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Admin
Even the pros get it wrong sometimes:
[image]
Admin
having been through this exact problem, when I shifted out of a group house (and DSL was in my name), it took us about a 2 hour phone call with iinet, but it was fairly simple - me tell them I'm shifting out and 'relocating' my adsl to another state, but my housemate wants to take over the adsl here.. Then my housemate gets on the phone and confirms he wants to 'join up' and take over the ADSL here.. He gave all his contact and billing details, and it was changed over within a couple of days.. The online account management was a little bizarre for a month or so, as we could see each other's phone/adsl info in the toolbox until they finished 'unlinking' our accounts (they'd created his as a sub-account of mine, and then moved the 'old' dsl/phone to the sub-account, and then when my adsl went 'live', they separated the accounts..
Only hiccup was two years later when he shifted into a new house and took his ADSL with him, I got the SMS saying 'ADSL is not available in your requested area, please phone xxxx with code yyyyy to discuss' - seems they never changed the 'technical contact' on the account!
Admin
Notwithstanding the 3 spelling mistakes in your post....
Admin
Admin
meh. its a known issue internally. who gives a fuck. slow news day? I expect so much bette from thedailywtf
Admin
I got tickets to a very highly reputable event through the same method (they were sold out, so I just spoofed an input tag). It's ridiculous how this kind of unsophisticated attack can succeed so often.
Admin
not in aussie land.
iinets connection fee is $79.95~$150.
and you will typically be without internet for a week while you are bounced between the telco who owns the line and the isp who owns the DSLAM.
http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/isp-15-6/iinet-naked-dsl.htm
Admin
"its a known issue internally."
Hahaha. Right, so it's totally OK to charge people $59 for a service they can do themselves, then not deliver the service?
Kind of goes to the heart of what other details might be 'secure' in your system to prevent abuse and loss of income for your company, too.
Admin
You should get your full $59 worth, and change the name every month
Admin
Well...either it was proof of concept or...a complete fabrication which makes it entirely less funny. Sort of like FML.
Admin
Not necessarily, depending on sign-up fees and whatnot.
Admin
I'm with iiNet myself. Things like this make me glad that I deliberately chose to keep my phone line and internet service separate, despite it costing more.
Admin
sigh
Seriously, don't make it so complicated. Call in to tell them you're still getting bills for the previous resident. Tell them that you are interested in purchasing the service, though, but obviously you'll need the old bills fixed so you can be the new customer since you won't be paying for service that's not yours.
Stop trying to do things the hard way!
Admin
He still paid for a name change the WTF is that he got hosed
Admin
I think the technical term for this article is "how I broke the law after I was dumb enough to pay for a name change". Stupid squared...
Admin
He should change it back and request for a refund of the $59 and when that is done, use the method to change the name. The ISP would have been none the wiser. ;)
Admin
The usual procedure is you cancel your account, your line gets marked as available and gets immediately assigned to the next Telstra customer on a waiting list instead of your subcontracting ISP. You then get told there are no available lines until the exchange is upgraded in a few months/years unless there is a cancellation. You then stay on dialup for months unless some other ISP manages to muscle their way into the exchange and put their equipment in.
Admin
Changing a billing contact doesn't cost anything. The fee would have been for a Change of Lessee for the phone service, it is a universal fee charged by Telstra.
Editting it the way he did would have updated our systems - but not Telstra's - which could cause problems for him if he ever needs to make changes to the phone service (moving providers/changing service addons etc) that require Telstra input.
Admin
He should have changed his name to "Douglas', monthly_bill='0"
Admin
And have to pay a "standard" $79 setup fee to set up the new account :)
iiNet are great like that...
Admin
I rented a house and discovered a dead phone line. Then a bill came. On a hunch I went down and paid it. Suddenly the phone was working and I could use my modem to access the Internet. Months later I got ADSL service. Everything worked fine in the name of the previous tenant.
One day the previous tenant was paying her bill for her new house when the staff kindly showed her the bill at my house also. She showed up at my house a little pissed off that I had used a phone line in her name for years. When I told her I got it by paying the fifty dollar phone bill that she had hoped to stiff the phone company for, she shut up. We cooperated on changing the name.
Admin
Try the name change by adding a space or something invisible.
Send them a letter rejecting the bill because an undue fee was billed. "I have never requested a name change !" That should get you your money back.
Do the name change yourself.
Admin
What, and have then tear out the cabling, wait for three weeks and have the same guy come reinstall the cabling?
Admin
And since when does common sense prevent people from coding silly stuff?
Admin
In most places there aren't any competitors for ISPs.
Admin
He actually agreed to the 59 dollar charge? What a dope.
