an angry Ken Griffin before getting a pink slip in August.

E*Trade Financial Corp. said it paid its former Chief Executive Steven Freiberg $10.7 million in 2012, including a severance payment, according to a regulatory filing early Friday.

In its proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the online brokerage said Mr. Freiberg received $3 million in stock awards, $630,769 in salary and a $7 million lump sum cash severance payment.

E*Trade also said Mr. Freiberg collected a prorated bonus of $1.6 million paid in February and outstanding equity awards, which were valued at $3.3 million under an accelerated vesting schedule.

E*Trade also handed over $2.5 million to its chairman, Frank Petrilli, including $2.2 million for doing Freiberg’s old job during the waning days of 2012. And E*Trade wasn’t the only good place to be a former or soon-to-be-former CEO last year.

Marsh & McLennan Cos. gave outgoing chief executive Brian Duperreault a $17 million pay package last year, a 17% increase from 2011, according to the company’s annual proxy released Friday.

Mr. Duperreault’s compensation included a $1 million salary, stock and option awards of $10 million, and a $5 million bonus. It also included the personal use of the company’s corporate jet, valued at $441,875.

Mr. Duperreault, a longtime insurance executive who ran Marsh & McLennan for five years, stepped down at the end of 2012. The proxy said his pay increase was based in part on the company’s financial performance for the year, his work in positioning the company for future growth, and the “successful transition of CEO responsibilities” to Mr. Glaser.

Good Friday compensation disclosures were less kind to the poor schmucks who still have to run their companies. Charles Schwab CEO Walt Bettinger hasn’t gotten a raise in four years, and the IntercontinentalExchange gave CEO Jeffrey Sprecher a 15% pay cut for the year in which he bought the fucking New York Stock Exchange.

Mr. Sprecher, who has led ICE since its formation in 2000, in 2011 was the second-highest-paid exchange CEO after Duncan Niederauer, CEO of NYSE. Under terms of NYSE’s deal with ICE, Mr. Niederauer will become president of the combined company, while Mr. Sprecher will remain chairman and CEO.

Former E*Trade CEO Paid $10.7 Million in 2012 [WSJ]
Marsh & McLennan’s Outgoing CEO Got $17 Million [WSJ]
Schwab CEO Pay Stays Around $10.2 Million [WSJ]
InterncontinentalExchange Chief’s Pay Down 15% [WSJ]

Other posts from Dealbreaker:

• S&P Cries “Conspiracy!”
• Half Of Hedge Fund Employees Pretty Sure Their Competitors Are Up To No Good
• M&A Bankers Developing Serious Jealousy Of IPO Guys

Filed Under: ceo, failures, salaries
Companies: e*trade

Maxis GM: Our Vision Is More Important Than Our Customers & Lots Of People Love Our Crappy DRM

from the so,-so-much-wrong dept

Well, it's been several hours, so obviously someone must have done something stupid over at the SimCity franchise. I could run through a long list of links from our coverage of this debacle, but I'll make it easy on you. The key links are the launch debacle, the backlash, and the evidence that all of this is wholly unnecessary. That last one is important because during the initial stages of this muck up, EA/Maxis came out hard, saying that offline modes were logistically impossible because of all the cloud-based resources needed to run the games simulation calculations. The evidence in the link proves rather conclusively that that is absolutely not the case. In that post, I had suggested that it was time for the game's producers to finally come out with a strong mea culpa. Here is that mea culpa, from Maxis GM Lucy Bradshaw:

So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision. We did not focus on the "single city in isolation" that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that. But we're also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality. The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.

Okay, so it isn't so much a mea culpa as a, "Hey, customers, why don't you go outside and play hide and go f@#$ yourself!" It's difficult to imagine a more tone deaf statement, given the circumstances. To essentially come out and say that you understand lots of people wanted an offline version of this game, and we already know you could have made one quite easily, but you rejected the idea of filling a customer need because it didn't match with your "vision"? I'd suggest that if this launch has been a faithful representation of your vision, it may be time to get idea-glasses.

And can I ask the other obvious question? Where the hell are all the people clamoring for online only mode? I have no doubt that there are folks who wanted and still want online components to the game, but who the hell is asking for a blatant limitation on their game? There's a major difference between offering online components and requiring it be online all the time. Personally, I think Bradshaw is reticulating our splines on that one.

On the other hand, when discussing the need for the servers in Bradshaw's blog post, there was one glaring omission: server resources/calculations. It appears the game's designers have finally decided to stop lying about why the servers in the cloud are needed and instead moved on to suggest that it's just a big part of their customers that are unnecessary instead.

Filed Under: customers, drm, failures, propaganda, simcity, single player, vision
Companies: ea, maxis

Go Ahead and Short Your 'InTrade Will Come Back' Contract

from the betting-the-house dept

While most of you are busily reading about the latest effort from U.S. News to calculate with the incalculable, applying its formula to tease out razor-thin distinctions between law schools, you’re missing the demise of the once lauded Internet prediction site, InTrade. What were the odds?

Over the weekend, the Irish-based website shuttered itself completely, noting in a statement to customers that there may be “financial irregularities.” Uh-oh.

All this comes at the worst possible time for InTrade customers, who were looking to cash in on that sweet, sweet Conclave action…

Customers in the U.S. already lost access to InTrade back in November, when the CFTC waved around a 2005 cease and desist. The CFTC’s beef with InTrade revolved around the website selling contracts that looked an awful lot like commodity futures. The CFTC does not like commodity futures traded from outside their regulatory framework. And even though InTrade specifically asked the CFTC to step in and regulate their trading, the CFTC opted to functionally shut them down (once the Presidential election contracts were all paid out, of course). The CFTC didn’t give a very clear explanation for this decision, but the CFTC apparently felt that allowing micro-level trading on commodity futures constituted a societal ill they could not accept — while institutional investors tossing around trillions seems perfectly harmless. Or the CFTC was just lazy. Never underestimate “just lazy.”

InTrade’s closure over the weekend was not related to trading commodity futures, but some vague suggestion of “financial irregularities.” Details remain sketchy, but the best guess out there alleges that InTrade failed to maintain duly segregated accounts.

What on earth is going on? My best guess is that the margin posted by traders was not held, as it should be, in segregated accounts separate from company funds. When bets are made on this market, both parties must post margin equal to their worst-case loss, so that neither is subject to counterparty risk. In effect, each party is taking a position against the exchange, but these positions are exactly offsetting so the exchange bears no risk. To ensure that all promised payments can be made, these funds must be held in the form of cash, insured deposits, or safe dollar-denominated securities such as Treasury bills. They cannot be invested in risky assets, and cannot be used for the payment of salaries or expenses.

The latter point about the “payment of salaries or expenses” is in line with the recent announcement that auditors had flagged payments to InTrade’s former CEO, the late John Delaney.

The loss of InTrade will spark glowing eulogies from multiple sectors, but losing the political prediction market will be the toughest loss. The political reporting class openly crowed about InTrade’s predictive power for years. The Washington Post already published its lament over the passing of InTrade as the loss of the last, best hope for pundit accountability:

It’s a shame, and this is why. We live in a world of punditry in which there are large amounts of, to put it nicely, horse manure. Those of us who write and talk about what will happen inevitably rely on vague predictions, full of qualifications. I’m guilty of it myself, and often find myself writing things like “this ought to be an OK year for the economy, if fiscal austerity isn’t too severe and there isn’t a return of the European crisis.”

On Intrade, by contrast, the traders who participate and collectively set market prices, are forced to choose—and put money where their mouths are. Will the United States enter a recession in 2013? Before it shut down, the prices for that contract on Intrade implied a 16.9 percent chance that the answer was “yes.” In a world in which people hold their pundits to a higher standard, people spouting off on the economy (or politics, or foreign affairs, or the selection of the pope) would be forced to make specific, testable predictions, and attach probabilities to those guesses.

I actually thought the best hope for pundit accountability would be a media willing to confront their own pundits with past flawed predictions, rather than sweeping the past under the rug every day, but what do I know?

But the legal fallout from the end of InTrade, for the U.S., will be the inevitable rise of the next online predictive market. With InTrade out of the way, some other online gambling site — anyone from PaddyPower to Betfair — will grow into the hole created by InTrade, subtly open itself to U.S. customers, and likely reignite the legal battles with the CFTC all over again. Hopefully, next time around, cooler heads will prevail at the CFTC and welcome these predictive markets to the regulatory regime.

But I’m not buying that contract.

