taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

I’ve been on vacation for a week, introducing Bea to the many joys of the bogs of Connemara. I think she liked it.

While I was away, I appeared in Ireland’s newspaper of record, the Irish Times, specifically in Conor Pope’s ‘Pricewatch’ consumer-affairs column, under the byline “Shopped to the taxman”. Here’s a cut-and-paste of some relevant snippets:

Justin Mason [hey, that's me] contacted Pricewatch after being hit with just such a charge. In August, he and his wife, who were expecting a baby, received a package from friends in the US [thanks Nishad and Janet!] containing amongst other things, some hats, socks and a little hoodie for their baby.

“It was shipped via FedEx, got here in good time and was very cute,” he says. The couple were delighted, until a couple of weeks later, when they received an invoice from FedEx looking for EUR 34.47, made up of EUR 2.49 duty, EUR 19.88 VAT and EUR 10 in “administration fees”, plus an additional EUR 2.10 VAT on the “administration fee”.

“This strikes me as pretty unfair, maybe there’s duty payable, but I’ve never had to pay VAT on a gift I’ve received before? On top of that, being charged one-third of the price as an administrative fee? Ouch!”

The couple disputed the fee and were told if they didn’t pay, the invoice would be sent to a debt collection agency and non-payment would affect their credit rating. A couple of weeks later, another gift arrived from the US, followed by another invoice looking for EUR 7.84 in duty, plus the EUR 10 administration fee and EUR 2.10 VAT on that fee. Mason disputed the charge and was eventually told it would be waived as it had a value of less than $50 (EUR 34.70) and was clearly labelled as a gift. There is tax relief called Small Parcel Standard Relief on goods purchased from outside the EU, which is EUR 22 for bought goods and EUR 45 for gifts, so the tax should never have been applied by FedEx.

We contacted FedEx and UPS, highlighting our readers’ concerns. A spokesman for FedEx said the administration charge has always been in place in Ireland and was applied “to ensure customers receive their packages quickly”.

He said that if it did not pay the VAT and duty, “packages would not be cleared through customs until the customer has paid them, thus adding severe delays to the delivery process”.

So, to be honest, I’m not impressed at all with Fedex’ response here. I was hoping they’d be more helpful, especially once it hit the most significant consumer-affairs column in the country — but not at all :(

To recap — since Conor didn’t mention it — here are my problems with the charges:

• the packages were both genuine, unsolicited, gifts. Surely having to pay duty on a gift is not applicable; it certainly makes receiving a gift a particularly unpleasant experience!

• the first package contained baby clothes, which are VAT-free in Irish tax law anyway.

• we cannot seem to get contact details for someone at Customs and Excise to talk to about this, and Fedex have failed to get back to us since then.

Not sure what the next step is…

There’s also a little follow-on discussion at Conor’s blog.

Update: good news. A couple of days ago, a letter arrived from Fedex UK, containing 2 credit notes; both invoices had been reduced to EUR 0.00, citing “incorrect application of duty” for one, and “customer satisfaction policy” for the other. Hooray!

Tags: bea, consumer, customs, duty, fedex, import, ireland, pricewatch, rip-off-ireland, rip-offs, tax

Net: Fergus Cassidy reports that ‘bandwidth-starved TDs and Senators’ in the Oireachtas will be taking a shortcut around Ireland’s woeful consumer broadband situation, especially in terms of deployment outside of the main urban areas.

There’s a tender up to implement ‘an enhanced remote access system, which will improve access from Members’ homes or constituency Offices to data and services on servers in Leinster House’.

