IZZI easily gets its corporate a** Twittered

IZZI, the Latvian cable TV, internet and wireless internet company, whose name is intended to suggest the word "easy" was just shown how easy it is to get your reputation badly ....twittered (as in tattered). The company announced in the spring that it would be first to deliver up to 100 Mbps internet to most of its cable network customers (and, apparently, some on a newer fiber-to-the-home network). It seems that for some customers, this didn't work out. While there are glitches in all new systems, what apparently also didn't work was customer service response and explanations of the problem. Customers were left baffled and without any internet service (or only a slow sporadic connection). Maybe there were not so many customers, but they were the wrong ones for IZZI, inadvertently or otherwise, to screw over.

Riding on a Twitter boom in Latvia, the angry internet users started bad-tweeting IZZI and soon, the uproar (which may well have been a tempest in a teacup involving some equipment on one delivery chain)spilled over into the blogosphere and finally ended up on the evening TV news. It took only a few days, or a couple of weeks at most.

What this proves is that internet service providers can get chewed by the very applications, social and blogging networks that their connections support. The best defense is seeing the early warnings and moving fast to correct the problem, or at least explain it to the customers, so they don't tweet all over the place what a bunch of intellectually challenged persons of apparently light hair color seem to be running customer service and parroting some kind of generic call-center script. I can put that in a politically correct way, but when you are angry and tweeting in 140 characters, it boils down to saying you have been bullshitted by some dumb blonde on the phone.

The problem is being resolved after some mea-culpas from IZZI. Interestingly, Balkom's new/old NGN (next generation network) service promising equally high internet speeds has so far not attracted the angry tweetmob. Perhaps they are using the tried and proven MPLS and other stuff that has been around for some years to load balance and prioritize so that customers get what they paid for almost all of the time.

A f**ked internet bank

One of the "dark secrets"of e-commerce is about labor practices. It employs a lot of free labor -- us, that is. Instead of going to a bricks and mortar shop ($$$ for the shopkeeper), and asking the salesperson(salary $$$ for the shopkeeper) for a look at some, say, Clarks shoes, we find a website selling shoes and find the brand ourselves and figure out the size and color and fill in the order and payment details and make the transaction. A better example is books, which I have bought lots of on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. You do all the work yourself, assisted sometimes by a robot that knows one's preferences.
Most of the work we do online at all hours (I have ordered from amazon at 1 am) is very simple, which is why, for convenience sake, we are so easily tricked into working as sales assistants, order takers and bank clerks in the middle of the night (often leaving a "tip"of personal information so that we can be approached by marketers more precisely and effectively).
Having said that, I had the most unpleasant experience with the Baltic Trust Bank, a bank thrust upon me by my new employer (for years I have been with Hansabanka and intend to stay) for the purpose of transferring salaries. I duly opened an account and got an envelope for my internet bank, hoping, as soon as possible, to set up an automatic forwarding of my salary to Hansabanka.
There were no clear instructions for using the internet bank. I guessed that one used one's bank card pin code to access the ibank. Wrong. Fortunately, I stopped doing trial and error with this before automatically locking down the account. I had to call the bank to find out that my password was, in fact, a code printed on a code card (one of these things where, as double authentication, you enter "code 26" or something after your password clears). I was then offered to change my password. Each time, I had to re-enter the original gibberish of numbers and letters, because, it seems, the system insisted I use both one capital letter and one of a defined set of symbols *%( etc and a number, of at least eight characters all together. For some reason, the system did not recognize symbols entered fromt the ordinary QWERTY keyboard, but finally responded to a symbol from the numerical keypad on my desktop iMac (will it work from a MacBook laptop? We shall see...). So after some ten infuriating and frustrating attempts, cursing the lame-ass BTB every time, I seem to have gotten it right.
I can understand the need for security, but it goes a little far to make the customer do a lot of repetitive and frustrating work. At the same time, BTB gives potential hackers an interesting formula: at least eight characters, one capital letter, one numeral and one of a limited number of symbols. Let us assume that most people will chose passwords that at least make some phonetic if not actual sense, rather than utter gibberish like &gbBzjq9, but rather fucKbtb*7 (that is not my password, btw, but I did think of this wording at one point), is it not a tractable problem to break the password? I'm not a programmer or mathematician, but it seems doable. Now BTB and other banks will say that the combination of the password plus the hundreds of thousands or more code card combos TOGETHER are impossible to crack short of using your 2070 model zillion multiverse quantum laptop. And they are probably right. But in that case, why make changing the password such an onerous chore?
Recently, BTB was acquired by GE Money. Maybe it is time to make the iBank service less of a frustrating task?