To Our Customers [InTrade]
A Prediction Market Mystery [Rajiv Sethi]
RIP Intrade: The Last, Best Hope for Pundit Accountability [Washington Post]
Now You Can’t Buy Your Crude Oil Futures In $10 Increments On Intrade [DealBreaker]

Filed Under: failures, prediction markets
Companies: intrade

Michigan Bets The State Pension Fund On Hollywood Success, Ends Up Stuck With The Tab

from the you-can-only-take-my-money-for-so-long,-before-you-take-it-all! dept

We've written before about cities and states luring Hollywood studios with multimillion dollar subsidies in the hopes of giving their local economies a bit of a bump. In nearly every case, this has been a money loser for the locale involved. A 2010 Tax Foundation study found that most states were lucky to see $0.20 in revenue from every dollar handed out. And yet, this surefire money loser remains incredibly popular.

The latest case of self-victimization belongs to the state of Michigan, which lured the production of "Oz The Great and Powerful" to the state with a $40 million subsidy.

Michigan has 4.5 million individual taxpayers, and the state gave the film studio $39.7 million to shoot the movie in Pontiac. That works out to a subsidy of $8.82 per taxpayer while average ticket prices nationwide are $7.96.

The subsidy was granted in 2010 when the program refunded up to 42 percent of Michigan expenses to film makers — essentially a check from the treasury to Hollywood studios. The program expired, but the Legislature, dominated by Republicans, overwhelmingly decided to keep it around.

As the article points out, the studio basically received paid admission from every taxpayer in the state. But that $40 million was apparently just a "good start," because the state soon found the studio knocking at its door again, cap in hand.

As part of the financing process, the filmmakers wanted to borrow about about $18 million in municipal bonds. In order order to do that, they needed a backer. So the state stepped in, and agreed to use its state worker pension funds as a guarantee. "If the investors failed to pay," the New York Times reported in a piece on the deal last December, "the retirees would be on the hook."

One would expect a Disney-backed venture to be able to scrounge up payments on an $18 million loan simply by digging around in the couch cushions. But one would be mistaken.

Michigan Motion Pictures Studios, which is being celebrated in the local media for having made the movie, "Oz The Great and Powerful," in Pontiac, has missed its last three payments on $18 million in bond obligations...

According to state officials, the state retirement system has made three payments since February of last year totaling $1.68 million.

This isn't good news for the state's pension fund, which is already underfunded by several billion dollars. It's pretty much guaranteed that the state will never recover the entire $58 million given to Michigan Motion Pictures Studio, either in the form of added revenue or even loan payments, for that matter. And Michigan should know better. According to the study mentioned in the first paragraph, Michigan's return-on-investment sits at $0.11 per subsidy dollar.

But Michigan Motion Picture Studios (formerly Raleigh Studios) can explain. You see, it was doing just fine... until the state decided to cut its allowance.

In March 2012, Raleigh Studio's then-chief financial officer Steve Lemberg blamed the studio’s financial struggles on the film tax credit being reduced.

The state reduced the tax credit from $100 million when the studio was being built in 2011 to $50 million last year. Gov. Rick Snyder has $25 million budgeted for tax credits this year.

There's something inherently flawed with a business model that relies heavily on being handed free money in exchange for the vague promise that a small percentage of it will be pumped back into the local economy. But I suppose it could be worse. Much, much worse.

The city of Allen Park recently requested an emergency manager after losing what will turn out to be tens of millions of dollars on a failed movie studio project that promised to create 3,000 jobs. It created none and left the town nearly bankrupt.

That's the sort of thing that happens when politicians get stars in their eyes and roll out a red carpet made of constituents' money. The best case scenario is still a money loser, as any economic effects are brief and underwhelming. The worst case scenario is taxpayers are on the hook to bail out their own pension funds or, in the case of Allen Park, their hometown.

Filed Under: failures, great and powerful oz, michigan, movie industry, subsidies

SimCity: The Backlash

from the still-plenty-of-'online-only'-hate-available! dept

It's not as if EA couldn't have seen this coming. Pretty much everything that could go wrong with SimCity's launch has gone wrong. But EA was warned. A Reddit AMA with the SimCity developers made it perfectly clear how unhappy people were with the online-only requirements. SimCity's closed beta had its own issues, mainly server access (not enough of it).

But EA didn't seem too concerned and went ahead with the launch. Shortly thereafter, everything fell apart. The servers couldn't handle the demand, something which would have been less damaging if there had been any sort of offline option. Much of the processing is handled server-side (along with storage of all saved games) and if customers couldn't find a free slot on a server then they just didn't get to enjoy their $60 purchase.

The backlash was immediate. And immense. Polygon (the Verge's gaming site) lowered its original 9.5 rating to 8.0 because of the online issues. Giant Bomb gave it a rather low 3 out of 5, largely due to the fact that EA made a single player game multiplayer-only to justify its online-only DRM/"social" features. Reviewer Jonathan Cresswell handed in quite possibly the most succinct (but most telling) review of all.

Elsewhere, paying customers have expressed their displeasure. Metacritic's critic score sits at 82. The user score? 1.8. Things are nearly as bad at Amazon, where SimCity currently holds a 1.5 star rating. (The digital version is faring even worse - 1.0.) In a rather unprecedented move, Amazon has pulled the PC Download version completely, citing EA's server issues. When will it be back? Amazon says: "We don't know when or if this item will be available again."

Other game retailers have pounced on the opportunity provided by EA's colossal blunder. GOG tweaked EA with a tweet pointing out that DRM-free SimCity 2000 doesn't require an internet connection (and is only $5.99), resulting in a sales bump that has sent SimCity 2000 to #3 on the "Top Sellers" chart. Another Redditor suggested Steam follow suit and kick off an "offline-capable city sim sale," featuring non-online-only city sims with new deals arriving each day "until SimCity is playable."

EA, for its part, is working hard to add capacity, but much of the effort seems a bit too late. The damage has already been done, and EA has destroyed a lot of gamer goodwill, something it really doesn't have in excess. As part of the effort to extinguish these self-inflicted fires, EA is now shutting off "non-essential features" to ease the server load. One of the first to go is "cheetah speed," the fastest simulation setting. This may do exactly what EA hopes it does (free up servers), but it is going to piss off even more customers, as Kyle Orland at Ars Technica points out.

Presumably this is to give the servers more time to process the thousands of simultaneous city simulations that are all feeding into its global and regional networks. In any case, this is a core piece of the gameplay that's now being hampered by EA's continuing server problems; in my 16 or so hours playing the game, I'd estimate 15 or so have been spent running at Cheetah. Slowing things down, even temporarily, is likely to impact a whole lot of players negatively.

Whether or not this backlash/implosion will hurt EA in the long run remains to be seen. It has made no secret of the fact that it wants all of its games to eventually have some sort of "online component," if for no other reason than to (slightly) impede piracy and eliminate second-hand game sales. The odds are that EA will continue to push the online requirement, passing the costs of any outages along to the customers in the form of useless purchases and higher game prices.

Some gamers are attempting to push back. A petition has been started at change.org requesting EA remove "online only" requirements from SimCity (most likely impossible, but...) and future games. It's well on its way to hitting 25,000 signatures in less than 24 hours (and should be well past that by the time this hits the front page), which should give EA some idea how many people are displeased with the SimCity debacle.

It's not completely unheard of for AAA developers to reverse course on onerous DRM (Ubisoft, for one), but EA didn't become one of the most hated companies in America by catering to the whims of its customers. If nothing else, gamers can take heart in the fact that other developers will view this as a cautionary tale, rather than a blueprint for success.

Now, if you're still waiting for an open server slot, why don't you kill a little time with the included Solitaire game? (Image by Redditor PainLing)

Filed Under: backlash, drm, failures, simcity
Companies: ea

HOA President Receives Public Criticism; Responds With Baseless Claims And Empty Legal Threats

from the ALL-CAPS---that'll-show-'em dept

If there's one thing our judicial system has taught the layman, it's this: when faced with public criticism, your first reaction should be to craft angry letters/emails full of baseless legal threats. (Of course, the internet teaches exactly the opposite lesson, one that many have failed to learn...) Today's angry email writer (and phone caller) is the president (and treasurer) [and legal agent] of the Stonecreek Arbor Homeowner's Association, located in Indiana's Vandenburgh County.

The Evansville Courier & Press recently wrote a lengthy piece about HOAs and how they can range wildly in quality, from being so laissez-faire that you wonder where your money is going to providing the services your area needs to micro-dictatorships that leave residents unhappy.

The HOA at the center of this story is called Stonecreek Arbors, in Indiana’s Vandenburgh County. According to the paper, the Stonecreek HOA was responsible for more than half of all the liens filed in the county last year. Many of these liens were for unpaid HOA dues worth a little more than $200.

The 49 liens filed by the HOA translates to slightly less than 1/6 of all the homes in the subdivision.

Anyone who's even slightly familiar with HOAs knows it's going to be nearly impossible to find a flattering article written about these overweening middlemen/micromanagers who have inserted themselves between homeowners and their own property. (At least one that's not written by association board members...) Why so many of these associations exist is a mystery, given that most people resent having arbitrary rules and limitations placed on something they purchased. It's like DRM for houses.

