Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Wells Fargo Click-Through Thuggery
 
Stupid Is as Stupid Does: Me and NewsGator
 
brrreeeport
 
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Wells Fargo Click-Through Thuggery

I had a nasty shock when I logged onto my on-line bank account.  I was there to check my account activity to verify my balance and arrival of a funds transfer.

{tags: Wells Fargo trustworthiness online banking orcmid}

Agree Or Else

What I encountered instead were two EULA-like statements and a mandatory click-through before I could access my account on-line.

The first statement was a single page E-Sign Consent document.  It constituted my consent to receive all information in electronic form.  The wording suggested to me that I would no longer receive paper statements. 

Taking the option to decline resulted in a warning that I could be denied on-line services and reverted to whatever there was before.  I have always had an on-line account, starting at the end of 1999, so I have no idea what would happen.    I did not confirm that I was declining and chose to agree.

The second statement presented the Wells Fargo On-Line Access agreement.  I could decline its provisions and be left in the same state as before, or I could claim that I’ve read and accepted the conditions of that agreement.  The text of the agreement is 69k, has 11, 000 words, and occupies 22 pages when viewed in Microsoft Word.  I obviously clicked through without reading the thing.  I saved the text file to disk by pasting it into Windows Notepad.

Since I would apparently be denied access if I did not accept both agreements, I did so without any clue what the consequences of agreement are.  My account appeared as normal and I was able to confirm that the expected funds transfer had been credited.  I also saw that my use of an ATM machine in British Columbia during Northern Voices cost me $5.00 each time. 

Checking it Out

I read the lengthy agreement off line.  It seems to be focused services that I either don’t use (brokerage, on-line bill pay) or didn’t even know about (e-mail alerts about account activity).  The only portion of interest to me is the availability of statements in PDF and viewable/downloadable on-line. 

When I went back on-line and explored my account preferences, it appears that I am still set up to receive paper statements and there isn’t anything that changes for me. 

Why the Bullying?

 I can’t comprehend why forcing click-through under the threat of loss of services is considered an useful way to promote addition of new account features.  It seemed to me, until I had a chance to look everything over, that this was a way to force me to agree to receiving my statements on-line.  Now I’m not sure what it was.  Badly done for sure. 

I should receive a paper statement any day now.  It will be interesting to see what may accompany that information.   

I’m making a list of the automatic deposits that I have into this account, as well as those services (PayPal and MSN Radio come to mind) that are paid from this account.  Apart from needing to provide some overlap and having to pay a monthly fee when the automatic deposits go elsewhere, I think I can manage to switch over the account and then close it.  Then I’ll have several months before I have to move my safety-deposit box.  I’d thought about this before.  It’s time to act.

---

[update 2006-02-15-22:28 Well, there’s one consequence so far.  I just received an e-mail welcoming me to the on-line bill payment feature.  In fact, I have not opted into on-line bill payment.  I tried it once and I gave it up as cumbersome.  I also don’t want to maintain the minimum balance that it takes to have on-line bill payment be free.  I have this ominous sense that all I’ve accomplished is arrange to have my e-mail inbox filled with friendly offers.]

[update 2006-02-19-11:39 I received a second version of the “welcome to on-line bill payment” e-mail before life quieted down.  My paper statement is the same as always and I see no indication that there’s anything different happening with my on-line banking account.  I also see in a 2006-02-17 San Francisco Chronicle article by David Lazarus (thanks to Scott Loftesness) that this scary forced click-through is happening to thousands of us.  I thought maybe it was me, especially because of the lame “our records show that we failed to obtain this agreement from you” that I was presented for an account that was set up in 1999 and has been in continuous use since.  I love how the Wells Fargo folk dismiss their scaring the pajamas off us while claiming to be providing us a service.  The last time I checked, they are playing with my money and this level of cluelessness is no reassurance.]

posted by orcmid at 2/15/2006 09:51:32 PM

Stupid Is as Stupid Does: Me and NewsGator

I updated NewsGator to overcome a problem I had with a site that silently and unilaterally upgraded all of its Atom feeds to Atom 1.0.  This cured one problem only to saddle me with another, as described in the final update to that saga.   A comment on that article provided a link to a NewsGator knowledge-base article and patch that is purported to remedy the new problem.

{tags: TROSTing NewsGator confirmable experience system coherence least privilege UAC SUA orcmid}

2006-02-14-08:58 I thought I’d fixed it.  When I noticed that my NewsGator Outlook folders were being trashed, I manually went into my subscriptions and either deleted a subscription or changed it to be stored into a specific Outlook folder of my choosing.  I did that for all 190 feeds.  When I was done, I had 100 subscriptions left.   I figured I had resolved the problem, after 90 minutes of painful editing.  I was still grumpy, but I figured I had some respite while I figured out a better way to do this.  I can also resubscribe to the deleted feeds on an opportunistic basis when I want to be caught up on one of them.  Meanwhile, all of my existing feed “clippings” are still sitting in my Outlook folders and kept searchable by Windows Desktop Search.  I can get back to work.