No similar luck for their constituents, of course. That really takes the biscuit…

Tags: access, broadband, consumer, deployment, net, oireachtas, shortcut, situation, system, tds, tender

Music: … from CDWow selling us cheap CDs. Paddy forwards on the news — ‘CDWow.ie will now charge EUR 3 on every CD sold from their Irish site. And they wonder why people download music illegally…’

It seems that IRMA and the BPI both joined forces in this case against CDWow, hence this decision affects Ireland, too. The record industry are very happy — ‘it is not the consumer that will suffer, just CD Wow’s profit margins.’ Not entirely clear how the consumer doesn’t suffer due to a 3 Euro surcharge, but I’m sure they have it all worked out.

Globalisation where it suits the producers, rather than the consumers, is the name of the game here.

More at The Register.

(Thanks, Paddy!)

Tags: bpi, case, cdwow, consumer, decision, download, eur, music, news, site

Music: So the current news on the Irish web scene is the Irish Recorded Music Association, Ireland’s very own mini-RIAA, attempting to sue cheap CD vendor CDWow.ie out of the Irish market.

CDWow sell CDs cheap, by shipping from Hong Kong. Yes, the price differential between Hong Kong and Europe is so big that even considering the shipping costs, it works out significantly cheaper for the consumer.

The IRMA page on the issue is hilarious, with vague threats of ‘credit cards floating through cyberspace’ (whatever that means), and comments like: ‘Remember every CD Wow purchase is a nail in the coffin of an Irish job’, because so much of the bland, multinational, big-music-industry output is produced in Ireland. Suuuure.

Read on at the Boards.IE discussion. ‘Doctor J’ on that forum notes:

I saw a Ween cd, manufactured in the USA, on sale in HMV for EUR44.99 last night.

• CD Universe - EUR14.99
• HMV.co.uk - UKP17.99
• Tower.co.uk - UKP9.41

Are IRMA seriously suggesting it is in the interests of the Irish consumer

to be ripped off by almost EUR30???

Tags: cdwow, consumer, eur, hmv, irish, music, news, recorded, scene, ukp, web

Spam: DMA meeting to address spam (South Florida Biz Journal):

The DMA recently announced its support for e-mail self-regulatory guidelines, including:

…. 4. Marketers should not acquire e-mail addresses surreptitiously through automated mechanisms without the consumer/customer’s informed consent.

So, my question is: how exactly does a consumer provide ‘informed consent’ to having their e-mail addresses acquired ’surreptitiously through automated mechanisms’?

Tags: biz, consent, consumer, dma, florida, journal, meeting, south, spam, support

Spam: So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Of course, I’m sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.

BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue — it seems the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:

For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.

Which is all well and good, but I’m not going to hang around for 10 minutes of ‘what long-distance company do you use?’ in order to differentiate ‘good’ surveys from ‘bad’ ones; I’ll just hang up straight away.

Sport: Ben forwards this story — the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn’t know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.

Tags: baseball, call, consumer, ftc, history, law, part, spam, survey, take, telemarketing

So in the past 2 weeks, I’ve been called 3 times to ‘take part in a survey’. That’s compared to prior history before the do-not-call law took effect, which was absolutely no survey calls before on this number — but plenty of telemarketing calls.

Of course, I’m sure these surveys are all companies keen to get my considered opinion, rather than phone-spam scum exploiting one of the blindingly obvious loopholes in the federal do-not-call list legislation. Sure.

BTW, that loophole seems to be there due to an oversight issue — it seems the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over telephone surveyors. However, this page notes that the FTC staff are prepared to prosecute callers who attempt to subvert the act:

For example, if a survey call asks a consumer if he or she would be interested in purchasing a type of service or merchandise, and that information then is used to contact the consumer to encourage such purchases, the survey call is considered telemarketing and subject to the Do Not Call restrictions.

Which is all well and good, but I’m not going to hang around for 10 minutes of ‘what long-distance company do you use?’ in order to differentiate ‘good’ surveys from ‘bad’ ones; I’ll just hang up straight away.

Sport: Ben forwards this story — the US baseball team has failed to qualify for the next Olympics. Yes, baseball. And no, I didn’t know that other countries had genuine baseball teams.

Tags: baseball, call, consumer, ftc, history, law, part, survey, take, telemarketing

Boing Boing links to a paper on the design of the Google Filesystem, Google’s in-house redundant-array-of-inexpensive-PCs cluster filesystem.

It’s very, very nice — and full of interesting tidbits about Google’s architecture.

• ‘the system must efficiently implement well-defined semantics for
  • multiple clients that concurrently append to the same file. Our files are often used as producer- consumer queues or for many-way merging. Hundreds of producers, running one per machine, will concurrently append to a file. Atomicity with minimal synchronization overhead is essential. The file may be read later, or a consumer may be reading through the file simultaneously.’

• ‘The workloads also have many large, sequential writes that append data to files. Typical operation sizes are similar to those for reads. Once written, files are seldom modified again. Small writes at arbitrary positions in a file are supported but do not have to be effcient.’

A perfect example of traditional UNIX system design!

Tags: architecture, boing, cluster, consumer, design, file, filesystem, google, paper, system

A cautionary tale of consumer electronics regional lockdown follows. Hopefully Google’ll pick it up and it’ll help someone else in the same boat.

So I brought my PS2 with me from Ireland, along with a few good games, figuring that it’d be cheaper, and simpler, to bring them and buy a few bits of converter hardware here, rather than buy the lot from scratch.

How wrong I was. :(

So I’ve already spent about 50 bucks on a step-up transformer to convert US 110v to the 220v my European PS2 requires. Of course, the European PS2 outputs in PAL rather than NTSC, and most US TVs, including my one, accepts only NTSC input.

So the next step is a PAL to NTSC converter. Sounds like a pretty simple piece of equipment, right? Well, nope. Most pages out there that deal with this recommend either (A) buying a multi-region DVD player that’ll convert PAL to NTSC on the fly — which won’t work for me, as I’m not looking to play DVDs per se — (B) buying a converter like this one for about 280 dollars, (C) buying a new TV (even more expensive), or (D) buying a VCR that’ll convert on the fly, like the Samsung SV-5000W, for about 350 dollars. (forget it, that’s more than the price of the PS2!)

However, there does seem to be another option: a PAL-to-XGA converter, allowing me to display the PS2 output on my PC’s monitor. Still pricey at 152 dollars though.

One more: I could just buy a new PS2 over here for 180 dollars and install a multi-region mod chip. But my soldering skills are rusty, and license-wise, it’s iffy. :(

Finally, though, the winning option seems to be this: Lik-Sang.com sell a PS2-to-VGA output converter box for about 50 dollars plus shipping. Given that the display quality is improved — and my monitor is sharper and bigger than my TV anyway — I think I’ll go for this.

Tags: consumer, converter, fly, hopefully, lockdown, monitor, ntsc, option, output, tale

NYT: Internet Is Losing Ground in Battle Against Spam.

‘We have allowed these spam cops to rise out of nowhere to be self-appointed police and block whole swaths of the industry,’ said Bob Dallas, an executive of Empire Towers, an e-mail firm in Toledo, Ohio, widely cited on antispam lists used by many Internet companies.

‘This is against everything that America stands for,’ Mr. Dallas added.

‘The consumer should be the one in control of this.’

Wow, way to shoot yourself down in flames. Without a spam filter to detect unsolicited bulk mail and differentiate from the solicited stuff from their friends and legit subscriptions, the consumer has control how, exactly?

BTW, Empire Towers have a very impressive ROKSO listing. It says: ‘Empire Towers (ET) is a hard-line stealth spamming operation whose spams are illegal in most US states. ET goes to elaborate lengths to hide spam origins and obfuscate URLs. They operate by obtaining multiple class C netblocks on multiple ISPs known for lax handling of spam complaints, the class Cs serving to make their account more valuable to the ISP so in theory harder to terminate.’

Tags: class, consumer, control, empire, ground, internet, losing, nyt, spam, towers