Charter Watcher

Charter screws a father, but rewards the CFO. Surprised? (updated)

A while back Charter held a Father’s Day contest, promising a 65-inch television to the winner. A fellow named Mike Lewis won the prize when his daughter wrote in to the company explaining why he deserved it. Unfortunately, like most other promises, Charter completely failed to honor the 65-inch television. They sent him a 19-inch TV instead.

But why exactly didn’t they deliver the promised prize?

From the article:

“When I asked if he had gotten the form, he said he hadn’t gone through his mail yet. He asked if Misty Wade, his associate, had called me,” she said. “Then he started talking about the TV and said something about someone in Georgia and that the expense was too much and that they wanted to give me a 19-inch instead but that he was working on getting me a 42-inch. He said he would call his boss and call me back.”

That’s right. Charter Communications ran a Father’s Day promotional giveaway of a 65-inch high definition television, but when it came time to deliver decided that it was too expensive and chose to offer a 19-inch television instead. One would think that Charter is in dire financial shape if they can’t even afford to give Mike his promised prize. Dire shape indeed.

But even though they can’t seem to come up with a couple of grand to honor their promise to Mike, they still managed to throw a $25,000 raise and a $100,000 bonus to their CFO this week. Former Chief Marketing Officer Robert Quigley also got $100K, and he has already resigned to make room for our friend and douchebag of the year Ted Schremp.

So let me get this straight. Charter can’t come up with the money to deliver on a promise made by the marketing team, but the heads of both the financial and the marketing departments both got the equivalent of fifty 62-inch TV’s each? Does anybody else see the idiocy in this? The heads of the department responsible for setting aside cash with which to buy the TV and the department responsible for delivering the TV both said there was no money to follow through with the promise immediately prior to receiving huge checks themselves

I swear, nothing surprises me anymore with these people.

UPDATE 7/14/08: A comment left by scoosdad provided this link, which includes updated information about this matter. Apparently Mike Lewis did not win the grand prize, but rather an honorable mention, which means that he was never eligible for the 65″ television in the first place.

From the article (and a letter from Charter Communications Director Marty Richmond):

“The details presented to the family were about a 19-inch HDTV honorable mention prize, not the grand prize 65-inch HDTV. Regrettably, this was not clearly communicated.”

Here’s the problem. Apparently Charter Communications didn’t communicate with the family very well, which totally screwed up their understanding of their prize. Perhaps they didn’t win anything except a 19″ TV, but they thought the prize was something much, much different, and everything I’m seeing says that they thought this to be the case based on what they were hearing from Charter. Maybe Charter is to blame and maybe the Lewis family is to blame. Either way, it’s still not surprising to hear that Charter found a way to screw up something so simple as a contest.

There’s clear evidence that Charter Communications wanted a W-9 tax from from Mr. Lewis, which means that his winnings would, by law, have to exceed $600. Either Charter intended to give him the nicest 19″ LCD on the planet, or they screwed up and thought he had won more than a simple honorable mention.

Moreover, an email from Charter’s Jeff Thatcher stated “Also, if you can think of a couple of days/times next week that would be good for us to come out and deliver the TV, I will get with my team to verify and we’ll get your Hi-Def set up!” Obviously Jeff Thatcher thought that Mr. Lewis had won the grand prize, and it sounds to me like he communicated just that.

Maybe the whole situation isn’t exactly as it sounds, but it’s certainly no picnic for Charter. Incompetence has a way of getting you into trouble with more than just advertising, it would seem.

Charter lies about a lot more than just privacy

A couple of months ago I saw a commercial for Charter Communications which featured a man in a suit sitting at a computer talking about fiber optics. He explained that Verizon was getting a lot of publicity of their FIOS service, but maintained that Charter had been using fiber optics for years, insinuating that the services were equal in terms of speed and reliability. Then he pretended to type. Not only can Charter not hire competent executives or managers, but they can’t even get an actor to type convincingly on cue.

