Tag Archive for: customers

Moonpig jeopardizes data of millions of customers through insecure API

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Moonpig, a large online seller of personalized greeting cards and gifts, shut down its mobile apps Tuesday because of a security weakness that could have given hackers access to customer information.

A developer named Paul Price found that Moonpig’s API (application programming interface), the online service used by the company’s mobile apps to interact with its website, lacked basic security features.

Price found that requests from Moonpig’s Android application to the API used a static set of credentials, regardless of customer account. The only thing that differentiated requests from different users was a customer ID included in the request URL.

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Network World Security

Comcast sued for launching public Wi-Fi hotspots from customers’ routers

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A class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco last week charges Comcast with exploiting its broadband customers by using their in-home routers to send a separate signal for public Wi-Fi hotspots that extend into their neighborhoods, according to a recent San Francisco Chronicle report.

Comcast has pushed its plan to create public Wi-Fi hotspots to 19 cities so far, and reportedly plans to launch 8 million hotspots by the end of the year. I covered the project when it launched in Chicago this summer. Here’s a quick breakdown from that article on how Comcast is approaching the project.

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Network World Colin Neagle

T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

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When T-Mobile US customers exceed their monthly data caps, they aren’t cut off from the Internet entirely. Instead, T-Mobile throttles their connections to 128Kbps or 64Kbps, depending on which plan they have, for the rest of the month.

But T-Mobile has made it difficult for those customers to figure out just how slow their connections are, with a system that exempts speed test applications from the throttling. After complaints from consumer advocates, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigated the issue and has forced T-Mobile to be more honest about its network’s throttled speeds.

Announced today, an agreement between T-Mobile and the FCC ensures that customers will be able to accurately gauge their throttled speeds.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

FCC to prevent phone companies from screwing over copper customers

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Divine Harvester

Amid complaints that phone companies such as AT&T and Verizon are letting copper networks deteriorate, the Federal Communications Commission today said it will examine the allegations and develop rules that maintain customers’ access to emergency services even after old copper networks are discontinued.

Today’s vote is one of the first steps in planning for the discontinuation of the primarily copper-based Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The PSTN is being replaced by Internet Protocol (IP)-based voice services that rely on network technologies such as fiber, cable, and wireless. AT&T and Verizon are anxious to make the transition because they want to shed costly infrastructure and century-old utility rules that likely won’t apply to Voice over IP (VoIP) services. Customers from around the country have complained that the companies are letting the copper networks rot in order to push them onto largely unregulated services.

Keeping VoIP phones running during power outages is perhaps the biggest concern. Copper lines conduct electricity and supply power to phones from central offices, potentially keeping phones running for weeks on end during outages. This system isn’t foolproof because damage to lines or the central office could result in loss of power, but backup options for VoIP phones are more limited, consisting of batteries in customers’ homes. When the power is out and the batteries for landline phones and cell phones have run out, customers won’t be able to call 911.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab