From looking online, I learned that it could be a battery issue. I knew my phone was still under warranty because I had bought it new in October (when Amazon drastically lowered the price) so Sunday I hit up a T-Mobile store to see if they could diagnose and fix the problem.

As it turns out, it was a battery issue. It also turns out that a phone’s battery is now classified as an “accessory,” instead of being an integral part of an electronic device. My phone itself was under warranty until this October, but my “accessories warranty” (what?) had expired in January.

Now, wouldn’t you come to the conclusion that a phone’s battery should last longer than 8 months, and that if it didn’t, it were defective in some way? And if it were defective, shouldn’t T-Mobile give me a replacement? Not so, says T-Mobile.

The guy I dealt with at the store was sympathetic and searched around to see whether he could find any used or returned G1 batteries to give me for free, because new batteries cost $50. When he couldn’t find any, he suggested BatteriesPlus, Craig’s List–anything other than buying a new one. But I decided I just wanted my damn phone to turn on again, soon.

My problems:

1. This isn’t a AA battery, and it should last longer than one. If a phone’s battery dies after 8 months of normal use, that means it’s defective. It doesn’t matter whether the company considers a battery to be an “accessory.”
2. A battery shouldn’t cost $50 if it needs to be replaced every 8 months. At this rate, I would pay $150 over the course of two years (entire length of my contract) which is more than I paid for the phone itself.

And let’s see: nope, as much as I try, my phone won’t turn on without a battery. So how is it an accessory? Simply because it can be swapped out and replaced by a consumer? That’s bullshit.

This is an hour and 45 minutes of my evening while tracking my mouse’s movements with IOGraphica. The lines are the cursor’s paths, and the dots are where the cursor stopped moving. Now I’m feeling self-conscious about where I leave my cursor.

Since my computer is under warranty, I brought it to an Apple store and let them deal with it. They confirmed that the fan wasn’t working and that I needed another one. They warned me that it could take up to 5 days before they were done with the repair. They weren’t sure if they would also need to replace the logic board, but they would go ahead and order both parts anyway.

It ended up being much less of a hassle than I expected it to be. All they needed to do was replace the fan so I got it back a couple days later. Everything has been working fine ever since!

This week, Minnesota Public Radio was able to access state employee data on Lookout Services’ Web site without using a password or encryption software. Employee names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and hire dates were visible on the Web site for every state agency using the service.

This week, the state and MPR are being countersued for breach of contract, stealing trade secrets and “hacking.”

It’s bullshit, of course.

The Lookout Services Inc. countersuit is a frivolous lawsuit which attempts to intimidate and quash people from exercising their First Amendment rights regarding publicizing information about their site’s complete lack of security.

Let’s see what’s up:

• Lookout Services CEO Elaine Morley runs a law firm out of the same address (5909 West Loop S Fwy # 300 in Bellaire, TX) with her husband, Arden Morley, called Morley & Morley P.C.
• On LinkedIn, Morley & Morley P.C. claims to have 5 employees and Lookout Services, Inc. claims to have 10 employees.
• Morley & Morley P.C. shares at least two other employees with Lookout Services, Inc.: Alisha Campos and David Person. In related news stories, David Person is referred to as “the company’s attorney” and you can find Alisha Campos’ email address on the Lookout site in reference to customer service. (The demo has been taken down, but is cached by Google.)
• The Morleys are on Twitter, and have registered the following accounts: @Everifyandi9, @Lookoutservices, @L00koutservices, @ArdenMorleyLaw, @ArdenMorley, @Houstonlawfirm, @SugarLandLawyer, and who knows what else.
• The Morleys are Republicans, which was kind of obvious from their gross misunderstanding of the First Amendment, although Arden Morley is particularly fond of the Second Amendment (plus 137 other things, damn):
• The Morleys/Lookout Services Inc./Morley & Morley, P.C. were taken to court in 2008 for failing to pay their “computer consultants” nearly $20k. This is publicly-available information: [PDF]
• On the Secrets of the City blog, someone calling themselves “Ashley” with a Sugar Land, TX IP address posted the Lookout press release and comparisons to a journalist burglarizing a house, along with things such as, “The power of the press is enormous and virtually unchecked.”

Text pagers are usualy [sic] carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

The morning of September 11th 2009 started like any other day.

2001-09-11 06:31:26 “Good morning sexy man!! Got my zebra thongs on!!! Feeling a little animalistic!!!”

2001-09-11 08:26:46 “We’re having cake at 9:00 in Mel’s office for Rich, Craig and Hoss’s Birthday.”

2001-09-11 08:40:37 “What did you do to my chair? I can’t figure out how to fix it. I feel like I’m sitting on the floor!”

It doesn’t last for very long…

2001-09-11 09:14:55 “Code YELLOW in effect. Situation Room is open. Only Duty Officers to report.”

2001-09-11 10:42:18 “ALL EMERGENCY SWAT RECALL MEMBERS REPORT Back to office”

2001-09-11 10:42:57 “58-THIS IS THE L.A. CITY HALL, CHIEF OPERATOR MAKING A NOTIFICATION OF A LEVEL 3 EOC ACTIVATION PER L.A. FIRE DEPT CHIEF OLSON AT 7 AM. PLEASE CALL BACK AT 213-485-5500.”

2001-09-11 10:43:30 “Pete is ok, he can’t find his brother who works in the world financial center next to the trade center. Your mom wants you to go home..Call me 26093″

2001-09-11 10:43:44 “/:DDC/: UPDATE: DUE TO HEIGHTENED ALERT FOR TERRORIST ACTIVITY IN THE UNITED STATES, TSS87 DEARBORN, TSS153 TAYLOR AND TSS45 JEFFERSON WILL BE MANNED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, KAS (17″

An act of sabotage “would explain why neither party is releasing any more details: for legal reasons dealing with the ongoing investigation to find the culprit(s),” one of the sources said. Due to the way Sidekick clients interact with the service, any normal failure should have resulted in only a brief outage until a replacement server could be brought up.

The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that “someone with access to the servers at the data center must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself).”

The tipster goes on to state that on the Microsoft side, they were clueless about Danger-related technologies. As such, the signs all point to a Danger (ex-)employee committing sabotage.

Well, this makes it more interesting. When it comes to a choice of Whimper vs Bang, I’d prefer to go with the Bang. I don’t want to have lost my data service access or all my contacts because someone tripped over a power cord, I want some massive drama along with it. I want the place to have burned down while suffering a Godzilla attack, that kind of thing.

Alleged details on the events leading up to Danger’s doomsday scenario are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it all paints a truly embarrassing picture: Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which — for reasons unknown — fails to make a backup before starting. Long story short, the upgrade runs into complications, data is lost, and without a backup to revert to, untold thousands of Sidekick users get shafted in an epic way rarely seen in an age of well-defined, well-understood IT strategies.

T-Mobile has refunded one months’ worth of data service charges to contract Sidekick users, which I didn’t get because I didn’t have a contract with my Sidekick. They will also be sending $100 “customer appreciation cards” to certain Sidekick customers, which can be used on T-Mobile products and services (including bills) only. There is no clear-cut criteria in place for who can expect to receive a gift card.

Today, T-Mobile finally admitted that all of our data is gone:

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

(The way it works is that while your information is on your phone, it’s not really stored there, it’s in the cloud. You sign-in to your account and the phone downloads your contacts. You can replace your phone without having to worry about contacts because they are stored in the cloud. However, if something happens to the cloud, you’re screwed.)

Too bad there’s probably something in fine print somewhere that prevents anyone from being sued over this.