I see now why we don't use live journal much anymore.

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This iPad app is really bad. Very difficult to use.

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USPS Cracks Down on Online-Generated Postage Dates

by jseaber on Jun.13, 2010, under Rants

Like other small business owners, I’ve learned to expect three things from the United States Postal Service:

1. A 5-15 minute wait in line
2. Useless tracking information, and a complete lack of help when packages do get lost (about 1 in every 500!)
3. Incompetence of approximately half of all postal employees (figure worsens when handed international packages…)

Even customers know better than to expect tracking information for USPS First Class and Priority Mail packages—this luxury only comes from UPS, FedEx, etc. The USPS cannot afford to replace their practically useless Delivery Confirmation service with an actual tracking system. Nor do they have the resources to develop an API that would allow businesses to automate shipments (like UPS/FedEx). There’s a single reason I stick with the USPS: Unmatched prices. However, the USPS is in financial trouble (and has been for years). Given the Great Recession, combined with ever increasing competition from alternative shipping carriers, I’d hoped that the USPS would finally step into the 21st Century, technologically. This has not been the case.

Last Monday, I stepped into a local post office and handed 6 postage-paid, domestic packages to the postal clerk. She looked over each, then stated, “These 5 cannot be shipped. They have the wrong date.”

As usual, I’d used PayPal’s Multi-Order Shipping tool to print out orders on Sunday evening. ‘The date is no problem,’ I said confidently. ‘I’ve been doing this for three years. The date is meaningless, but if you insist, I can mark out Sunday’s date  and write in today’s date by hand.’ I picked up the pen on the counter and proceeded to change 6/6/10 to 6/7/10 on each of the rejected packages.

“Let me get the postmaster,” she replied.

The postmaster stepped up and had made up her mind before even looking at my packages. She handed me a clearly unofficial document which read:

“Accepting packages that have stale ship dates on them could affect our delivery scores. This information from usps.com explains the correct process. The same policy would be in place for other pcpostage labels such as paypal, stamps.com, endicia.com, etc.

…

You must mail your item on the date that you selected for your Click-N-Ship label; this is known as the Ship Date. An electronic record is generated on that date indicating that your mail piece has been mailed. Packages shipped with labels that have incorrect Ship Dates will be returned to the sender and will not be eligible for a refund. If you are unable to use the label, you should request a refund within ten (10) days of the printed label and create another label with the correct Ship Date.

Your online label can be used only as it has been printed, without any alterations. If you find an error in your label, print a new label with the correct information and request a refund. Any mail piece which has a manually altered online label will be returned.”

I argued for another minute before leaving. As I made my way out, the poor postal clerk quietly told me that it was a “new policy” of “cracking down on Click-N-Ship labels”. Technically, nothing had changed; USPS’s shipping requirements have always stated that packages must be shipped on the day for which they are printed. While PayPal’s Multi-Order shipping system allows selection of the “Mailing Date”, it is obvious that labels postmarked on Sunday cannot possibly be shipped until Monday. For the past three years, postal employees and postmasters have told me, assuredly, that this was not a problem. And it hadn’t been, until last week.

Proper Selection of Mailing Date (PayPal)

Outraged, I drove home and immediately Google’d the document. Nothing came up, so I called 1-800-ASK-USPS begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              1-800-ASK-USPS      end_of_the_skype_highlighting to get to the bottom of the issue. I was told that it was indeed a recent change, and that I was correct: USPS made NO ANNOUNCEMENT WHATSOEVER of their changed policy. Why not? Well, it isn’t a change—they are suddenly enforcing a rule that has always been in effect. The guy further stated, “I don’t like the change either, and they really should have made an announcement.”

The next day, I went to a different local post office. None of the clerks had seen the unofficial document (although they were aware of the new policy), so I asked to speak with their postmaster. This fellow was quite helpful; he furnished the following e-mail printout, dated April 28, 2010:

Internal USPS E-Mail, Subject: FW: Stale pcPostage dates

After a lengthy discussion with the postmaster, a self-described “postal nerd”, it was clear that the USPS is just trying to survive. They’re losing money, customers are displeased with Delivery Confirmation, and of course, USPS also gets blamed when some businesses print out labels several days before actually dropping them off. Thus, the USPS has decided to reject all packages with “stale ship dates” in effort to improve public opinion.