That being said, Stonecreek Arbor was like any other homeowners association that makes the news. Excessive fees. Sudden bans on a previously parkable driveway, which instead became a HOA board member's private road to and from the lake. Demanding pets be microchipped, even when the existing "rules" carried no language to that effect. And so on.

The Evansville Courier article detailed these offenses, leading off with a photo of the subdivision's entrance which handily sported the Stonecreek name, lest anyone be confused about which HOA was currently abusing its members. Shortly after publication (and following a brief interview with the HOA president Stephen Hess -- captured "on tape" over at the Consumerist), the Evansville Courier & Press received this email from Hess.

“[T]his notice also requires you not to at any measure mention anything regarding my name, any resident of Stonecreek, NOR will we ALLOW any of your printing in any article regarding Stonecreek at any time in any publication… You will be held liable for any violations of this letter and notice/request in this email. If we find/discover you have mentioned Stonecreek in any legal matter their (sic) will be action toward yourself as well as any print paper you represent in the media article.

“You may contact any HOA in the County of Vanderburgh, the State of Indiana, but Stonecreek will not PERMIT OR ALLOW YOU our legal name in any future article.”

There are a lot of claims being made here that the HOA president can't hope to back up. Exactly how he was hoping to prevent mention "in any publication," much less the one with which he's currently tangling, is unclear. Maybe he was hoping a few CAPITALIZED WORDS would strike fear in their tiny journalistic souls. The double threat of "being held liable" and having "action toward" the paper doesn't seem to have prevented publication of this article on the internet, or in "any print paper."

The HOA president didn't even throw out handy, but un-actionable, terms like "libel" or "defamation," but he did follow up with one more vocal threat:

That obviously didn’t work, nor did the phone call to the Courier & Press, which demanded the paper “stop this article immediately, because I will sue you just like I sue the people who don’t pay their dues.” he said.

While Hess certainly seems to know his way around legal matters like lien filing (he filed more than 47 liens against his neighbors in one day), he seems to have a little trouble parsing the grayer area of public criticism. His response has just dropped Stonecreek's reputation from "bad" to "worse," and he will probably find himself on the outside staring in come the next board election. Now, he's also "internet (in)famous" as well, having successfully portrayed himself as the sort of person who comes out suing at the drop of a hat. Not much fun to deal with at a phone line's length, much less as a neighbor.

Filed Under: failures, home owners association, legal threats
Companies: stonecreek arbor homeowner's association

Just How Dumb Is It For CBS To Block CNET From Giving Dish An Award?

from the count-the-ways dept

As you may or may not recall, last year, pretty much all the TV networks sued Dish Networks over a new feature it had launched, PrimeTime Any Time (PTAT), with its Autohopper technology on its DVRs. PTAT is where it would automatically record all the major networks' prime time programming and hold onto it for a bit. Autohopper would then automatically skip over the commercials. It's important to recognize that these features, on their own, have been considered legal. VCRs had auto commercial skip ages ago and DVR technology (time shifting) has been called fair use plenty of times. Given that, the lawsuits aren't going well so far.

But, in a moment of pure stupidity, some very short-sighted suits at CBS made a really silly decision. As you may or may not have heard, CES -- the massive consumer electronics show -- has been going on all this week in Las Vegas. I just got back from there myself. At the show, Dish announced another merging of some of its products, adding its Slingbox (who they bought years back) to the same basic setup. Slingbox, of course, is for "place shifting" what the DVR is for "time shifting." You hook it up to your TV and it lets you access what's playing on your TV via the internet (so, via your computer, phone or tablet). It's hardly surprising that this is where Dish was heading.

And... the early reviews and buzz were definitely strong. For example, CNET wrote a glowing review in which executive editor David Carnoy suggested it may be the best DVR out there these days. The CNET crew liked the thing so much that they nominated it for their "Best of CES" award. And... then the suits at CNET parent company CBS noticed. And suddenly they told CNET that it had to remove the Dish Hopper with Sling from consideration for the Best of CES award and that it was no longer allowed to review any Dish products. CNET editors appended the following note to their review:

Editors' note: The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration for the Best of CES 2013 awards due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp. We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product.

This is monumentally stupid, for a variety of reasons. Let's see how many we can come up with.

