XENU STRIKES AGAIN! In a move which will affect approximately zero SbG readers, Wikipedia's admins have chosen to ban Church of Scientology members from contributing or editing entries. A painfully overwrought case history is available to read on Wikipedia (WARNING: do not read), but to cut a long story short, TPTB at Wiki have ruled that CoS' wiki-contributing practices constitute such a conflict of interest that the CoS' opinion on anything at all is not worth the hassle of actually allowing users with CoS-related IP addresses to contribute.
Members of the internet non-entity Anonymous are said to have simultaneously removed their Guy Fawkes masks and slowly looked upward, as if gazing upon the harbinger of a more promising tomorrow.
LIFELOCK SLAMMED IN COURT! Moving on to an issue which does affect a segment of the local population (namely, Knoxvillians who are both tech-literate enough to know about identity theft and easily frightened), ID-theft protection racket Lifelock was hit with a ruling Wednesday in a California court which may well defang the industry as a whole.
Credit bureau Experian's complaint against Lifelock is twofold, claiming that Lifelock engages in illegal business practices by both contacting credit bureaus on a customer's behalf (an act which a federal judge ruled could only lawfully be undertaken by a family member, guardian, or attorney) and by requesting fraud alerts in situations in which no imminent danger of fraud existed.
Was the ruling justified? Does it shake the ID theft protection industry to the very core? I sure as hell hope so. Credit monitoring is all well and good, but Lifelock's most trumpeted service involves you paying them $10/month to basically make three phone calls to request a free service from three different credit bureaus every three months. The legality of Lifelock's acts as representatives of its customers notwithstanding, if you have the mental capacity required to, say, order pizza once a month, then Lifelock would be ripping you off.
Maybe once the industry is free of company founders who learned the business from the other side and business practices which usurp due process only to result in inadmissible evidence, a company with a model which actually protects the consumer and provides value for the money can drag the industry kicking and screaming into legitimacy.
Members of the internet non-entity Anonymous are said to have simultaneously removed their Guy Fawkes masks and slowly looked upward, as if gazing upon the harbinger of a more promising tomorrow.
LIFELOCK SLAMMED IN COURT! Moving on to an issue which does affect a segment of the local population (namely, Knoxvillians who are both tech-literate enough to know about identity theft and easily frightened), ID-theft protection racket Lifelock was hit with a ruling Wednesday in a California court which may well defang the industry as a whole.
Credit bureau Experian's complaint against Lifelock is twofold, claiming that Lifelock engages in illegal business practices by both contacting credit bureaus on a customer's behalf (an act which a federal judge ruled could only lawfully be undertaken by a family member, guardian, or attorney) and by requesting fraud alerts in situations in which no imminent danger of fraud existed.
Was the ruling justified? Does it shake the ID theft protection industry to the very core? I sure as hell hope so. Credit monitoring is all well and good, but Lifelock's most trumpeted service involves you paying them $10/month to basically make three phone calls to request a free service from three different credit bureaus every three months. The legality of Lifelock's acts as representatives of its customers notwithstanding, if you have the mental capacity required to, say, order pizza once a month, then Lifelock would be ripping you off.
Maybe once the industry is free of company founders who learned the business from the other side and business practices which usurp due process only to result in inadmissible evidence, a company with a model which actually protects the consumer and provides value for the money can drag the industry kicking and screaming into legitimacy.
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