I have several problems with this:

1. Up until April 28, 2010, the USPS didn’t care when I dropped off my packages. USPS should have made an official announcement. Factoring in labor, my business lost over $200 last week due to USPS’s failure to communicate. More disturbingly, my customers experienced a 1 day delay in shipping—we pride ourselves on same-day shipments.
2. USPS knows that labels printed online are rarely shipped the day they are marked. Anyone who has checked the Delivery Confirmation number of a freshly prepared shipment has seen this blurb from usps.com’s tracking system:
   

   Label/Receipt Number: #### #### #### #### #### ##
   Status: Electronic Shipping Info Received

   The U.S. Postal Service was electronically notified by the shipper on June ##, 2010 to expect your package for mailing. This does not indicate receipt by the USPS or the actual mailing date. Delivery status information will be provided if / when available. No further information is available for this item

   This statement has served its job well enough for years. Does USPS really expect to increase customer satisfaction by suddenly refusing their packages?
   

3. USPS is built upon the principle that postage is as good as currency. A 44 cent stamp is worth always 44 cents, regardless of the day or the year. Until recently, USPS had maintained this perspective for postage printed online: Labels printed for $2.09 on Sunday were perfectly valid no matter the calendar date. But this is apparently no longer true. On very rare occasion, traffic has prevented me from making my daily post office visit in time. When this happens, I’d toss the packages into the drop-box instead. Now, I can no longer use drop-boxes after hours! I must cancel and re-print the shipping labels, then explain to customers why they have just received a shipment cancellation and 2nd shipment notice. And my poor accountant! All in all, this could cost my small business thousands of dollars in labor.

    

4. Historically, USPS’s instructions mandated that online labels be used “only as it has been printed, without any alterations” because the digital barcode tells the postal system where the package is headed. A computer will ignore handwritten address changes on a digital label. The computer does not care when the label was printed. It only cares where the package is going. Hence, the “Electronic Shipping Info Received” statement cited above. In other words, USPS has deceptively manipulated an old policy in attempt to combat financial losses. Way to go, USPS.

In conclusion, USPS has made another poor choice and will continue to lose money and business. If they really wished to improve customer satisfaction, they would take example from UPS and FedEx: Customers want fine, friendly service, and REAL tracking information. Then this whole issue would be a moot point, since it would be clear when a package was physically accepted by the post office. But alas, the USPS is a federal entity and is not bound to the same expectations as a capitalistic business…

Anyway, fellow users of PayPal.com/Stamps.com/Endicia.com/Click-N-Ship should be aware that USPS has begun looking at the printed date on internet shipping labels, so you better get it right.

PayPal Payment Holds

We're committed to providing you and your customers with a fast and secure payment service while keeping our prices competitive. To keep ourselves on track, we've established a Funds Availability Policy.

We might be throwing some new words at you here, but we promise to explain them in full detail. As part of our Funds Availability Policy, "reserves" may apply to certain accounts. A reserve is a percentage of your payments that'll be released at a later date. A related term is "payment hold." A payment hold is a type of reserve in which 100% of the funds received are held for a specified amount of time.

Payment hold - a longer definition

A payment hold is an amount of money that belongs to you, set aside by PayPal, while we make sure that your customers are satisfied. The payments received are held temporarily as a pending balance in your account, and released after a given timeframe. The funds may be released early if PayPal determines that the transaction has been fulfilled and your customers are satisfied.

Please note: Although not available for use, the funds are yours and will be reflected in your pending balance and eligible for money market dividends* for eligible accounts.

Why does PayPal hold payments?

Payment holds ensure that sellers have sufficient funds in their account if, for example, a customer files a dispute. This allows PayPal to provide a fast and secure payment service to you and your customers while keeping our prices competitive.

We know this is a change in the way we do business with you and we hope you understand that, if your payment is held, you haven't done anything wrong. In deciding whether to hold payments, we review many factors including transaction activity, business type, and customer disputes.

When do payment holds apply?

