uVerizon Tells Another Customer To Switch To FiOS Or Lose Landline Servicer

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  (chrismar)

  Even though his landline service was working fine, a man in Virginia was recently told by Verizon that he had two weeks to switch to the company’s FiOS fiberoptic service or lose his account altogether.

  This is according to Ars Technica, which tells the tale of John, a Northern Virginia man who recently experienced an outage of his landline service that had nothing to do with the copper line running to or through his home, but with a network error farther up the line.

  Had he not noticed or brought the error to Verizon’s attention, we wouldn’t be telling you about John, but by filing a ticket with the telecom titan, he inadvertently started a process that ultimately resulted in him ditching Verizon.

  After bringing the outage to Verizon’s attention, he checked in with the company about his ticket. That’s when he tells Ars that his issue had somehow gone from being an outage complaint to a request for installation of fiber at his home.

  Verizon even called him to try to set up an appointment to make the change-over from copper to fiber. Not wanting to switch and not thrilled with being compelled to switch without notice, he said no.

  Meanwhile, John’s landline service eventually came back to life without anyone having to come do anything at his house. But that’s not the end, obviously.

  On June 18, he received a letter from a regional Verizon executive saying that because “you declined transitioning service to our fiber network to resolve your issue… we will no longer be able to provide service to your home,” even though the upgrade to fiber was not needed to resolve the issue.

  The letter only gave John until July 3 to make his decision or his “Verizon home service account will be closed.”

  In the end, July 3 came and went without his landline turning into a pumpkin (and without explanation from anyone), but John decided to switch his landline service — not to FiOS but to the VOIP service offered by his cable/broadband provider. It may not offer the same access to a dial tone during a local power outage, but it’s less expensive than Verizon, and well… it’s just not Verizon.

  “I’m still canceling Verizon even if it’s still working because this whole experience has been pretty unsavory,” he tells Ars.

  John’s story is not dissimilar from a recent item we brought you about a New Jersey woman who was receiving letters from Verizon saying she’d lose landline service if she didn’t upgrade immediately to FiOS.

  Telecom worker unions have accused Verizon of deliberately neglecting its copper line network, alleging that the company is fudging its service numbers to make it look like they are making prompt repairs to these lines. Verizon denies these claims and says the union is only using them as a negotiation tool.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uJust Looking At This Airplane Seat Design Patent Makes Us Uncomfortabler

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  A patent for new airplane seats shows the middle seat turned around in an attempt to increase arm and shoulder space.

  Airlines and aircraft manufactures are continuously looking for new ways to pack passengers into planes like sardines. From installing narrower seats to exploring the idea of bicycle-like perches , there appears to be no end to what might be considered to maximize capacity on flights. The latest concept: a seating design that takes the already awful experience of being stuck in the middle seat and makes it worse… so much worse.

  Wired reports that a recently approved patent [PDF] by airplane seat supplier Zodiac Seats France takes the middle chair and turns it around, creating an alternating seating pattern.

  The “Economy Class Cabin Hexagon” design essentially gives every passenger on the plane four seat mates instead of two.

  The seating arrangement is described as a configuration “with at least one row having at least one forward-facing seat and at least one aft-facing seat.”

  

  The new design creates alternating seat positions.

  That means if you’re lucky enough to be sitting between two people, you’ll now be lucky enough to look two others in the eyes for an entire flight.

  Zodiac says in the patent that the new seating design is meant “to increase cabin density while also creating seat units that increase the space available at the shoulder and arm area.”

  While facing the opposite direction of two seats you’re smushed between would likely give you a little more freedom to move your upper body, it doesn’t help the fact you likely won’t be able to completely ignore the two other people with little else to look at than your face.

  Of course, as Wired points out, there might be a few situations where facing other passengers might be helpful: if they’re your family or friends or you’re just looking to chat up a fellow traveler.

  Though the patent certainly gives us a small glimpse into the creative means for which the airline industry is looking to maximize limited seating space, Zodiac hasn’t made any public plans to take their new design to the skies.

  In order for the Hexagon design to make it to the masses, it would first have to undergo an array of safety and compliance tests, not to mention the extremely dirty looks many travelers would surely throw such a design.

