Nothing to see here. Move along please.

Facebook is at it again …

Facebook has long been known for not taking sufficient care with users’ money and privacy, having hit the news headlines on several occasions. Seems they’re at it again.

Yesterday, I *tried* to get a simple ad running on their system, just a test really — though I did attempt to complete payment for a real ad. I tried three times, each time receiving various, different error messages and automated apologies, with messages like “we’re working to fix this problem …”, etc. At no time did I receive any message saying that my credit card had been charged and at no time did I see anything to suggest that the ads had in fact been accepted and lodged for running.

Today, I see that Facebook managed to fix the problem (I’m assuming), gather up the broken database data from my broken orders and then go ahead and charge me for essentially the same ad, run at the same time, to the same audience (all the same settings), three times. It’s not really the exact same ad, since I tried three times to get the ad to be accepted, each time having to re-enter all the data from scratch and each time receiving errors messages. So, technically, the ad was re-created three separate times.

Now, with any decent and reputable online vendor, you’d be able to contact them to query or complain about what had happened and get something down about it … maybe a refund or some credits or something. But not Facebook.

With Facebook, when you reply to a billing email, you simply get a message back saying that they don’t accept email responses to billing notices. They provide a link to a ad-related help page. Of course, every last character of text on that page is about assuming YOU, the user, have done something wrong or don’t know what you are doing.

There is no way to raise a specific request for help, only the FAQ. There is a message that reads…

Please note that if you choose to contact the Facebook Ads team, we’re only able to provide support for inquiries in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, and Turkish.

… but there’s no way to contact them, that I can find. They further state …

We’re also unable to offer phone support at this time, but will be happy to respond to questions submitted through contact forms on this site.

… but again, there are not, in fact, any “Contact Us” links anywhere “on this site”.

None of this is in compliance with laws designed protect online consumers and credit card users of course. It’s just Facebook, being their usual half-ass selves, making a mess of things.

What’s the one big lesson Facebook keeps kicking back in users’ faces, concerning both privacy and monetary transactions?

IF IN DOUBT — DON’T!

I suppose its only fair that I also point out that the ads did actually run and did in fact gain some 81 clicks at about $1.23 each. So not all was lost, though the cost was 3x the intended budget.

But sorry, Facebook. Your credibility just went down yet another notch. Very, very poor.

A HUGE let down

The Apple(tm) AirPort Extreme II

[2011-03-11 heavily edited for accuracy and what not ]

This product looked like a real winner and the ideal upgrade to our ageing but ever faithful, LynkSys WRT54G. Only, it simply didn’t work for us at all, due in my humble opinion to poor programming design. WHAT?! From Apple?! Well… yes, apparently. I’m actually still in shock as I type this.

So what’s wrong with it?

Well, it turns out that the AE DHCP client for the WAN (Internet) port cannot handle the IP addresses offered by various modems running in half-bridge mode. The result, for those living in countries where PPPoE is not the norm — ZERO Internet connectivity, unless you’re lucky to have an arguably half baked half-bridge modem. (There have been several replies to my forum posts from people using their AE’s and Apple Time Capules with half-bridge modems successfully. However, Google seems to suggest that the majority have the same problem we experienced.)

In this specific case, when our D-Link 502T, firmware-upgraded DSL2 modem runs in half-bridge mode (in order to offer the AirPort Extreme a “proper” IP address on the internet (no Network Address Translation (NAT) — thus a ‘direct’ connection) the “IP address” and the “router” (default gateway)  address given to the AirPort Extreme are exactly the same. This is common with half-bridge mode implementations. In fact, I would argue that it’s the one thing that defines the source as a device offering a half-bridged connection.

Alas, under this condition, the AE’s internal programming decides that the IP address is invalid and falls back to a self-assigned, private IP, which is of course useless. Upgrading to the latest firmware (one x.x.1 step  up) made no difference unfortunately. (I seem to recall that even OS X on my iMac cannot cope with this, either. But I haven’t tested it recently.)

Interestingly, I was able to manually specify the exact same IP, gateway and DNS server addresses being offered by the DHCP server and guess what? It worked! But this is no solution when the IP address being offered by the ISP can change at any time.

Our ancient old LinkSys WRT54G handles this mode of operation flawlessly. Granted, it has custom firmware. But that firmware is also at least three years old. Half-bridge mode is not exactly rare — especially outside of the USA. Sure, there’s no real standard for the mode. But it’s been around for a long time now and I reckon most any modern router should handle all common variations — especially considering how completely not difficult that actually is.

I might have been prepared to settle for using the AE in bridge mode, so as to take advantage of Wireless-N and the shared hard disk or printer functions, which I did want. But alas, even over a 1Gb Ethernet link, hard disk performance was very poor. There’s also some strange problem with mounting my Apple formatted 1TB Seagate USB drive. It just doesn’t work. Again, Google reveals others with the same problem, though most seem to be OK in this instance.

So all in all, a very poor performer and, I’ll say it again, a big surprise from an otherwise excellent hardware/software developer such as Apple.

Nothing much can be done about the situation at my end. We’ll just have wait until Apple releases the AirPort Super-Mega-Duper-Extreme and fixed the couple lines of firmware source code to remedy things.

Meanwhile, we ended up with the latest offering from Belkin, with 2 USB ports for sharing a hard disk and a printer. This device seems to be working very well, with its built-in DSL2 modem to completely avoid that situation — and for a little less than the same money. (No Time Machine support though, which is a shame.)

We remain astonished, because we’re actually BIG Apple fans around here and have got ourselves thoroughly used to quoting the old, “It just works!” slogan, as well as the standard answer to frustrated Windows users, “Get a mac!” Ah well. No one is perfect.

But have you seen the new iPad 2 promo video yet? Apple hits another home run! Awesome.