2006-02-14-14:30 Not So Fast, Sparky.  When I saw the comment, I took a look at the NewsGator Knowledge Base item.  It’s a little daunting that it is not at a NewsGator domain, but the download is from a NewsGator URL.  Since I had already gone through and corrected everything, I was hoping that my problem was resolved and I could proceed without applying a patch.

Haven’t We Met Somewhere Before?  The odd thing about the patch is that is offered for some other problems.  When I was researching the status of NewsGator Outlook 2.5 before updating to 2.5.12.495, I saw a patch file of the same name being offered for another class of problem(s). That other problem involves some weird confluence of interactions depending on installation of Visual Studio 2005 (which I don’t have on this machine) and a variety of plug-ins that might be installed in Outlook (none of which I have) and that conspired to prevent NewsGator from running.  The peculiarity of these interactions and the “try this, maybe it will help” approach is not something that I find confidence-inspiring and I figured I would not be using any patch unless I absolutely had to (and was still using NewsGator).

I’m Still Screwed, Time to Patch.  A while later, I manually start a NewGator “Get News” and son-of-a-gun, there are renamed folders again.  I look in the NewsGator | Subscriptions … list and I see that all of my subscriptions have been either marked as destined for <base> or for folders having the same name as the feed.   All of those carefully-entered manual corrections have been trashed.

2006-02-14-18:36 Patching Is Such Sweet Sorrow.  I downloaded the patch (it is gigantic, larger than the production release).  I upgrade what I call my least-privilege Safe User Account (SUA, just to add to the confusion around LUA and UAC) to Administrator so I can do an install that has NewsGator operating only under the one SUA account.  I launch the patch program and it completes successfully, completing much more quickly than I was expecting based on the size of the download.

NewsGator, Where Are You?  I restore my account to non-administrator SUA (limited access, in Windows XP parlance), restart my computer, and then bring up Outlook.  NewsGator isn’t there at all.  The updated to 2.5.12.495 didn’t have this problem.  I wonder what’s different.   This is starting to become my worst nightmare.

NewsGator Diagnostics Tell All.   There’s a program called NewsGator Diagnostics on the Start | All Programs | NewsGator menu.  I run it.  Oh, I see, the patched NewsGator needs to modify something in Outlook and my SUA account doesn’t write privileges to do that.  I’ve been here before.  There are essentially first-time startup operations of the NewsGator Outlook plug-in that require unusual privileges.  I change the account type back to Administrator.  I run NewsGator Diagnostics again and it seems to succeed.  I go back to least privilege, start up Outlook, and NewsGator is there and running.

2006-02-14-20:30 Endless Optimism.  I had the vague hope that somehow my fixed-up subscriptions would be restored, but that isn’t to be.  So I spend an hour after dinner fixing them all up once again.  Meanwhile, to get through this without messing up I delete 40 more subscriptions, ending up with 60 of the 190 I started with in the morning.  Some of these I know I’ll want back, and I’ll resubscribe to those later.

2006-02-14-22:00 Unlimited Pessimism.  I have to tell you that I was fully expecting the patch not to work.  And the only way to know is to have done all of the cleanups and then downloaded any updates to the 60 subscribed feeds remaining in my list.  I click to “Get News” and NewsGator works through the downloads.  There isn’t much new, but it all goes to the right places.  My subscription entries seem to be unchanged.  I’ve exhausted myself fretting with this stuff and I shut down to see what the new day will bring.

2006-02-15-12:16 Reflections: What a Difference a Day Makes.  I have downloaded feeds again and there is no further disruption.  The patch brings me to version 2.5.12.537 of NewsGator and apart from installation hiccups I’ve seen before (requiring unusual privileges to complete setup during the first-use of the application), I seem to be back in business.  I have even subscribed to two feeds as a result of some morning e-mail alerts that I receive.

I’m relieved that I still have my system and all of my feed clippings intact.  I’m mildly dismayed at the difficulty that I went through and that there are data-corruption cases and plug-in interference conditions to be found in a feed reader.  The fact that NewsGator is a .NET application is also revealing in ways that I don’t even want to think about.

I think there are lessons here concerning the difficulty of having predictable, coherent behavior of software.  I also think that there is something to be seen about how one confirms operation, confirms difficulties, and is able to provide positive support responses.  I also notice that going to NewsGator to see if there were already-known problems about corruption of subscriptions was not part of my approach to finding a solution.  I figured it was a failure of the update process and not a chronic condition of the new version.  I went directly to working around the damage.  I didn’t realize I was making a bet, but I lost it anyhow.

posted by orcmid at 2/15/2006 12:37:01 PM

brrreeeport

Scoble’s Brrreeeport Report.  Well, I need some kinda comic relief.  I have run out of ideas for getting technorati tags actually working on my blog.  Click on any of them in preceding articles and notice how those articles, sometimes those tags, have no presence in the technoratisphere.  I’m told the way to get attention on this sort of thing is to mention the Dave guy.  OK, we’ll try that too.

{tags: brrreeeport technorati Dave Sifry orcmid}

posted by orcmid at 2/14/2006 01:06:31 PM