Comcast support and phishing prevention

And this kind of thing is why phishing emails still succeed.

Dear Jeremy,

I understand you are interested in [details removed]. We would be more than happy to accomodate [sic] your request, however we cannot do this through email.

At Comcast, we are focused on providing our customers with the most secure high-speed Internet experience. To protect our customers from Internet fraud, we do not request or provide any sensitive customer information via email.

To minimize any inconvenience caused by this policy, we recommend that you use our secure Live Chat channel to chat with an agent immediately. Our agents are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Please click on the link below to chat with an agent who can help resolve your issue right now.

http://www.comcastsupport.com/sdcuser/asp/default.asp

I apologize for the inconvenience and hope you understand that this policy is to protect your valuable customer information.

[generic security/ending stuff]

OK, so they dump their contact forms on the site through email. It'd be nice if if they did a non-real-time messaging through their web site like some other companies. There's the issue that most of the account data is included in the email reply anyways... As for other things, the domain isn't in their main domain for account management (or the one they use for the customer portal). Yea, they probably outsourced it, but they could use support.comcast.com or something similar. And the fact they sent an email asking people to click a link in it. Those two alone are pretty bad. At least it was plain text and not HTML, but I doubt many people would notice the difference.

Interesting data point

I was just noticing that my Internet access is very fast right now. Normally it's not so fast except during the work day. Many other people have noticed how Comcast's speed has sucked lately (on the order of several months, not a short time) too. Yea it's not like evening, but... Given the day I think there's the reason, but I'd say it's a good data point to say the issues are not technical but due to excessive oversubscription.

It's been a good week. On Friday the 24th the new Chipotle located 1.3 miles away from my house officially opens. However that meant that on Tuesday and Wednesday it was free food days. Of course that meant waiting in line for 30 minutes the first day and over 45 minutes the next, but hey - free burritos and whatever else you want. I think half the people in line both days were Bethel people too. Today they get to sleep in though, as they've all been there every day for 8 days and need rest for the big day tomorrow. Apparently the way to be first in line for the official opening is to fax your order in at like 8am asking for it to be ready at 11. Or at least that's what one of the workers said. On Wednesday I was sitting down eating with Ross and Lindsey, and suddenly one of the workers walks by, looks at me, and says "hey, it's the fix-your-computer guy!". We all sorta were puzzled for a second, until I realized that on Tuesday I had worn this shirt. I hadn't talked to any of the employees that day, but I guess I must just make an impression on people.

Otherwise the week has been sorta boring. Work is busy with too many projects, all of which are going in and out of various states of holds on certain things. It's an interesting balancing game of figuring out something to do while waiting for something else to avoid ending up with yet another in-process project hanging over my head. I say it's better to not start rather than have to keep track of state. I spent the day hiding in the server room, which was actually sorta peaceful. No interruptions, and it's a room with white noise (fans/air through the ducts) so loud that you have to raise your voice to talk to people, but with my earphones in I can't really hear that. Perfect background for just listening to music while waiting for progress bars and doing all the daily requests.

Tuesday night the Comcast guy came out to disconnect the video trap. I sorta felt bad for him, since he was a short guy and the ladder and fence were definitely disproportionally large for him. And the fact that I actually have no intention of ever hooking up a TV to it. The reason for the visit was actually because they offered me a free upgrade to 6Mbps service for a year, along with that video. They came bundled, not separately. I haven't noticed anything different yet. Unless things change drastically, I think it's pretty definite that in a year I'll switch back to 4 or possible 3Mbps service (if I even have Comcast HSI at that point).

I'm rather annoyed at Microsoft tonight. ActiveSync is being flaky and saying my PocketPC is a Guest (allow network pass through) rather than a syncing connection. Apparently this isn't an uncommon problem with it, which doesn't sound like fun. And ActiveSync 3.8 has issues with the installer (as does 3.7). I think I may start looking at sync4j again and possibly do a complete wipe and rebuild once that's working. That's assuming it handles all-day events now. Why don't any of the open calendar solutions handle that properly? vCalendar supports it, which is what stuff seems to use. Apparently iSync breaks it on everything though (on my PocketPC, and also for someone who uses it with a blackberry). It turns them into 00:00-24:00, which is completely broken with timezone changes. Actually IIRC Outlook has this issue too if you're not careful, and it came up in a recent /. article. I'm thinking that I may need to customize a solution to get what I want. I've said it before and I'll say it again - PocketPC is fine for those who know computers and want certain features (like VGA resolution on a 3" screen and it backed by a fast CPU and lots of RAM), but sucks for non-computer people. So yea, basically they're horrible for the people they're targetted towards, and fun toys for the people outside the marketing department's view.

Today went well. I started off the day by driving over to the Comcast office and dropping off the HD box and canceling all the video service. They're gonna send someone to trap the video on Wednesday supposedly. After Dave's ordeal who knows what'll happen though. As long as my cable modem doesn't die I probably won't know (I haven't had a TV connected to the cable for months). After that JoeBuck™ and I went to Chipotle for lunch. Burritos are good. I then went and restocked the dew in the office, as well as acquired some canned food items for the department Christmas party. Bringing those things is a great idea and all, but for those of us who don't normally keep that type of stuff around... It becomes like the Chipotle free burrito day. Maybe that's why I remembered it. I stopped by and bugged the coworkers a bit. The Ogo AIM portals also freaked out for most of the afternoon, and Cingular kept duplicating SMS messages too. We'll see how long this thing sticks around. The rest of the day was spent sitting around, as well as fighting Bethel's horrible latency to try and eliminate some pages. Which didn't work apparently as my phone is beeping and vibrating right now... Actually they're not Dave's servers this time - it's the network being broken again. The server is "OK" now (defined as Packet loss = 0%, RTA = 2088.30 ms). Anyways, some interesting links were acquired. Want to know what happens when you give a writer a camera? It's actually rather funny, especially if you know anything about what the normal photo guys go through. Then there's the case where someone leaves a voicemail telling someone "God hates you and he wants to kill your children," along with a work phone number, and the predictable results. Then there's Roseville being a big shopping area. I'm pretty indifferent on that one, other than I don't mind the fact that there's a lot of different restaurants in close proximity to work.