It bothered me even then that Charter would lie so boldly. Of course they use fiber optics in their network, as does virtually every company with more than a half dozen servers. Heck, my third bedroom has some fiber in play for my personal servers, and I’ve been using fiber to connect my music hardware for almost a decade. Does that put my technology on par with Charter’s? With Verizon’s? Since I use fiber too, can I now go on television and promise to deliver the exact same thing that these companies do?

Of course the answer is no, but that doesn’t stop Charter from comparing their decades-old cable technology to Verizon’s cutting-edge FIOS. It’s so blatant that even Forbes did a piece on it.

From the article:

Mike Weaver in Watauga, Texas, saw an ad from Charter Communications Inc. that talked about “advanced fiber optics,” and was disappointed when he realized that the cable company isn’t drawing fiber to the home. He wants the faster Internet speeds provided by FiOS, he said.

Charter spokeswoman Anita Lamont said the intent behind the current ads, which say the company has been using fiber for the last 10 years, “is to reassure current Charter customers that they too have fiber optic technology bringing their homes to life.”

Mike saw the same commercial I saw. In it Charter obviously compares their fiber optic network to Verizon’s, which indicates that Charter too offers fiber to the doorstep. According to Anita Lamont, this commercial is intended to do just that. Charter knows that the vast majority of customers won’t know that the fiber optic being touted in their commercials only refers to that in use in their datacenters. Charter knows that the majority of their customers won’t call them on their BS when they see a plain old coaxial cable strung across their backyard. Charter thinks that they can lie with impunity, and that no one will do anything about it. That is how much they think of you and I as customers.

So why is it surprising when they employ the same techniques in dealing with privacy? Charter’s standard procedure is to lie, bend the truth, and spread misinformation. We all know that they don’t have the same fiber optic network as Verizon, and we all know that they won’t protect our privacy.

But that isn’t going to stop them from lying through their teeth about it. There’s money to be made, and the truth is the only thing left standing in the way. Somebody call Ted Schremp. There’s BS that needs to be spread.

Ted Schremp gets a promotion!

Businesswire has an article about our friend and general douchebag Ted Schremp. It seems that Charter absolutely loves the way he outright lies to journalists, as he has now been promoted to chief marketing officer. From his new post he’ll be able to continue to spread BS about the new wiretapping program, as well as lead his entire company into delusional fairytale land, where every opportunity to make a buck just has to be good for the customer because it’s good for Charter.

This is a warning sign for all Charter customers and shareholders. Ted Schremp is willing to say and do anything for corporate profits, including helping his company violate federal laws and Constitutional rights enjoyed by all Americans.

One has to wonder what it takes to fill the shoes of a man like Ted Schremp. How low does one’s moral character have to sink? How technologically incompetent does one have to be? How willing to shit all over your own customers must you be to take over a job once held by a man like Ted Schremp?

From the article:

“I look forward to stepping into this important position at Charter,” said Mr. Schremp, who most recently served as the Company’s Senior Vice President of Product Management and Strategy. “Bob has developed a solid strategy targeting continued growth, and I look forward to assuming leadership for this key area of the business.”

Let’s break this down. Charter’s “solid strategy targeting continued growth” involves illegally wiretapping our Internet connections and selling our lives to advertising companies. Ted Schremp is a moron who claims that the system doesn’t use the core technology on which the entire program is built, but he’s somehow going to assume “leadership for this key area of business.”

If I owned stock in Charter (NASDAQ: CHTR) I’d be bailing like hell right now.

NebuAD is as bad as we thought

It seems like everyone has a recent article on NebuAD’s technology, which was once thought to be simple deep packet inspection only. As it turns out, NebuAD is actually conducting browser hijacks and modifying packets. The legality of this kind of thing isn’t really questionable. NebuAD is actively engaged in criminal activity.

From the article at eWeek:

According to a new technical report (PDF) by Free Press and Public Knowledge, NebuAd uses special equipment that “monitors, intercepts and modifies the contents of Internet packets” as consumers go online. The report found that NebuAd inserts extra hidden code into users’ Web browsers that was not sent by the Web site being visited.