1. Hello Streisand Effect. There were approximately one gazillion articles this week about products coming out of CES, and the place was wall to wall with journalists -- probably half of whom were coming up with their own "best of" lists. Most people were completely saturated with CES stories and would barely glance at such a story. Except... now, tons of people are suddenly finding out about this awesome Dish DVR, the Hopper with Slingbox. In fact, they're hearing that the damn thing is so good that CBS is trying to block any news of it from getting out. Talking about increasing the awareness... I have no clue whatsoever what product CNET -- or any other publication -- awarded "best of CES" to. But I sure as hell am well aware of Dish's new DVR.
2. Goodbye to the wall that separates the suits from the journalists at CBS/CNET. CBS execs have just confirmed that they don't want their journalists and reviewers to cover things based on the merits, but rather on what it means for their corporate masters.
3. Hello slippery slope. Is it really that hard to see where this heads next? Is CNET still allowed to report on the lawsuit if CBS loses? If they can't talk about the products, what about the legal issues themselves?
4. Goodbye journalists with credibility. Frankly, CNET has always had some of the strongest tech reporters in the business. For many years I've considered it one of the top tech news sites out there. I have tremendous respect for many of the reporters there. But, now I have to wonder how much the suits are interfering with their ability to report things accurately.
5. Goodbye to principled journalists who want to work for CBS. If I'm a journalist at CNET right now, I'd be seriously considering quitting in protest. This move seriously harms the brand and reputation of the site, and this is the kind of thing that journalists should stand up against. Having the suits interfere with what they can write about is generally seen as a massive offense to journalists. I would bet this leads to some of the best, most principled CNET reporters jumping ship to elsewhere.
6. Good luck to CNET hiring new journalists. Who wants to jump into that toxic situation?

CBS's suits should have kept quiet and not interfered with the news side of the business. They had to know that this would backfire in a big bad way. And, if they didn't know that, they deserve to lose their jobs for being pretty clueless about things that matter.

Of course, they were probably thinking that Dish would likely use the reviews from CNET as evidence in the lawsuit, which very well may be true (and could still happen since the review did go out). But it's not hard to get around that, since the legal impact of a single review is near zilch. In the end, they didn't stifle the review, they made it more well known. They didn't do anything that helps them in their lawsuit. And they're left with an undoubtedly pissed off set of journalists who may now question how free they are to actually report the news.

Filed Under: ces, credibility, dvr, failures, hopper, journalism, lawsuits, reporting, slingbox, streisand effect
Companies: cbs, cnet, dish

Child With Brittle Bone Disease Detained By TSA For An Hour

from the if-you're-going-to-be-oppressive-at-least-do-your-job-right dept

It's no secret that I don't think much of the TSA. In addition to a long list of pieces we've done on what I consider one of the most useless government agencies, there's also the more recent story I covered discussing whether or not the agency's operations have resulted in more deaths in the past decade than all the terrorism against American's combined. Still, there is some discussion over whether all of this freedom-taking and death is worth the fuzzy feeling we all suposedly get when boarding a plane, knowing that at least all of this asshat-ery is making us safer.

But then you hear the story of someone like Shelbi Walser, a twelve year old girl from Texas who suffers brittle bone disease and also apparently has to suffer with over-zealous federal employees that don't have enough common sense to fill a thimble.

Shelbi Walser, 12, has brittle bone disease, and was flying to Tampa, Fla., to receive treatment on Sunday when she was randomly selected for an explosives screening on her way through security. Tammy Daniels, Walser's mother, said that her daughter tested positive for explosives when a screener swabbed Walser's palms and fingers.

Speaking with ABC affiliate WFAA, Walser said that she has no idea how the traces of explosive got on her. "It could have come off fertilizer, because we have chickens. I could have run through something from them," she said. "It could have just come off the ground, because I roll through everything."

Here's the thing. Even if you believe that the threat of terrorism via explosives on airplanes is everything that the government would have you believe (and I don't), and even if you think that the methods used by the TSA can help make us safer (and I don't), we're still left with a federal agency that is given so much leeway in curtailing our liberty that they at least should get their damned jobs right. There can be such a thing as common sense in airport security, where you understand that the 12 year old Texan with brittle bone disease probably isn't going 'splode a jetliner. Certainly it seems unlikely that it would take an hour for the TSA to come to this determination.

"I am by no means undermining our safety in the air. After 9/11, by no means am I doing that," Daniels told WFAA. "But when it comes to children, common sense is not in a textbook."

This has always been the problem with the TSA: in the absence of common sense there is such a thing as the paralysis of bureaucracy, and when that paralysis comes to the people in the form of handbook-style security, then that's a win for the very people we're supposed to be protected against.

Filed Under: children, detention, failures, security theater, tsa