Dan Gillmor

On May 14 we attended a dinner in San Francisco. There was a valet parking stand, and when we arrived the valets were fairly backed up. We got behind several other cars and waited.

A few minutes later one of the city’s parking police came up behind the line. I asked one of the valets what was up, and he said they were out of parking spaces, though one might come open again if someone left. But, he said, the city was starting to ticket cars waiting in line.

We waited a minute, hoping someone might leave, and then pulled out and found our own parking.

A few weeks later I received a notice from the city, saying we owed money for illegal parking that evening. I filled out the protest form, noting that no one had handed us any ticket or put one on our windshield, and, moreover, that we’d moved the car. To repeat: The parking cop never handed us this phantom ticket, nor did he/she put on the windshield — and we were sitting right there.

Months went by, with two more letters saying the city was looking into the situation. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we got another letter saying the city parking department had decided we did owe for illegal parking. In other words, whatever its own employee — remember, the one who never actually handed us any paper — told them was considered true. Or maybe they just figured they could get away with going ahead with this bogus ticket.

Well, they did. As the city knows from the vehicle registration, I’m living a majority of the time in Arizona and can’t possibly take the time or justify the expense of challenging this ticket. So I’m sending the $100. I’m tempted to send a pissed-off letter to the mayor, but realize what an empty exercise that would be.

Instead, for the next few months, when we’re at our Bay Area place and thinking about going out to dinner or a movie, or going shopping, we’ll head somewhere other than San Francisco. At some point we’ll figure we’ve avoided paying enough city parking and other taxes/fees, etc. (including the local version of the multiplier effect — spending causing more economic activity), to have denied the San Francisco treasury somewhere in the vicinity of the $100 its parking police docked us. I regret that this means some restaurants and stores in the city won’t be getting our business during this stretch, but they’ve chosen to be where they are.

I assume this kind of thing happens all the time. Parking tickets are a fabulous source of revenue for a city like San Francisco. I also wonder if the people who govern the city realize how annoyed they make people with such tactics. I assume they don’t care. In the long run that’s poor policy.

Consumerist: Airport Payphone Charges $20 For 1-Minute Local Call

I received a notice recently that one of my credit cards had been compromised in an online transaction in which Verisign provided the alleged security/verification for the merchant. Terribly sorry, said Verisign, which did offer (I accepted) to pay for a year of credit watching via one of the three major credit bureaus.

Since then, however, I’ve had several of purchases rejected by the card issuer. At least twice now, I’ve had to call the credit-card company and verify that, yes, I was the person making the purchase. Then the issuer unfroze the card, and I could try again to make the purchase.

When this happened earlier this week, I asked the person at the other end of line to simply cancel that card and issue me a new one with a different number. She refused, on the ground that since there was no actual fraud, there was no harm being done and therefore no need for the time and expense — to the company — of issuing the new card.

What about my time and expense? These calls to the card company are taking up time that is worth something to me. That, of course, is irrelevant to the card issuer.

Just one more hidden cost of credit in today’s world.

From the Wall Street Journal, here’s another reason I’m planning to cancel my current credit cards (which I pay every month in any event) and do business with institutions that choose not to screw their customers:

The committee overseeing federal banking-bailout programs is investigating the lending practices of institutions that received public funds, following a rash of complaints about increases in interest rates and fees.

Bailed-Out Banks Face Probe Over Fee Hikes

So United Airlines baggage information page informs us that unless you’re a frequent or upgraded passenger, you’ll pay $15 for the first bag you check. This follows American Airlines’ lead.

Lemmings are smarter than this.

The policy is guaranteed — absolutely guaranteed — to lead to on-plane fighting for overhead space. It will turn an already lousy experience into the kind of chaotic crappiness that will leave everyone in a terrible mood. People in Group 4 will board, or attempt to board, with the earlier boarders — and dare the gate agents to do something about it.

Everyone knows that fares have to rise, at least everyone with a shred of common sense. The airline industry is trapped in fuel-price hell, and through no fault of its own can’t cover the cost of flying the planes.

You can make an argument that people with luggage are carrying extra weight and should pay more. But by that logic, obese and simply large people should pay more than children and petite women. (Obese people who take half of someone else’s seat should have to buy two seats, but that’s a different issue.)

The airline industry is caught in a vortex. It isn’t evil, but policies like this show it’s damned stupid.

I bought an iPod touch in November, and figured I’d leave the system software alone for a while — that is, not using third-party software that unlocks the capabilities of a machine that is, in fact, a small personal computer in its inherent power. Apple’s fall announcement that it would be more open with third-party developers was one reason I held off on hacking the device.