In turn, the code directs the browser to another site not requested or even seen by the consumer, where more hidden code is downloaded and executed to add more tracking cookies. Using the secretly collected information, NebuAd serves up ads based on the user’s browsing habits.

There have been concerns that NebuAD might modify packets or inject script. This comes on the heels of a report last week showing how a company providing the same kind of wiretapping in England is actually crashing people’s browsers. I wonder what the penalties are for modifying copyrighted content, spying illegally on users, then crashing a user’s browser. I guess it’ll all depend on how much cash Charter brings to the upcoming hearings.

What interests me even more about this revelation is that it completely negates NebuAD’s previous statements on anonymity. Even if Charter is handing NebuAD completely anonymous lumps of raw data, stripped of sensitive subjects and identifiable information, NebuAD can just use this data to redirect you to one of their sites in order to load your browser up full of additional tracking software not hindered by Charter’s anonymity attempts. With a few tracking cookies and a bit of javascript now and again NebuAD could conceivably build a personal dossier on every Charter customer, complete with names, emails, association, interests, and lifestyle choices.

From the article at Wired:

NebuAd has conceded that its boxes peer deep into internet packets to pull out URLs and search terms in order to classify each user’s interests. That profile is then used deliver tailored ads on various partner websites.

Wait a minute. Didn’t Charter’s Ted Schremp, senior vice president of product management and strategy, definitively say that this system did not use deep packet inspection? Why yes, he did, in an interview with CNET here. The exact quote, in fact, was:

“The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only. That’s another point of misinformation on the Net.”

Misinformation? I guess you would know better than anyone else about that, Mr. Schremp. The only thing customers can be 100% sure about is the unending stream of complete and utter BS coming out of both Charter and NebuAD. Misinformation exists because it has been used as a tool by both of these companies to obfuscate the true nature of the technology being employed. Slowly but surely, however, the truth is coming out. And it’s not pretty, especially for NebuAD. They’ve been counting on their program running quietly behind the scenes and under the radar.

From the article at MediaPost:

NebuAd said in a statement Wednesday that it was “disappointed with the misleading characterization” of its company in the report. NebuAd stated that its technology is no different from that of other ad networks. “Similar to most ad networks, we place cookies on users’ machines … All ad networks use a small piece of code that is temporary and operates only within the security framework of the browser to invoke the placement of ad network cookies. The code NebuAd uses is no different, and is clearly demarcated outside of and does not modify any publisher code.”

These people are delusional. Their technology is “no different from that of other ad networks”?! Maybe the fact that their advertising is based on a constant stream of my personal information passing through their system makes it different. Maybe their access to each and every packet which comes or goes from my house makes it different. Maybe their injecting javascript and redirects into sites owned by other people makes it different. Maybe the fact that they refuse to disclose their technology makes it different. Maybe their lack of patents makes it different. Maybe the fact that it is nowhere near “anonymous” makes it different.

Sure, NebuAD uses a cookie just like every other advertising company out there, but there’s a lot more than just a cookie in play here. There are evil men (and women) working hard to profit from the personal lives of you and I. They’re willing to spy on us, wiretap us, and monitor our every communication to make a buck, and in the end the only thing we can be completely sure that we’re getting out of the deal is crashed browsers, stolen identities, broken websites, and violations of our right to free association.

Exactly what do we have to do to stop companies like NebuAD from spreading such terrible practices into the world? It really makes you wonder how some of these people live with themselves.

NPR gets it totally wrong

NPR posted an absolutely terrible article on Charter’s wiretapping program today. Cyrus Farivar spends most of the piece drawing stupid comparisons to Google and Facebook, dedicating nary a word to Congressional interest and legal aspects of the topic. I guess maybe I just expect more out of NPR, but even the audio accompanying the story is bad. If anyone from NPR is reading this, you can contact me here when you’d like a coherent and thorough report on this case.

