TheMukt reports:
Over the last few days we have seen increased activity on the nightly changelogs which suggest [CyanogenMod has] incorporated a call recording feature into its most recent nightlies. Generally speaking call recording is largely considered very grey in terms of the law and as such it seems CM is not offering this feature as a direct and obvious feature.
Instead what we are seeing is the call recording setting can be activated by the user but does require a little bit of knowledge. This presumably is a way for CM to avoid any direct law breaking. So to be accurate CM [is] now offering support for call recording although not the feature directly.
Related: Record Customer Service Calls
Related Stories
Tim Davis moved his household and, not finding a competitive ISP, relocated his Comcast service. He did the online install himself and everything was OK until a few weeks later when he experienced intermittent outages.
Techdirt notes:
An initial call with Comcast confirmed the problem was with the wiring outside the home, not the internal setup. Tim recorded that conversation, including when a Comcast rep confirmed that there is no charge to have a technician do work on outside lines to provide adequate service. Makes sense. A technician comes out, fixes the outside line issue, tests the network inside the home to assure connectivity is restored, and leaves. Then this happens.
All is fine until a week or two later when Davis receives a bill that includes $99.99 for "Failed Self Install," another $32 for "Failed Video [Self Install Kit]," and $49.95 for "Wireless Network SET Up." That's $181.94 in total. But, insists Davis, the problem wasn't that he failed to do the self-install correctly or that there was a failed self-install kit, since the problem involved cables entering his property that he never touched. Similarly, the tech never set up or did anything with Davis's WiFi system, so the set-up charge is bogus.
Calling Comcast back, the rep insists that Tim owes them for the repair. It's only when Tim reveals he has a recording of the previous call that the rep reneges.
ALWAYS RECORD CUSTOMER SERVICE CALLS.
Oh, but if you're recording your call, you may want to pay attention to the local laws about such things
Related:
Comcast Internet Cancellation Horror Story Goes Viral
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrNemesis on Wednesday August 27 2014, @04:38AM
Really?! I'm quote surprised to learn it isn't a standard feature TBH; my last two phones, the appallingly stone-aged Nokia 6310i and Nokia E6, both have it built in.
What's the controversy supposed to be about? Reading this wiki page [wikipedia.org] makes it sound like it's not a big deal in the US either. So why the cloak and dagger and why's it taken so long to implement?! I've considered it a crucial piece of tech for over a decade.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @06:05AM
I think business is terrified that call recording among the customers will take off.
However, I believe business has done a great job of conditioning us all that recording calls is a perfectly businesslike thing to do.. you know "this call is recorded for quality assurance purposes.."
I believe the fear business has for recorded calls is the inability to precede any reply with a torrent of fine greyed-out print like they do when printed information is released.
Business has lobbied for the legality of making oral commitments legally binding when recorded. I have no beef with that - but what is good for the goose should be good for the gander too. If the telemarketer calls with a business offer, then the person called should have a record of what service and price was agreed on before all the "businesstalk" is spoken. ( A good example of businesstalk is an AT&T contract - full of payment obligations to the company as well as all sorts of hold harmless for failure to deliver what was in the large print. ) Its best to avoid businesses that talk that way at all costs.
When a business has to clearly sound out all the disclaimers that are usually hidden in fine greyed out font, the customer will have ample time to determine whether or not they want to accept those terms and may think better of it than do business with companies who need the protection of all that legalese before they will do anything.
Incidentally, the first thing I do when considering a purchase with a company is look for the fine print. Presenting me a contract with a lot of fine print on it - well you might as well wipe your ass on it before handing it to me. My mood goes from happy to pissed-off in milliseconds when I see the company I was thinking of doing business with has to hide behind all sorts of legal trickery to stay in business. Fine grey print says to me this company relies on legal maneuvering, not customer satisfaction, for their business model, and its best to stay clear of them. They aren't much different than a street huckster trying to interest me in his shell game. You will lead a much happier life if you do not sign anything they hand you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday August 27 2014, @11:12AM
"So why the cloak and dagger"
Corporate FUD, thats what. They are tired of bad service ending up all over the internet and paying for better service might cut into the multimillion dollar exec bonuses. So FUD FUD FUD about it.
In my state its perfectly legal as long as I know about it, so I'm all good.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 27 2014, @05:13AM
In many states, it is illegal to record calls without the consent of both parties, with some exceptions for threatening calls which require just the consent of one party.
ps: the blockquote is set thus because when PipeDot scrapes SN, the scraper pukes after a blockquote. If this or a similar blockquote appears at the top of each post, that is all that will be seen on pipedot.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 27 2014, @05:16AM
It's already working! ;-)
(Score: 1) by engblom on Wednesday August 27 2014, @05:25AM
I am frequently visiting both Soylentnews and Pipedot for news. I am seldom commenting, but reading every day.
The only thing I find bad with this behavior is that Pipedot did not discuss this with Soylent. However, I find it very great if both sites could share content. I hope both sites will give each other a good API for doing this. This would be the best. The more comments we get the better the sites takes off. Soylent is getting more comments at this moment, but Pipedot usually also get a few comments so by adding them together it could benefit both.
There is another benefit to: If both sites would cooperate, it would force both sites to have a UI not annoying anyone or all users move over to the other.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 27 2014, @05:28AM
It would have been hilarious to see a story filled with meaningless blockquotes. But you broke it. Have to wait for the next story now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @06:23AM
The only thing I find bad with this behavior is that Pipedot did not discuss this with Soylent.
Their registration of soylent-news.org seems predatory to me.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday August 27 2014, @10:51AM
"Their registration of soylent-news.org seems predatory to me."
There's more to it than that. I took a quick look at comments I had submitted to SoylentNews.org. In the header for each SCRAPED comment is an e-mail address to use for contacting me: "martyb@soylent-news.org". But, I do NOT have access to that e-mail address. Anyone trying to contact me directly in response to something I posted on SoylentNews that was copied over to Pipedot is being intentionally misled that I can be reached there. My failing to respond to an e-mail sent there makes me look bad. And it seems there's nothing that I can see that I can do about it.
It gets worse.
As an editor at SoylentNews, I have submitted over 130 stories to the main page. In the masthead for each story, I am listed with an e-mail address, as well. Again, I cannot access that e-mail address. For that matter, any other editor or commenter who posted on the REAL soylentnews.org site, cannot access comments directed to them through the e-mail address posted on the scraped version of the soylentnews site.
Even more disturbing to me is that the owner of the domain soylent-news.org DOES have access to that e-mail account.
I have updated my sig on the real SN site to express my wishes, but pipedot fails to include the sig when it scrapes the SN site. So, I include it here, explicitly:
Copyright © 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Wednesday August 27 2014, @12:01PM
UPDATE: The provided e-mail address text: martyb@soylent-news.org is on an HREF that, when clicked, directs to: https://martyb.soylent-news.org/ [soylent-news.org]
A test e-mail bounced, and I got a generic web page about pipecode when I tried to access the link. If that is an attempt at providing attribution, it fails, and fails badly. Further, that test only reveals current behavior. I suspect no malice on the part of the current site owner, but a subsequent owner/maintainer could relatively easily change that behavior.
Copyright © 2014. All Rights Reserved.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Marand on Wednesday August 27 2014, @06:48AM
They also did not discuss it with the commenters. If I wanted to comment on pipedot I'd have a fucking account there already. I don't, and I don't appreciate having my contributions to this site added to that one without my consent. Whoever got the idea to scrape SN for free articles+comments is a despicable dick that deserves nothing but contempt. The only reason they're doing it is because pipedot can't get enough momentum going on its own, so it's trying to steal some of SN's and giving nothing in return. That shit is on par with spammers and those weird plagiarizing clickbait pages that show up on searches sometimes.
Prior to this, I saw pipedot as another post-slashdot site that had potential to grow and I wished it well, but that's gone, now. Pipedot did a damn fine job of ensuring I'll never contribute to it in any meaningful way ever, and I'll do what I can to discourage anybody else from visiting it when possible, too. What we're seeing from pipedot right now is sleazier than Slashdot ever was; why should anybody want to encourage its growth? SN's not perfect, but the people running the show at least seem to have better morals than that shit.
In summary: fuck pipedot for that scraping bullshit. I hope the site ends up failing horribly.
(Score: 1) by engblom on Wednesday August 27 2014, @07:18AM
This kind of attitude inside of SoylentNews is also hurting SoylentNews and will probably make some moving over to Pipedot.
I mean: The music industry get angry if somebody is copying songs. The SoylentNews people get angry if somebody is copying some comments. Who likes the music industry? Don't be hypocrites with downloaded songs and videos. Also streamed media often contain copyrighted material. If you watch youtube, you probably will end up hearing music somebody put there without permission. Do you get angry for finding such videos? Permit what you like to do yourself or people will dislike you too.
This is all about spreading news and not about faking school works. Seriously, I hope you are minority or I will dislike this site as I think information should be free. It is not like it would be impossible to see which comments are from Pipedot and which are from SoylentNews, so the credit goes even right in this case.
People will usually want to support what they like. Even if I would be able to download something for free, if I like it I support the producer. People will like to support SoylentNews if they see they are the producers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @07:42AM
Don't be hypocrites with downloaded songs and videos.
Your analogy doesn't work for a couple of reasons, chief of which is that the MAFIAA don't provide free access to movies and music on their own. For example, there is no place you can go to legally watch the new Godzilla movie for free, yet everything that pipedot has taken is available right here for free.
People will like to support SoylentNews if they see they are the producers.
They can't. Not only does pipedot not provide source attribution, they registered a look-a-like domain, soylent-news.org, to use instead.
This is all about spreading news and not about faking school works.
Uh no, it is about people and building a community. If it were about "spreading news" there are a thousand other websites they could scrape.
This kind of attitude inside of SoylentNews is also hurting SoylentNews and will probably make some moving over to Pipedot.
That's a stretch. PIpedot is trying to suck the marrow out of the community here without contributing anything in return. If that sort of one-sided behavior actually appeals to anyone then let them go, nobody is stopping them. But I doubt there will be more than a handful who see it that way.
(Score: 1) by engblom on Wednesday August 27 2014, @07:46AM
Yes, they provide source. There is a big yellow box saying clearly from where the source is. When you plagiarize you do not even provide the source. Open up story originating from SN and you will see that yellow box.
However, I agree that they should not have made an own domain name for the comments. That is just strange.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @08:36AM
> There is a big yellow box saying clearly from where the source is.
That wasn't there a couple of hours ago.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday August 27 2014, @01:24PM
To the best of my recollection, I didn't remember a yellow box before I sent a DMCA notice on behalf of 4,000 users [soylentnews.org].
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday August 27 2014, @08:41AM
You're making assumptions about what I do and how I feel about other topics with zero factual information to support it. You're also making some terrible comparisons that just don't work. In the case of streaming and youtube, most uses of copyrighted work are more of a fair-use case, with the presence of the work being incidental to the stream/video itself. Game videos, for example, are generally more about the people playing as the game than the game itself.
In the case of news aggregation sites like /., SN, and PD, the comments are the content. The sites become popular for the comments, so pipedot scraping SN in full and then dumping it all -- comments included -- is just content swiping. If it were just the article submissions, and they were properly attributed*, I wouldn't even care. Pipedot's community should be able to stand on its own, without artificially inflating it with comments from here.
What happens if someone comments on pipedot in response to, say, a comment I write? Will it notify me, or cross-post the comment here? If not, then it's a disservice to the PD community (if there is one) as well, because discussion there is drowned out by copying of comments from here. It's like if you opened a restaurant and filled the tables with mannequins; you can pretend the place is busy and healthy, but in reality it's still empty and doesn't provide a good atmosphere for the real person that wanders in.
I like to cite original sources, provide relevant links to them, and create original content rather than swiping it wholesale and posting it as my own. I permit pipedot to do the same, but it doesn't seem to want to. See above about making assumptions about what I like and what I do without sufficient knowledge.
If it were about spreading news, they wouldn't be copying comments. Sites cross-reference each other all the time and it works out just fine, because of two things: 1. the sites refer back to their original sources, with links; 2. they have their own communities and comments, rather than scraping the contents section of the reference site.
Comment copying means it's not about news, it's about making the site look healthy and busy when it's not. If it were, it wouldn't be resorting to stunts like this.
Also, the "information wants to be free" line of thought is bullshit. The information's already there, and it's already free, so how is blanket copy-pasting of the SN comments section freeing the information? It's not locked away. Again, scraping the SN summaries and providing reference links back would be acceptable, but trying to duplicate SN, comments and all, is just sleazy. If I wanted my comments on pipedot I'd have a login there and be posting them myself. I don't.
* In fairness, I just checked again and the SN scraped pages now have an attribution at the bottom, which they didn't earlier today. That's an improvement, but the comment duplication is still sleazy.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday August 27 2014, @07:32AM
Exactly. I would've joined Pipedot, but their signup form required I solve a kind of math equation I didn't recognize, then when I got it wrong (duh) it said my registration was being submitted for review even though I'm probably too stupid to leave worthwhile comments! If they don't want anyone that's dyscalculic and/or last took a math class 20 years ago in high school as they didn't major/work in a STEM discipline, then fuck them -- I won't contribute to their site, and they certainly shouldn't be snagging my work from here.
(Score: 1) by engblom on Wednesday August 27 2014, @07:43AM
Just put that math equation into google and you get the answer immediately. I find this much better than the normal captchas which I often fail as the letters are too much distorted. Often I end up trying around 3-4 times before passing them. With a clear math problem (and it was a famous formula even, most have been learning by memory) you know you read everything right and the answer, if you do not know it directly, is just one search away.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 27 2014, @11:18AM
"required I solve a kind of math equation I didn't recognize"
Oh cool I like math. Yes this is very strange that this finally motivated me to try and sign up for pipedot. But I like math.
"What is the 3rd number in the list twenty seven, 33 and 8?"
I shit you not that is an honest cut and paste of the dreaded math puzzle that I got. Not exactly math grad student level here. Now if one of you people refreshes and gets "Provide a correct proof of the Riemann hypothesis in less than 140 characters" then I'll admit my defeat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @04:56PM
Originally, it asked what is sin²(θ) + cos²(θ)
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Wednesday August 27 2014, @10:32PM
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday September 18 2014, @12:11AM
I googled the math problem I got, the answer was 1. I also had no idea what it actually meant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @12:38PM
So you want to read all these comments but don't rarely comment yourself? Thanks
(Score: 2) by Lemming on Wednesday August 27 2014, @03:07PM
By now, the copied articles and comments seem to have disappeared from Pipedot. They also posted an article/discussion [pipedot.org] about it. Most comments in that discussion were also rather negative about the new feature, so that's probably why they removed it (for now?)
(Score: 1) by pendorbound on Wednesday August 27 2014, @02:40PM
Sorry, but there are actually 12 US states where two-party consent is required. For the rest, one-party is sufficient:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United_States [wikipedia.org]
For four of those 12, there are caveats that make it closer to one-party as well. Two of them require notification only (“BTW, I’m recording this, KTHX”), one of the statutes has been found unconstitutional, and Hawaii is basically one-party even though it’s listed in the 12 (see http://www.pibureau.com/HRS,%20%20SURVEILLANCE%20%20LAWS%20%20IN%20%20HAWAII.HTM [pibureau.com]).
So essentially eight states require two-party consent. Doesn’t seem like it’s a grey area legally at all. The majority of US citizens are within the law to record their own telephone conversations regardless of what the other party might want.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday August 27 2014, @06:17AM
My motorola cellphone from the late 90's had this feature.. in fact it probably had it in the best way possible:
* Dedicated button for the recording
* When pressed during a call it started to have a non-intrusive 4s interval beep inserted into both incomming and outgoing
* It had a setting whether it should record both ends (great for dialouges) or just the remote end (great for getting directions and phonenumber)
* Also worked great as a dictaphone
All in all, I really hope they (CM) record the streams (in and out) separately and allows for separate playback..
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @06:33AM
If you will leave the &mode=nested in the URLs of the S/N links in summaries, Google (and I assume other search engines) will have A LOT more meat in what they find.
Google's spiders don't use cookies, so they only get the flattest, least-useful image of this site. 8-(
...or the coders could change the default presentation to something that sucks less.
The same advice about S/N URLs goes to anyone else inserting one of those into a summary.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @03:21PM
so it's okay for any wierdo to track the super model and general hotty thru the cell phone but recording the conversation received/made from your very own paid-for phone/property is not?
(Score: 1) by richtopia on Wednesday August 27 2014, @03:41PM
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=com.call.recorder [f-droid.org]
I saw that yesterday when reinstalling everything with a new rom, but I have not been able to test yet.
I assume that the NSA is already recording all of my calls, so why not make a copy for myself?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27 2014, @10:46PM
Sadly doesn't seem to work with current Android versions.
https://code.google.com/p/call-recorder-for-android/issues/detail?id=2 [google.com]