Admin
Noone posted link to iiNet response?
[quote user=iiNet Rep] kay guys, here's where we're at with both issues:
First up, the loophole within the form was fixed this morning. The fix has been deployed and the problem should not arise again.
Regarding the $59 fee for change of name, this is likely to have been a request to change the lease on a phone service and not a DSL name change as suggested in the article.
The $59 fee is handed to us by Telstra, which we pass on to the customer. There is no charge for a name change on a DSL account.
That said, we can't be certain this is the case until we've been in touch with the affected customer – we're looking to get in touch with him now. [/quote]
Admin
Thats awesome ;) iiNet is actually one of the few decent non-telstra ISPs available in Australia. Well, another bad australian isp added to the pile
Admin
I thought SSN were not unique? I remember reading that somewhere...
Oh, name as PK is a bad idea, not because of changeability, but because of uniqueness. How many John Smiths or Michael Joneses are there in the world?
Admin
BT in the UK isn't a lot better. When my landlady converted her house into two flats, she was using cable TV + phone with (at the time) NTL, so wasn't interested in the BT phone line. She still lived downstairs and rented out the upstairs flat, where I now live. A previous tenant wanted BT phone service, rather than NTL, so extended the wiring to an extension socket in the upstairs flat, taking over the line.
I moved in and switched the line to my name. The landlady decided to move out and live in Italy for a while, and rented out the downstairs flat as well. A few tenants came and went without wanting BT service. Then, about a year and a half ago, a new tenant did want a BT phone line. He asked for a new line but BT started transferring mine. I told them they'd got it wrong, he tried to cancel because they'd screwed up, we both sent letters and thought the transfer had cancelled. It hadn't. Suddenly my phone number won't ring and my DSL goes out.
I get back on the phone and try to transfer back into my name. 'That will take two weeks, and you can't have your old number back.' WTF?
I think on it for a while and ring back, asking for a new line myself. I again ask for my old number. "Yes sir, no problem." Double WTF.
However, you can't put DSL on a new line until it's been installed, then there's a two week waiting period; in the meantime my ISP has cancelled my account and lost the contents of my web space.
BT Customer Service were entirely unhelpful or unavailable; I actually ended up calling the sales number each time because they at least answer the damn phone!
Full saga at my blog.
Admin
man, u re a hero!!!!
Admin
I once signed up with a different WA-based (that's Western Australia) ISP which gave the option of getting a discount on a modem or giving it to your referring friend as a bonus, if you already had a modem. However they only used JavaScript validation to ensure this happened. Disabling JavaScript allowed my friend the bonus and my discount on the modem. ;-)
I was also once an agent for Yet Another WA-based ISP (which has now been assimilated into the iiBorg) and had my ADSL with them, but had to move house while under contract. Because of the Telstra monopoly there is no "move service": only "disconnect" and "connect" - so I was up for a $59 break contract fee plus $99 connection fee. Annoying but nothing I could do about it.
At the time they were running a promotion that gave a $50 credit if you signed up for their phone service and ADSL if using the then-new "churn" process: Churning meant that you could change between two Telstra Wholesale ISPs without losing your port and only minutes of downtime instead of days. If you signed up to the phone service and ADSL without being able to churn (as I was doing as it was a new line) they simply waived the $99 connection fee.
However, something must have happened and my transfer was put through billing as a churn, giving me a $50 credit instead of a $59 bill! And being my own agent gave me commission on the monthly fees after that!
This kind of action must have damaged them as a few months later they reduced value AND increased prices. By that time I had stopped being an agent for them, for personal reasons.
Telstra made no money from me either. I paid the bill for the new phone connection and first month, but as I transferred away there was a credit on my Telstra account. Every month for 12 months I got a "bill" for $2.97 credit, until I switched back into their cheapest phone plan. I use a lot of VOIP so my monthly telephone bill has been between $20 and $21. Only have it because you need a phone line for ADSL (now ADSL2+).
Admin
Admin
Lol iiNet are terrible. I'm not surprised at this at all. Im cancelling my subscription today
Admin
They fixed the system, but did they fixed the attention service for calls?
Admin
30 Euros is not much cheaper than 59 Australian dollars. According to Google 30 Euro = 53.51 Australian dollars...
Admin
Update: Niaal Holder, the Comms Manager at iiNet, wrote in to say: "First up - as strange as it might sound, thanks for posting your 'connect betterer' article. Our dev team have since fixed the issue raised, so the problem shouldn't exist any more."
--
Which problem? The problem of not being able to change your account's name online, or the problem of getting charged $59 for telling them you've done it?
Admin
Okay but yet you look and sound like an idiot. You fail.