Payment holds may be applied to some or all transactions in your account. Here are some common reasons for holding payments:

• You have limited history or selling activity with eBay and PayPal
• You have an eBay feedback score of less than 100 or received fewer than 20 Detailed Seller Ratings in the last 12 months, and do not have a record of good performance
• If you have low Detailed Seller Ratings or other indication of below standard performance on eBay
• You have a high rate of customer disputes, claims or chargebacks
• You're selling in a high risk category or industry such as, but not limited to, tickets, travel, gift certificates, computers, consumer electronics, or cell phones
• Your payment activity is inconsistent. For example, you have a spike in selling activity or you started selling in a new category without an established history in that category
• The account information you have provided is incomplete or inaccurate

If your payments are held, PayPal will provide you with notice specifying the terms. The terms may require that the amounts received into your account are held for a certain period of time. PayPal will re-evaluate your account periodically and contact you when we stop applying payment holds.

If your payments are held, the funds will be shown as "pending" in your PayPal balance.

When does PayPal release the payment?

Payments will be held in a pending balance for a certain time period. For example, if you receive a $100 payment (after fees), the $100 will be held in a pending balance for the specified amount of time. After the hold is released, the money will be available for withdrawal.

The money may be released sooner if:

1. We can confirm that the item was delivered**
2. Your buyer leaves positive feedback. (Applies only to eBay items.)

To get access to this money more quickly, please process this order right away and communicate with your customers early and often.

What can I do to avoid payment holds?

Here are some things you can do:

• Improve your DSR feedback rating
• Avoid buyer disputes, claims, and chargebacks.
• If you have a buyer dispute, resolve it quickly.
• Process your orders right away and ship quickly using a service that provides tracking and delivery confirmation
• Communicate early and often with your buyers
• Make sure you confirm your address and phone numbers and keep them up to date
• Verify your account and keep your financials up to date

I'm a new seller. Will payments I receive be held?

Not necessarily. If you're a new seller with PayPal, we may hold your payments until you establish a record of good selling performance.

I'm a tenured PayPal seller. Will payments I receive be held?

Not necessarily. If you don't have a record of good performance or have limited selling activity or other indication of potential performance problems, your payments may be held.

Can held funds be used to pay for shipping?

If you print labels and pay for shipping through PayPal or eBay, the cost of shipping will be released from your pending balance shortly after purchase. Printing labels on eBay and PayPal is free. You're charged only the cost of shipping.

Rolex 3035 Dial Refinishing With Diamonds Added.

This Rolex dial was damaged with rust.  The dial is from a 3035 movement that arrived at our shop for repair.  This dial originally did not have any diamonds and had the regular stick style markers.

We replaced the stick markers with diamonds.

 

This is the original rust damaged Rolex dial.

 

 

 

Another view of the rust damaged dial with the original stick markers.

 

 

 

This is the "New" refinished Rolex 3035 men's dial.

 

 

 

Another view of the dial after the diamonds have been added.  Note the professional lettering as well as the Swiss Made markings at the bottom of the dial.

 

 

 

Rolex Oyster Perpetual DateJust, Superlative Chronometer, Officially Certified, Swiss Made.

 

 

 

Note the date window on the dial as it looks now compared to how it looked in the first two pictures when it was filled with rust.

 

Antique Time Professional Rolex Dial Refinishing.

Our professional dial refinishing service is very affordable as well as the addition of adding diamonds and other precious stones to existing Rolex dials.

 

Call us Toll Free at 1-888-ROLEX-01

 

 

Rolex Yacht Master Mid-Size With Custom MOP Dial.

This Rolex mid-size Yacht Master is powered by the typical ladies 2030 Movement.  The movement fits into a retainer that is the right size for this case.  These are nice watches with the only drawback being the ladies movement which might not be durable enough when worn by men.

This watch had the typical silver colored dial.  At the request of our client we installed Mother-of-Pearl and added genuine emeralds to each of the markers.  All of the lettering on the dial was done to the original colors and specfications.

 

The original dial surface was machined down in order to apply the new MOP base.

 

 

 

By machining the surface of the dial down allows for proper hand clearance on the dial as well as allowing for the hands to clear the markers.

 

 

 

When the dial is ready to be installed it is important to check to make sure that the dial correctly snaps onto the movement.  There are two small slots that are cut into the side of the dial where it fits over the movement.  If the dial is loose you can adjust the fit by slightly pressing the lower portion of these two slots inward.  By doing so, the dial will snap onto the movement.   There are NO dial legs that hold the dial to the movement, so correct adjust for fit is important.

 

 

 

This is the new MOP dial installed onto the movement.  The hands have been adjusted for correct fit and set so that the date changes at midnight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For more information about our custom Rolex dials please visit our web site.

 

Antique Time Dial Refinishing.

 

3rd party advertising and tracking firms are ubiquitous on the modern web. When you visit a webpage, there's a good chance that it contains tiny images or invisible JavaScript that exists for the sole purpose of tracking and recording your browsing habits. This sort of tracking is performed by many dozens of different firms. In this post, we're going to look at how this tracking occurs, and how it is being combined with data from accounts on social networking sites to build extensive, identified profiles of your online activity.

How 3rd parties get to see what you do on the web.

(in this screenshot, NoScript is being used to identify the third parties whose code is embedded in the page)

Each of these tracking companies can track you over multiple different websites, effectively following you as you browse the web. They use either cookies, or hard-to-delete "super cookies", or other means, to link their records of each new page they see you visit to their records of all the pages you've visited in the previous minutes, months and years. The widespread presence of 3rd party web bugs and tracking scripts on a large proportion of the sites on the Web means that these companies can build up a long term profile of most of the things we do with our web browsers.

They can track us, but do they know who we are?

A recent research paper by Balachander Krishnamurthy and Craig Wills shows that social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace are giving the hungry cloud of tracking companies an easy way to add your name, lists of friends, and other profile information to the records they already keep on you.

The main theme of the paper is that when you log in to a social networking site, the social network includes advertising and tracking code in such a way that the 3rd party can see which account on the social network is yours. They can then just go to your profile page, record its contents, and add them to their file. Of the 12 social networks surveyed in the paper, only one (Orkut) didn't leak any personally identifying information to 3rd parties.

There are some interesting technical details in how the social networking sites leak this data. In some cases, the leakage may be unintentional, but in others, there is clever and surreptitious anti-privacy engineering at work.

Paths for Data Leakage from Social Networks to 3rd party Tracking Firms

A second and slightly more revealing method that some social networks use to leak personal information is through URL/URI parameters for the 3rd party content. Here's a typical example:

GET /track/?...&fb_sig_time=1236041837.3573&
     fb_sig_user=123456789&...
Host: adtracker.socialmedia.com
Referer: http://apps.facebook.com/kick_ass/...

The third and most surprising method for leaking personal information is to alias 3rd party tracking servers into the host site's domain name in such a way that the 3rd party can see the host site's cookies, in violation of the same origin policy. Here's an examples:

GET /st?ad_type=iframe&age=29&gender=M&e=&zip=11301&...
Host: ad.hi5.com
Referer: http://www.hi5.com/friend/profile/displaySameProfile.do?userid=123456789
Cookie: LoginInfo=M_AD_MI_MS|US_0_11301; Userid=123456789;Email=jdoe@email.com;

What can I do to protect myself?

1. Pick a good cookie policy for your browser, like "only keep cookies until I close my browser", or manual approval of all cookies.
2. Disable Flash Cookies and all the other kinds of "super cookies". You can test for these here.
3. Use the Firefox extensions RequestPolicy and NoScript to control when 3rd party sites can include content in your pages or run code in your browser, respectively. These tools are very effective, but be aware that they're hard to use: lots of sites that depend on JavaScript will need to be whitelisted before they work correctly.
4. Use the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out plugin. This will automatically opt you out of any 3rd party trackers who have an opt out somewhere that requires you to accept a cookie. Be aware that not all 3rd parties will offer opt outs, or that some of them may interpret "opt out" to mean "do not show me targeted ads", rather than "do not track my behavior online".
5. As always, it doesn't hurt to use Tor via TorButton to hide your IP address and other browser characteristics when you want maximal browser privacy.

Unfortunately, many of the steps above are quite difficult to follow, and we're fearful that the vast majority of Internet users will continue to be tracked by dozens of companies — companies they've never heard of, companies they have no relationship with, companies they would never choose to trust with their most private thoughts and reading habits.

