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FTC Rules That This Favored Tactic by News Media is Illegal

Andrew Orr ·

Some companies, such as news publications, use a “click to subscribe, call to cancel” tactic to discourage customers from cancelling their service. The FTC says this practice is illegal.

But it’s not just hedge fund-owned publishers that have adopted the subscription practices that have caught the government’s attention. Again, most U.S. news organizations don’t give readers an easy way to cancel online. When I checked — more than a week after the FTC announced it planned to crack down on companies who don’t make it easy to cancel — The New York Times still requires me to talk to someone to unsubscribe, either by starting a live chat or by picking up the phone.

A welcome move from the FTC. Currently, my tactic for this is using a disposable card and cancelling it.

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GitHub Fixes NPM Bugs That Leaked Private Package Names

Andrew Orr ·

GitHub has fixed several flaws with npm packages that leaked private names and let attackers publish new versions of a package they didn’t have rights to.

The data leak was identified by GitHub on October 26th and by the 29th, all records containing private package names were deleted from the npm’s replication database. Although, GitHub does warn that despite this, the replicate.npmjs.com service is consumed by third parties who may, therefore, continue to retain a copy or “may have replicated the data elsewhere.”