Admin
Okay but yet you look and sound like an idiot. You fail.
Admin
The flaw with our online form. The $59 charge is legitimate (handed to us by the national infrastructure provider) if it's a change of phone lessee, which is an entirely seperate change of details to those being changed by the form.
Admin
I submitted this to TDWTF ages ago and then totally forgot about it.
To clear a few things up:
Yes, our former housemate should have had this changed before he went to the UK. He didn't, because he's not very organised and was generally a pain in the butt for the weeks prior to leaving.
iiNet's service wasn't really what upset us, it was the fact that their web form could be exploited in such a trivial fashion. We'd paid to have our billing details changed, they hadn't been changed, we changed them, it was kind of funny at the time, so we just let it go. I don't like calling up customer service at the best of times, we didn't want to stir the pot there. As far as we were concerned, everything worked out, and there was a giggle in it too.
Yeh, we had a brief check to make sure these were the only details we could change - if it had have been as serious as changing our bill or download quota, we'd have phoned iiNet immediately. As it was, only first/last/business name could be changed via this method. In retrospect we probably should have told them about the problem with their form, but honestly, who wants to call up customer service again?
iiNet have tried to get in touch with us to work it out. I need to talk to the other housemates first before responding, since we all use the account. I have verified that they've fixed the problem; that was pleasingly prompt at least.
Admin
Hmm, I wonder what the law actually says.
Not that laws are necessarily rational, but I'd think that if, (a) little or no effort is made to prevent you from doing something, and (b) what you are doing harms no one, then, perhaps barring some special cases, it should be legal.
I suppose "deprives them of the income they could have received from charging you for it" could be considered harm, but how far do you go with that?
Like, my neighbor's driveway and mine abut -- it's basically one wide piece of concrete. I sometimes use part of his driveway when I pull my car in, or walk across his driveway on the way from my car to my front door. He could put up a fence to stop me. He could demand I pay him a toll for crossing his property. He's done no such thing, so I take it that he doesn't care. If after I've done this for years, he suddenly called the police and accused me of trespassing, I doubt they'd rush over to arrest me.
On the other hand, I read recently of someone who was arrested for stealing computer services. Seems he parked in the parking lot of a restaurant that advertised free WiFi, at a time when they were closed, and used their WiFi to access the Internet. The police said that as the restaurant was closed at the time, this was unauthorized access and violated some federal law. The restaurant owner said he didn't have any objection, the service was free when they were open, they didn't bother to turn it off when they were closed, it cost them nothing. The police said it wasn't up to the restaurant owner, it was still a federal crime. I don't know what ever came of it.
Admin
Methinks the flaw was not with your online form, but with the lack of any business rules being built into the application to actually limit what data can be changed, and when. There should be logic in place to check the data no matter what the source is, whether it's an online form, or a web service, or what have you.
Admin
Don't do it, Doug! They're just going to demand the worthless $50. Remain incognito! Heh heh heh.
Admin
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=craigslist+housemate
Admin
The $59 is a standard charge from the Wholesaler.
This is to change the lesee on the line.
You have only changed the name on the bill, not the lesee on the line.
The lesee on the line is the name that appears in the residential listings and who technically has ownership over that telephone line.
Admin
i did the same thing with my ISP regarding using my personal data for advertising purposes. The checkbox for "use my personal information for advertising purposes" was disabled, so i changed its value with firebug and submited the form - no more advertising phone calls, and all that for free. It pays to be technically savvy.
Admin
SSNs are unique so long as you don't care that they re-issue dead people's SSN numbers after a very short time in some dense metropolitan areas, and you only care about US citizens. (As I understand it, Green Card holders and work visa holders share SSNs.)
IMHO, primary key should be autonumber or account number. Period. End of list. You might think something like land line phone service is physically connected to the address - but the address is not, in fact, physically connected to the location. My first girlfriend had at least three different addresses in the 8 years we dated, and she never moved during that time. (Funny bit - the house where I lived at the start of that relationship briefly held her first address while she had her last address. My parents, who still owned that house, got some of her parents' junk mail.)
Admin
So long as the decision is made by a jury of those unable to get off jury duty, that's hacking. It has been since the 1980s.
Randal was socially inept. He, in effect, told someone in management, "Do something you find tedious and annoying, or silence me, or I'll get you fired." They chose to do nothing. Randal then, by his actions, said, "Silence me or I'll get you fired." So they moved to silence him - very forcefully. That's the way people are.
Of course, that's looking at it from the perspective of the intel management in question, as far as I could tell from hearing Randal tell his side of it. It's possible, if I heard intel's actual side, I'd realize that Randal was even more inept...
Admin