From the article:

[F]our years ago, when Google launched its free Web-based Gmail, a lot of people were concerned that Google would be scanning private e-mails to allow targeted ads. Today, most people don’t seem to mind so much and continue to use it. Just like Gmail, Blum says, some customers might not mind the more targeted ads.

Let me explain this again for Mr. Farivar and Mr. Blum:

What Google does is legal because the data they collect does not leave the company. Gmail users do not have their information sold to an advertising company because Google itself is the advertising company. As long as Google is competent enough to protect the data used to generate the advertising, which most reasonable people believe Google to be, then the privacy concern in their case is not as significant. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, and I’m not suggesting that what Google does is right (because it isn’t), but at least what Google does is legal, as it isn’t predicated on user data being sent into the wild.

Charter, on the other hand, is breaking several federal laws. As an ISP they are held to regulations which disallow them from collecting data from their customers outside of that which is legally mandated. There is very little comparison to be drawn between the program put forth by Charter and NebuAD and that run by Google.

Charter would not go on the record to discuss its upcoming ad program, but the company already makes it possible for customers to opt out.

Do they now? Perhaps the dozens of articles to the contrary should have been consulted prior to your submitting a report to NPR on the matter, Mr. Farivar.

At its core, Charter’s initiaive is about money, says Chris Hoofnagle, a privacy law expert at the University of California, Berkeley.

“ISPs have to find a way to become profitable,” says Hoofnagle. “And they need to find ways to generate revenue on top of merely connecting people to the Internet.”

I don’t think anyone has any problem with Charter finding new ways to make money. That’s what companies are supposed to do. Nobody is ever going to speak negatively of Charter for exploring new ways to make money, except when those ways stomp all over the very people responsible for their current income. It’s robbing Peter to pay Paul. Wait, no, it’s selling Peter’s personal information to a bunch of people on the Internet so that they can steal Peter’s identity for fun and for profit, from which you will receive a kickback which you then use to pay Paul. Or better yet, just forget Paul and give Ted Schremp a bigger bonus!

Indeed, a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission states that Charter is $20 billion in debt, has lost billions of dollars over the last three years, and adds that the company expects “to continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future.”

I wasn’t aware of that. That’s the best news I’ve heard all week.

Wired goes after NebuAD

Wired is back with another great article, this time about Charter’s partner-in-crime NebuAD. Everything about this company just oozes sleaze. Just look at their website. It’s not inviting or inventive, it’s just a blob. And wait until you see some of these quotes.

From the article:

“NebuAd does not overlay ads, inject ads or otherwise alter ads that are already displayed on a publisher’s web site,” [vice president of marketing Janet] McGraw said. “Observers should not infer from any patent how our business actually operates.”

Oh, so you’re going to team up with Charter to monitor us in a super secret way that has nothing to do with anything you’ve previously put on record? Thanks NebuAD, I feel so much better about my personal information being protected now.

McGraw says the company doesn’t need to read the cookie to respect the users’ opt-out request. The company has a way to create a unique identifier for each user based on information their browsers sends with any request for a web page.

“This association is done by applying proprietary patent-pending user identification algorithms that makes use of multiple elements of a browser request,” McGraw said in a written response to questions.

The company didn’t explain why it sets a cookie to begin with.

I’m starting to think that Janet McGraw went to the same school as Ted Schremp. “It doesn’t work like we said it did before, and it doesn’t work like Charter says it does. It’s something completely different, made from the breath of unicorns and programmed by elves in a far-off land.” How are we customers supposed to accept this program if the people running it can’t even pin down how it works? And where the hell do these companies find their marketing people?

THREAT LEVEL was unable to find a patent application for that system.

Wait, so you mean Janet McGraw, vice president of marketing for NebuAD and otherwise upstanding corporate citizen, was lying? You mean this system doesn’t completely protect every single aspect of my privacy despite its being kept completely secret? I didn’t know that companies were allowed to outright lie about how they protect customer privacy. I thought there were all sorts of laws about that.