  Hey Look The Most Nightmarish Idea For Plane Seating Ever [Wired]

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

uFacebook Will Actually Let People Decide What They Want To See In The News Feedr

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• Customization can be a wonderful thing. In the case of your Facebook News Feed, it might mean the difference between confronting a daily onslaught of adorable baby photos and actually getting content you want to view. The social network added a new feature today that will allow users to designate a group of accounts that will automatically appear at the top of their News Feed.

  The “See First” option that launched today allows people to identify up to 30 people or pages whose newest updates will appear at the top of the News Feed every time that users opens Facebook.

  This is a departure from Facebook’s often confounding algorithm that it uses for determining what people want to see in the News Feed, a divergence from practice that the company itself points out in the blog post announcing the new setting.

  “The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you,” Facebook explains. “To do this, we use ranking to order stories based on how interesting we believe they are to you: specifically, whom you tend to interact with, and what kinds of content you tend to like and comment on.”

  While you can always click through options on a post that pops up in your News Feed to make it go away or simply have that kind of content appear less often, that doesn’t always guarantee you will or won’t see something like it again the next time you’re on Facebook.

  But noting that “ultimately you’re the only one who truly knows what is most meaningful to you,” Facebook says it’s giving more control to users over what they see. Fancy that!

  This could be bad for business, Re/code points out, as Facebook relies on people scrolling through their feeds to make money on showing ads to users. But that’s a risk the company is willing to take to please users and keep them coming back for more, a spokesperson explained to Re/code.

  “It sounds counterintuitive, but the worse we do on rankings, the more we make people try and scroll through, the more likely they are to just go away,” the rep said. “If we show you the stuff you really really want first, you’ll come back more often.”

  See First and other changes in the Preferences section will hit the Facebook app today in an update for iOS, and will roll out to Android and Web versions of the social network later.

  And if you’re wondering how you’ll ever fill those 30 slots, might we ah, ahem, humbly suggest you add the Consumerist Facebook page to your list? We promise not to fill your feed with adorable baby photos, unless they are pictures of a newborn wheel of cheese or a wee gaming system in its infancy. So. Cute.

  For now, we dance.

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uSenate Advances Bill That Would Require Social Media Sites To Report “Terrorist Activities”r

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  (Tom Raftery)

  If it seems like everyone uses social media, well, that’s because basically everyone does. But it’s not just cake recipes and birthday party meet-ups people plan online; plenty of illegal activity gets talked about in digital space, too. And now members of the Senate want to make sure that when certain kinds of no-no topics pop up, the platform owners let the feds know.

  The language that would require social media sites to alert authorities if terrorists are talking is in a bill that just cleared committee, Reuters reports.

  It’s part of the appropriations bill (S. 1705) that would authorize all intelligence activity and spending for the next fiscal year — so, kind of important for Congress to actually move through, in some form or other. As such, the full text is quite long, but Reuters noticed the reporting requirements deep in section 603.

  Specifically, that section of the bill outlines a duty to “report terrorist activities and the unlawful distribution of information relating to explosives.” The actual requirement reads:

  Whoever, while engaged in providing an electronic communication service or a remote computing service to the public through a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce, obtains actual knowledge of any terrorist activity, including the facts or circumstances described in subsection (c) shall, as soon as reasonably possible, provide to the appropriate authorities the facts or circumstances of the alleged terrorist activities.

  In plain English, that means that the defined set of services — which include all the big social media sites and networks like Twitter and Facebook — would be legally obliged to tell law enforcement ASAP if anyone making terroristic threats or talking about illegal “explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction” floated across their networks.

  An unnamed Congressional official told Reuters that the purpose was to protect social media companies that report certain traffic to the authorities, rather than to compel them to spy on their users.

  In a committee hearing about the bill yesterday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said that social media companies should work with the government to prevent violent militants from using their sites.

  “Twitter, FB and YouTube all, as I understand it, remove content on their sites that come to their attention if it violates their terms of service, including terrorism,” said Feinstein. “The companies do not proactively monitor their sites to identify such content nor do they inform the FBI when they identify or remove their content. I believe they should.”