Apple’s view is that while customers own the hardware, any upgrading to the software, including third-party applications, will be at Apple’s discretion. Now we’re seeing the result of this philosophy: a $20 cost to get software that ships with all new models and is given to owners of the IPhone.

This is a flat-out ripoff. And it’s leading me to do what I really don’t want to do — find the appropriate hacks that will let me use the iPod the way I want, not solely the way Apple decides.

I didn’t imagine it was possible, but Apple’s arrogance is growing.

Techdirt: AT&T Does Nothing, Convinces Reporter It Has Now ‘Opened’ Its Network. Basically, absolutely nothing happened here except that AT&T’s marketing crew declared that AT&T’s network is now open, and convinced USA Today to report it as if it were a big deal. If there was any change at all within AT&T, it’s that retail store employees are now supposed to admit that you can use other devices on the network, rather than pretending you can’t. Not quite as exciting as “flinging the network open,” though.

True, the technology change here is precisely zero — it was always possible to use any GSM phone on their network. But the fact that AT&T felt a marketing advantage to proclaiming itself “open” is still a bit noteworthy.

Now, we’re still talking about a terrible company in many ways. Still, let’s be glad for this tiny improvement.

Amazingly, Apple has downgraded one it the key applications in its new operating system, OS X 10.5 “Leopard” — it removed the “information drawer” feature in its iCal calendar software, and it now requires multiple mouse clicks to create new events.

Beyond stupid, this is arrogant. There is absolutely no good reason to remove useful features from software.

Meanwhile, I’m not the only customer who’s annoyed by the company’s casual decision to make life harder for users. In the Apple support forums, for example is this dicussion: “Want my iCal info drawer back!! …”

And this thread starts with a post I’ll quote in full, because it sums up the problem:

Is it just me…but why does it seem like iCal is way harder to use in Leopard?!?!?! Just look at the number of steps/clicks it takes just to enter an entry.

In month view, you double click on the day, but you can only enter in a title. you have to double click on the new event before you can enter in any details or even a time. And the box that pop-up is a tiny little box. In the old version of ical you could enter in everything in the right hand panel right away.

Then there is viewing events you have to double the event to get a little pop-up in order to see the details of the event. All you had to do before was click on an event and it would display in the side panel. Much much easier and less work.

Does the new ical bother anyone else? or is it just me? it just seems like they rushed it. there’s lots of other little annoyances and inconsistencies in it too.

Amen.

Will Shipley: iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?

But with the iPod Touch, what’s Apple’s excuse for locking up the platform? Why can’t I write programs for this device? Who might it hurt? Why is Steve announcing that he’s playing cat-and-mouse with developers who intend to do so? Is Apple so far removed from its customers that even when the latter overwhelming votes for extending a device (by downloading iPhone programs in the hundreds of thousands), Apple’s response is, “No, you can’t do that. We know what you want, you don’t. You want AJAX apps, you just don’t know it yet.”

That sure reminds me of the old, crappy Apple. The one that almost went bankrupt because of its hubris.

I don’t write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment. But I’ve always said that I will move from the platform the day Apple starts acting like a monopoly — trying to make money by using its marketing position to extort money from users, instead of innovating so quickly that users willing throw money at Apple.

Apple’s control-freakery is more than inconvenient for customers and potential partners. It’s insulting, and counterproductive.

I still use a Mac because it’s the best tool for the job — and because it’s infinitely extensible. But I won’t consider an iPhone or iPod Touch until the company lets go of its insistence that Apple, not the customers, are in charge. That may be never. Too bad for Apple, which is losing a customer.

John Dvorak: Google Pulls Plug, Everyone Misses Point. The scary part is that we are not talking about some flaky, small underfunded company. We’re talking about Google, a behemoth. This tells me that if Google can throw in the towel and abandon one of its online-related services, then anyone can do it—and they will. And then they’ll all point to Google. “Well, if Google can do it after it made promises, then we can do it.” It can happen anywhere. You have all your family photos online? Good luck with that. Your blogging software and blog are all online? Have a nice day. Your business is completely reliant on online systems? How does your insurance policy look?

The case here is about customers’ ability to use a service they purchased. Google is reneging on its promise. But the bigger issue is in the latter part of this quote — whether the photos, text, videos, financial information and other things you put online are yours, or whether they end up belonging, in practice if not principle, to the company you use to store and/or display them.

For citizen media creators contributing their work to a variety of sites, this is not a trivial issue. The portability of data is one of the absolutely crucial problems in a world of online-everything.

You cannot absolutely depend on online vendors to protect your information, despite their best intentions (and most of them have very good intentions). If you can’t download your data to your own computer, in a form that lets you use it elsewhere with not too much hassle, then you should be clear: It’s not really your data after all.

Should there be a law about this? I suspect, in the end, we may need one.