It isn't going to be easy to fix this mess. On the technical side, all of this tracking follows from the design of the Web as an interactive hypertext system, combined with the fact that so many websites are willing to assist advertisers in tracking their visitors. Browsers could be altered to make them harder to track, but great care and clever design will be required to achieve that without undermining the virtues of interactive hypertext in the first place. It's not clear that anyone has found the right way to do that yet.

On the legal side, it's clear that the current U.S. privacy regime isn't working: behavioral tracking companies can put whatever they want in the fine print of their privacy policies, and few of the visitors to CareerBuilder or any other website will ever realize that the trackers are there, let alone read their policies. It's time we found legal rules to ensure that people actually know when their privacy is part of the price they pay to visit a site.

1. 1. One subtlety here is that sometimes the 3rd party won't be able to tell whether a profile is yours or belongs to someone else. But there are several ways around that: they can look for URLs associated with profile editing or other activites that your friends can't do with to your profile; they can see which profile you visit first when you log in to the site, and they can see which profile you visit most often over time.

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By now, it's no secret that social networks (or really any websites) are sharing some of your usage data with advertising partners in order to provide more targeted ads. Most of the time, this data gets anonymized when it gets passed on so that there's no personally identifiable information attached to your browsing history. Or does it? I turns out that some social networks—including the majors that we all know and love—have an interesting definition of "anonymous," essentially making it possible for lots of personally identifiable information to be exposed in connection to browsing habits.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, and LiveJournal (among others) are all guilty of "leaking" personally identifiable information (PII) to partners, according to a recent study by Worcester Polytechnic Institute researcher Craig E. Wills and AT&T Labs' Balachander Krishnamurthy. A "leakage," by the study's definition, is the opportunity for a third party to link the information they get from the social networks (either in the form of logs or browser cookies) to someone's PII—your name, phone number, and dog's favorite treat aren't passed on directly, but can easily be pieced together.

How is that possible? Not through your name, but through your profile's unique identifier, which is apparently included in the data given advertisers from most social networks. "We found that when social networking sites pass information to tracking sites about your activities, they often include this unique identifier. So now a tracking site not only has a profile of your Web browsing activities, it can link that profile to the personal information you post on the social networking site," Wills said. "Now your browsing profile is not just of somebody, it is of you."

Through an examination of the 12 social networks they included in the study, Wills and Krishnamurthy found that a personal photo, location, gender, and name were almost always available to those who have a unique profile identifier on hand. Further, a list of friends, activities, other photo sets, age, schools, employers, and location are available by default from most networks. (Just imagine if you had clicked on a number of Cialis and Viagra ads from MySpace, only to have those ad people go back and find out what you look like, where you work, who your friends are, and what you like to do for fun?) Only things like a zip code, phone number, and e-mail address were usually unavailable by default.

The researchers note that there are reasons why this should be a concern—aside from mere embarrassment. Not only can this information, when linked directly to you, constitute an invasion of privacy, it can also affect very real parts of your life. "Tracking sites don't have the ability to know if, for example, a site about cancer was visited out of curiosity, or because the user actually has cancer," Willis warned. "Profiling is worrisome on its own, but inaccurate profiling could potentially lead to issues with employment, health care coverage, or other areas of our personal lives."

This is not to say that third parties are actually doing anything with the unique identifiers they are receiving, but the door is wide open for abuse. We attempted to contact several social networks for comment, but did not hear back by publication time—it seems the only thing users can do to protect themselves right now is lock down as much information as possible. Still, the researchers noted that the easiest way to prevent this kind of data leakage is for the social networks themselves to stop passing on unique identifiers, whether accidental or not.

Update: Facebook spokesperson Simon Axten responded to the paper by reiterating that Facebook has granular privacy controls that allow people to decide how much information is public. "This means that anyone who doesn’t match those criteria can’t access it, regardless of whether he or she knows the person’s identifier. Given this, even if a site could link a URI, referrer, or cookie to a specific user, it would only be able to access information that the person had made public. While we don’t believe there’s any danger here, we take all reported privacy issues seriously and are investigating further to determine what, if any changes, we can make," Axten told Ars.

Further reading:

• On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks (PDF)
• EFF: How Online Tracking Companies Know Most of What You Do Online (and What Social Networks Are Doing to Help Them)