NebuAd’s president Bob Dykes backed out of a planned interview with THREAT LEVEL last Tuesday, asking instead to answer written question. Days later, McGraw provided some information related to a few of the questions, but declined to answer most on the grounds they related to NebuAd’s “proprietary technology.”

Oh, it’s proprietary. Now I understand. You can’t tell me how you’re spying on me because you’ve found an incredibly clever approach that you don’t want your competition to find out about. Never mind the fact that there are a relatively limited number of ways to accomplish IP wiretapping, all of which are widely published. We all believe you when you say you’ve come up with something completely new to do to a protocol which has been around for over 30 years.

McGraw did not respond to a follow-up email Wednesday asking for clarification of how the opt-out system worked and for answers to the original, non-technical questions. The questions the company refused to answer are below.

• How deep into packets are you going to extract urls? How does Nebuads know what a given url means? Are the urls manually reviewed, ala the early days of ask jeeves, or do you use some sort of spider tied to a classification algorithm? How does the system handle search engine queries?
• How does opt-out system work with a cookie, given that NebuAd is a network appliance and can’t read the opt-out cookie unless the user goes to a specific site so that the cookie can be released and thus either read by Nebuad.com or read in the TCP stream. It seems that an ISP’s customers can opt out of the ads but not the monitoring? If that’s incorrect, please explain how the opt-out works? How does this system fit with the promises made on the NebuAd opt-out page?
• Why should an ISP’s customers want to allow your company to monitor their web usage?
• Is there anyone at the company with a background in privacy?
• If a customer wanted to see the profile NebuAd had built up about them, how would they do so?
• What exernal auditing has NebuAd had? Does the company plan to perform audits on an ongoing basis? Will any of those reports be public?
• Are your network boxes capable of injecting content into packets?
• What security measures does NebuAd take to lock down the network appliances and prevent NebuAd from being used for a Man-in-the-Middle attack?
• How long does NebuAd keep data?

This looks to me like a list of questions Congress needs to put in front of NebuAD. Heck, why not just let Ryan Singel do the questioning himself? He seems like a capable sort.

Does NebuAD sound like a company that you want snooping around in your web traffic? They don’t even know what they’re doing, and they certainly aren’t on the same page with Charter. Ultimately it is we the customer who should have the final say as to whether our activity is tracked, and we should be given every opportunity to review the methods by which it is accomplished.

Another Ted Schremp interview, this time with extra BS!

Ted Schremp, senior vice president of product management and strategy, is back again today with a second interview, this time with CNET’s Declan McCullagh. This time he claims that Charter’s program does not utilize deep packet inspection, and that their new “enhanced service” is no different than giving their customers faster broadband speeds at no additional cost.

From the article:

Q: If you’re conducting deep packet inspection, that means you know what data your customers are transferring. Are you going to look for evidence of copyright infringement, child pornography, and so on as well?

The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only. That’s another point of misinformation on the Net.

Q: You’re saying that URL-level information is not deep packet?

Suffice it to say that we’re using URL-level information only.

Huh, so I guess all of those articles out there on every other technical site and in every other interview, including the patent data from NebuAD itself describing their deep packet inspection model, is only “misinformation” and isn’t really using deep packet inspection after all. Is it just me or does this Ted Schremp guy sounds like he feasts on a big bowl of bullshit in the morning before he starts giving interviews just so his breath smells right for the occasion?

Q: If you’re getting a new stream of revenue from NebuAd, does that mean lower prices for your customers?

As we’ve gone into these pilots, we’ve conducted a series of focus groups to help us understand from their perspective, does this technology add value to their Internet experience, talk through privacy concerns, and so on. What our customers have shared with us is that they understand the fact that advertising is part of the Internet model. To the extent that fuels the economics behind the Internet, they understand that. They appreciate the notion that ads that are being served are attuned to their interests or potential interests.

We view it the same way as offering faster Internet speeds. This is no different. It’s about taking the latest technology and applying it as a way to be useful to our customers.

