246 DEAR HACKER

246 DEAR HACKER

I’d paid for the right to listen to? Not a chance. As soon as I could get

a computer running again, I began downloading the titles I lost in the fire. I still have a good ways to go but I’m putting a big dent in the task. Nearly 150 albums had to be thrown away as they were nearly transparent from heat damage. I kept as many of the jewel case inserts as I was able to. And as the mp3s are burnt to new discs, the inserts are being matched to the albums. If it weren’t for an outlet like Napster, I’d be spending thousands of dollars to replace my music.

Brad Brown

This also brings up an interesting point insofar as licensing. The MPAA and RIAA would like us to believe that we are simply buying a license to view or listen when we buy movies or music. Using that logic, we should still own the license when the physical disks are destroyed.

Dear 2600: I’m not a hacker. I can barely boot up and set the margins on Corel 8.

I read your magazine to stay informed about the politics of technology. And those letters and their accompanying answers: they’re all gems. Now it’s my turn. For the last two weeks some wingnut has been calling me at exactly 9:30 every morning. When I answer, there’s no one on the line. I called Bell-slash-Verizon regarding annoyance calls. We ruled out an unauthorized wake-up service. These were my op- tions: Star 69, Star 57 (a police phone trace), get a new phone number ($42.05), or Caller ID with Anonymous Blocker ($7.99 a month). Star

69 and 57 didn’t work. I don’t feel like shelling out bucks to corporate shareholders just yet. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Silverspartan

Note how every solution Verizon came up with involved you giving them money. This is completely unethical. You do not have to pay a penny to stop this from hap- pening. Don’t let Verizon tell you otherwise. Contact their Annoyance Call Bureau (the number is in the front of the phone book) and give them the details you gave us. The fact that it happens every day at the same time will make it easy to track.

T H E M A G I C O F T H E C O R P O R AT E W O R L D

They will contact whomever is doing this and make them stop. However, they won’t tell you who’s doing it.

Dear 2600:

I work in the financial services industry and it strikes me as amazing that so much private information is held by the credit bureaus and financial institutions. Privacy is the responsibility and should be the concern of every individual citizen, but let me tell your readers right now that your consumer credit report contains way more informa- tion (correct and incorrect) than you would ever want an anonymous person to know. For the most part, there is little that can be done to protect this information from prying eyes. Financial institutions nationwide have ready access to your entire financial, employment, criminal, driving, and spending records without your knowledge or consent. There is some recourse that has been built as a protection against the information being reported incorrectly or falling into the wrong hands, but it does little to preserve your privacy.

As a part of the internal workings of this industry, I have more access to your data than you do, a lot more. As an example, I can pull a credit report on anyone in the country with little more than their name and a made up address. No social? No problem. When I pull up your info, it will politely inform me that the social security number I have entered was incorrect and that the correct one is XXX-XX-XXXX. By the way, when I pull up a credit report I am prohibited by law from giving the customer a copy, and the copy you can request from them (it is your right to get one for free) is not even close to as complete as what I see. Experian, CBI, Trans Union, and Equifax have the goods on you right now. They know where you work, how much you make, how much available credit you have on your cards, who your cell car- rier is and how much you use it, whether or not you have been or still are married, where you have applied for credit, and also where and at what rate you spend your money and a plethora of other tidbits. Credit is extremely necessary for most of us and also extremely valuable but is based largely on arbitrary formulas. This is a system that needs to