Meeped: It begins

For months, the Foo household has been receiving from Time-Warner Cable a mind-numbing barrage of propaganda regarding their impending ownership of our business. There are the postcards, the pamphlets, the e-mails, and the extremely annoying TV ads that gleefully remind us twice at every commercial break how they're "fine tuning" our cable service.

If throwing a spanner in the works can be considered fine tuning, I suppose that's a true statement. Turtle called this morning to tell me she'd received an e-mail instructing her to convert her Comcast e-mail account(s) over to the new, exciting Road Runner accounts. I hadn't received any such notifications, so I asked her to hold up and forward a copy of the e-mail to me.

According to the e-mail, "all you have to do" is run their handy wizard, which downloads and installs some sort of ActiveX control and modifies your Internet Explorer browser with neato Road Runner stuff. This malware activates your Road Runner service, "optimizes" your computer to run with it, and then goes through every e-mail client it can find on your system and modifies your e-mail configurations. "Never mind the details," it seems to say. "I know what I'm doing."

In other words, it's time to make a full system backup and dust off the OS reinstallation disks.

Meanwhile, I noticed this morning that I haven't received any e-mail to one of the public comcast.net addresses I use for mailing lists and other correspondence that might attract spam. It's a forwarding address that I've set up to pass everything along to my primary comcast.net mailbox, but it turns out that Time-Warner went ahead and switched it to forward to some new tx.rr.com address that doesn't exist because I haven't created it yet!

They're fine-tuning my internet experience, you know.

It gets better. I visited the Time-Warner web page that provides migration information for the North Dallas victims. Yes, Road Runner will still be providing free anti-virus and firewall software, as Comcast did, but instead of McAfee, we get some half-arsed junk put out by Computer Associates. I've used Computer Associates' stuff before, and it was crap; but I thought maybe things had improved, so I went a-Googling for reviews. Words like "ineffective" and "system crash" kept cropping up in the user reviews. PC Magazine's review was more diplomatic but said essentially the same thing. Looks like I'll be shelling out some bucks for ZoneAlarm's security suite.

Thanks for letting me vent.