Schremp regularly talks about these focus groups, which must have been made up of hand-selected individuals chosen for their complete lack of understanding about the Internet, privacy, and technology. Based on the comments and articles I’ve seen, the only thing that Charter’s customers have confronted them with is negativity regarding this program. Of course Schremp has been programmed from birth to ignore negativity when presented with a better, less comprehensible company line, and proves once again in this interview that he is the perfect man to be selling this “enhancement” to Charter customers. It’s a wonder they aren’t actually raising prices over this.

And for the record, none of the Charter customers or technical service associates I’ve spoken with consider this on par with offering faster speeds. I don’t understand how spying on your customers, selling their private information to an advertising company, then lying through your teeth about how you’re going to collect, store, transmit, and secure their data is on par with bumping up your broadband rates. But then again I’m no Ted Schremp.

The key from our perspective is that we’re very customer-oriented in everything we do. The privacy concerns and the ability of our customers to opt-out and the fact that we’re talking today is indicative of that as well. We want to be very clear that they have a choice.

That’s great, Ted. Now exactly where can I exercise my choice not to be a part of your illegal wiretapping program?

The New York Times interviews Charter VP Ted Schremp

The New York Times is running an online article by Saul Hansell about Charter’s snooping program, complete with an interview with Ted Schremp, senior VP for product management and strategy. What did Mr. Schremp have to say about his company collecting private data to be turned over to an advertising firm?

From the article:

He offered his personal view that the system was harmless and well within the norms of the Internet these days. “The mainstream Internet user is hugely aware of the fact that the fundamental economic model on the Internet is advertising,” he said. While some people object to targeted advertising systems like Google’s Gmail, which displays ads related to the text of e-mail users are reading, many others don’t.

First of all, Mr. Hansell doesn’t seem to understand the critical difference between Google’s advertising system, which collects user data and feeds it into a Google-owned and operated advertising algorithm, and Charter’s, which collects user data and sells it to an advertising company not otherwise associated with Charter’s customers. In the interest of clarification, let’s just simplify the comparison by saying that one is legal, and the other is not. Mr. Schremp is partly correct in his assertion that the fundamental economic model on the Internet does seem to be advertising, but that only goes for companies other than ISP’s. For companies like Charter the economic model is very, very different. Google and other such services simply do not have the same level of access to a user’s interests and traffic, and are not responsible for facilitating a user’s actual connection to the Internet. Their model, quite simply, is advertising. Charter, on the other hand, does a poor enough job at fulfilling their own fundamental economic model, that being Internet access, that they have no business attempting to put themselves into competition with companies such as Google.

“All we are doing is, in an anonymous format, providing additional context to serve those ads. To the extent those ads are more meaningful to me as Ted Schremp, I will have a better Internet experience than the generic ads that are part of Yahoo and everything online.”

I want you to think about whether or not the advertisements you see on web pages are meaningful to you personally, and to ask yourself how much better your Internet experience would be if the advertisements you saw were more targeted to your interests. Now, is that worth letting your Internet provider monitor your every move to capture your habits, then sell that information to a company trying to convince you to buy things?

For those customers who disagree, Mr. Schremp said that Charter was offering the ability for them to choose not to be part of the system. I suggested that most privacy experts prefer opt-in systems where information isn’t collected until the user explicitly grants permission. He said that opt-out has become the norm for all targeting on the Internet.

Opt-out has become the norm because companies such as Charter have declared it to be the norm. It’s a lot easier to leave the majority of your customers in the dark about your programs and profit from their private information than to beg customers to let you make extra money from the content of their lives.

Mr. Schremp did acknowledge that raising revenue was a main goal for Charter in this: “We want to leverage technology in a way that makes sense for our economic model.”

Here’s the real reason this is happening. NebuAd is paying Charter “several dollars per subscriber a month,” and Charter could really use the money, seeing as their stock price recently dropped so low as to see them delisted by Nasdaq. It’s a shame that their management is so inept as to believe that the road to becoming profitable runs directly through the very privacy they’re required by federal law to protect.