CAUCE

Opt-in At Gunpoint Isn’t Opt-in

There are loads of good reasons why you might want to require an address, and confirm it, when someone is signing up for your WIFI service.

However, one of them is NEVER ‘so we can send you unwanted spam’. Like this one :

 

 

I encountered this silly approach to ’growing a marketing list’ at the Westin Market Street in San Francisco recently, and since I figured the sign-up might be tied to my room, and disallow repeat attempts, I gave them a real address. As it turned out, I could have entered FredFlinst[email protected] since they didn’t actually confirm the address …

So what has the Westin accomplished? They are forcing people to give the a ton of bad addresses, most of which will bounce, the rest of which will complain about any mail being send to them as spam, and rightly so.

What a dumb policy. I told the conference organizers about this, so they could take it up with management. We’ll see what happens next year, same time, same place.

Russian Cybercrime

Speaking as a Canadian, Sochi was pretty nice. However, in terms of cybercrime, NBC recently published a report which sums it up pretty well :

 Skilled, Cheap Russian Hackers Power American Cybercrime

The following clip is from a remarkable documentary called ‘Thieves by Law’ about the Russia organized crime syndicates and their relationship with the Russian government, which is pretty stunning in its assertions.