  The bill does specifically say that nothing in it should be construed to read as a requirement for sites to monitor particular users or their communications, as a “protection of privacy,” so it’s not that Twitter or Facebook would suddenly start intently watching each and every one of their 236 million or 1.44 billion respective active users. It’s that if certain communications made on those platforms seemed too suspicious and caught their eye — or, let’s say, an algorithmic text filter — they’d have to call the feds and report it.

  A Facebook representative told Reuters, “”We share the government’s goal of keeping terrorist content off our site. Our policies on this are crystal clear: we do not permit terrorist groups to use Facebook, and people are not allowed to promote or support these groups on Facebook. We remove this terrorist content as soon as we become aware of it.”

  The bill has been reported out of committee and will go to the Senate floor for a vote at some as-yet-undetermined time in the relatively near future.

  Senate bill would make social media report ‘terrorist activity’ [Reuters]

  
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by Kate Cox via Consumerist

uDoritos Reloaded Queso-Coated Nightmare Is Being Tested At Burger Kingr

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  (Ashlee KIeler)

  What’s that? You live in an area where there are no 7-Eleven stores, but you secretly dream of experiencing the convenience store chain’s exclusive Doritos Loaded? The product, which apparently combined the worst features of mozzarella sticks and nachos, could only be found in a few 7-Eleven stores last year. People in other places might have the opportunity to try them now, since Burger King has been testing the cheese bites in a few locations.
  

  To refresh your memory about this particular “warm cheese snack,” we learned that they were available last year just a few blocks from Consumerist’s Washington bureau, and hazed some new staffers by making them try the cheesy treats. We don’t normally test food items ourselves, but couldn’t resist the opportunity when they were so close by.

  When our colleague Ashlee tried them, she described them as tasting like “a reheated, damp cheese stick with a sprinkle of Doritos flavor and pepper.” That sounds unpleasant and like something that Burger King would be better off not inflicting on the public, especially in the wake of their popular revival of the very tasty chicken fries.

  What they’re supposed to taste like are queso-dipped Doritos, but the idea isn’t quite there yet. Has the recipe improved? We can only hope so. If you happen to see a Burger King promoting this item, let Marvo over at The Impulsive Buy know: he wants to figure out where they’re being tested. So far there’s been one confirmed sighting, in Queens, NY.

  Maybe the recipe has changed slightly, but I’m not really keen to try this product and find out.

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

uKFC Figures “Why Not Make A Pizza Crust Out Of Fried Chicken Too?”r

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  (@kfcphilippines)

  If you’d thought KFC had hit rock bottom in its quest to mine every possible acceptable use for fried chicken when it tried the Double Down Hot Dog earlier this year, you were wrong. Very wrong.

  Yesterday, KFC Philippines announced the “KFChizza,” which if you haven’t already guessed and then lost your appetite for both chicken and pizza, is a pizza where the crust has been replaced by KFC fried chicken.

  As BGR notes, the basic chicken parm has already set the precedent for slathering a breaded chicken cutlet with tomato sauce and cheese, but in our experience the cutlet in a chicken parm is nowhere near as distinctly seasoned as the stuff you get at KFC. Additionally, everyone knows that a good chicken parm uses a bread-crumb coating as opposed to traditional fried chicken you’d get from KFC or elsewhere.

  [via Eater]

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uSouthwest Passengers Removed From Plane After Engine Catches Firer

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  (David Transier)

  A short delay turned into an overnight stay for nearly 150 Southwest passengers when the aircraft they were on aborted its takeoff after an engine caught fire.

  The Chicago Tribune reports that the 143 passengers and five crew members were safely evacuated from the aircraft shortly after it began and then halted its takeoff procedure Wednesday evening.

  The flight, traveling from Chicago’s Midway Airport to Boston, was finally headed down the runway – after a 30 minute delay – at about 10:45 p.m., when smoke and sparks were seen coming from the right engine.

  Chicago Fire Department officials tell the Tribune that fire equipment and six ambulances were dispatched to the scene.

  All travelers were able to exit the plane without incident and no injuries were reported.

  Commander Frank Velez with the fire department confirmed that the aircraft’s right engine caught fire, but a cause for the incident has not yet been determined.

  Passengers on the flight were scheduled to take another airplane to Boston early Thursday, Southwest said.

  Southwest plane aborts takeoff at Midway after engine catches fire [Chicago Tribune]

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist