In this time of inflation however many are resorting to all kinds of surcharges. With the price of gas being so volatile, UPS and FedEx have had gas surcharges for years; this I understand.

Now I am finding surcharges on credit card fees when I dine or when I pay a bill. This credit card fee also occurs with many internet providers.

Disposal waste surcharges are found on the mechanic’s bill.

As an aside, when I order, pick up my food and throw away my trash at a restaurant, they are trying to guilt me into a minimum of a 20% gratuity. I waited tables during college and earned my gratuity. This is unearned income for the restaurant staff and a bit intimidating; but I tip appropriately to the service I receive.

One restaurant chain has been toying with food pickup fees…. REALLY?

Check out the resort fees/parking fees/taxes when you stay at an out of town hotel!

Bullitt has a recovery fee to address the taxation and reporting (compliance recovery fee) for the telephone service that we provide.

In defense of SOME of these businesses, everyone wants to advertise their service/product as the least expensive. They then advertise inexpensive pricing but load up on the surcharges. For the consumer it becomes very difficult to compare pricing.

Jay mentioned that some are increasing prices AND adding surcharges.

I wish EVERYONE would just suck it up and promote the price inclusive of all of the fees. It has the smell of bait and switch pricing when surcharges are added.

I am getting in the habit of asking what surcharges there may be!

Scott

The post Surcharges Everywhere! appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

KID SAFE includes the following:

• Manage screen time
• Filter which websites your kids can visit
• Keep up with kids with location check-ins
• Free with Bullitt managed router service

KID SAFE+ includes the KID SAFE benefits PLUS:

• Monitor texts, email, YouTube, and 30+ apps and platforms
• Get alerts for issues like cyberbullying, online predators, suicidal ideation, and more
• $12.00 per month

Both of these work with our managed routers, your Android and Apple IOS devices.

The following applications may be monitored:

• Snapchat
• Facebook
• Spotify
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Tumblr
• Gmail
• Google Hangouts Chat
• Outlook/Hotmail
• OneDrive
• OneNote
• Dropbox
• Yahoo! Mail
• Comcast Mail
• AOL Mail
• YouTube
• Discord
• Pinterest
• GroupMe
• Houseparty
• Steam
• Holla
• VSCO
• Lipsi
• Messenger Kids
• Flickr
• WhatsApp
• Kik
• iOS Text Messaging/Photos/Videos/Web browsing
• Android Text Messaging/Photos/Videos/Web browsing
• Amazon Fire Tablet
• Chrome web browsing (requires extension)
• Chromebook
• Slack
• Skype
• Reddit
• TikTok
• LiveMe
• BIGO LIVE

Give us a call to allow us to help in this battle for our kids!

The post KID SAFE appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

I had not seen this in a long time. How was someone getting into our network to hack this router? I took some time to investigate and was reminded that the existing provider’s network was not protected from such an attack. I RARELY see this on our network due to our security. I quickly disabled the services that were responsible for this and hardened the router security.

This brings to mind that you should always use the following to protect your router:

-Try to change the username if you can from admin to something else

-Change your password to a very secure password including numbers, letters, symbols and upper and lower case text; don’t use dictionary works.

-NEVER NEVER use your name, business name or phone number.

Check out this helpful link: http://mentalfloss.com/article/504786/8-tips-make-your-passwords-strong-possible

Good luck and safe internetting!

The post Instant Hacker! appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

As an alternative to Google, Yahoo and Bing, I have been using startpage.com.  It hides my searches from the big three while at the same time using google’s search engine.  It does a fair job of searching the web.  Duckduckgo.com does not return as many detailed results as startpage.com; google.com wins the search prize but fails the privacy test.

I still find that in about 5% of the searches, I still use google.com to find those obscure sites that are not retrieved by startpage.com.

The post Vivaldi and Firefox, startpage.com and duckduckgo.com; PRIVACY MATTERS! appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

I had a pleasant call from a gentlemen last weekend who asked if our company supported ROBO calls. I said, “No” and asked why. He indicated that he was ROBO called from one of our numbers. The offending ROBO spoofed one of our numbers to call this very nice guy. I explained how it happened and again assured him that we did not participate willingly.

As you are probably experiencing, your home phones, office phones and cell phones are all getting hit with what has been recently termed “ROBO calls”. This refers to the war between the robots and your telephone devices. Is this a twist on the Terminator movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger?

You may get local caller ID numbers, out of the area or unknown caller ID. You may hear silence or a recording with instructions on how to have your number removed from the robot’s list. You may think it is from Google regarding your web page.

I have many thoughts on this:

1) I theorize that if you press a number to be removed from the list, you are helping to populate the database of telephone numbers that receive a human response; you are helping them not helping your situation… just a theory.

2) It costs the originating company next to nothing to program a computer to make these calls and again costs them next to nothing to call your phones.

3) It costs you in time, it elevates your stress level, it takes you from your goals and life enjoyment to answer a computer (robot). It costs your employer your time and payroll taxes. I (again theory) believe that this is causing businesses across the United States BILLIONS of dollars in lost employee productivity.

4) Very little revenue is generated from this calling pattern. Please don’t buy from this kind of activity or your “Vote” may help propagate further calls.

Who is to blame?

First and foremost, the telemarketers. Bad telephone etiquette and abuses have been the cause over the years of illegally changing your long distance from your carrier to someone you didn’t request. They have shared your information with others for the purposes of marketing new products to you (shouldn’t happen without your permission). Net Neutrality abuses presently occur whereby your data is throttled depending on what data your network is requesting (I hate Net Neutrality, but agree with the principle). When the government steps in to fix these problems, it means more paperwork and filing for yours truly; it means bigger government.

Secondly, my industry with its vast lobbying influence has not done enough to encourage regulators to address this issue. We are losing phone lines and business because of this. We are making enemies of our customers. People don’t want to pay for this abuse.

Thirdly, the Federal Communications Commission is to blame. Except for last month when they fined a ROBO $120 million. Good GOING! They need to get heavy handed for a while and fix this both with securing Caller ID information (prevent Caller ID spoofing) and handing out steep fines to make this activity too expensive for the offenders. Click for a news story on ROBO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzCXmqM6fBo

So we at Bullitt are working on perfecting a service for our residential customers whereby the caller should identify themselves. Our customer phone then rings and gives our customer several options after the recorded voice identifies themselves:

1) Accept the call and complete the voice path
2) Send to voicemail (sorry mother-in-law)
3) Send to nonstop hold music
4) Play Dah-Dah-Dah, “This number is not in service”

If I sit here and contemplate it, it isn’t worth getting upset about. You are getting upset at a robot. A robot programmed to go to war with you. I figure that if I get upset it wins.

Good LUCK!

Scott

The post ROBO CALLS! LETS TERMINATE THEM! appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

Bullitt Communications will never sell your browsing information. The only tracking that we do is as a legal requirement if requested by court subpoena.

We feel strongly that our customer’s internet usage is private, none of anyone’s business and not for sale.

Be aware that anything which leaves the Bullitt Network has the potential to be tracked by many ISPs and website owners upstream.

If you don’t want people to know what you are doing, don’t say it in any telephone and don’t type it in a computer.

The post WILL BULLITT SELL MY INTERNET BROWSING HISTORY? appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

During this charged political season I was blown away by the potential that Google is modifying your search results so that you are less likely to find information which is public, current and relevant to making voting decisions. Keeping the politics aside, if this is true, it is another example of thin moral fiber from our leaders.  What is being suggested in the video below should not happen with any political topic or candidate.  It should not happen in any form, it is a free speech limitation.

I have checked this as shown in the video and the search results are populating as indicated in the video… https://youtu.be/jtn7cb8Esqg

See for yourself!

Update 6/10/2016:  Scott has changed his search engine to bing.com and is reviewing an exit strategy from the Google Android operating system on company phones in July.

Update 6/14/2016:  Google has responded to the video.  See here!  http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-response-donald-trump-2016-6

Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary?

The post IS GOOGLE UNETHICALLY MODIFYING YOUR SEARCH RESULTS? appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

REALLY!  At Bullitt, while we sell affordable routers which we can easily support, we don’t offer a lease program because we don’t believe in them.  We also do not mandate that you buy a router sold by Bullitt.

Check out the article: https://consumerist.com/2016/01/12/why-is-comcast-interrupting-my-web-browsing-to-upsell-me-on-a-new-modem/

The post WHAT IS COMCAST DOING TO ANGER THEIR CUSTOMERS NOW? appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

First, you phone or tablet has a finite amount of memory and processor power.  Many of these bloatware programs remain in memory and are also running in the background.  This slows your phone down and takes memory away from you.  You may want additional memory and processor power for applications of YOUR choosing:  pictures, videos or anything that YOU deem important to save to you phone.

Additionally, these programs are sometimes written poorly opening your phone up to potential security risks, see Security flaws.

Removing bloatware, specifically on the Android operating systems is a pain.  You must first root your phone and install an app to remove the bloatware.  When you root your phone, you may “brick” the phone which renders it inoperative and voids your warranty.

Samsung may be listening.  Less bloatware has been reported in Samsung S5 and S6.  It seems to me that bloatware opens the bloatware author and installer up to lawsuits when security holes damage the user’s phone or causes important data to end up in the wrong hands.  Hopefully liability concerns will prompt manufacturers and carriers to think twice before installing this on their phones.  As a customer, you too have the power in your wallet to include bloatware in your purchase decision.

The post WHY ALL THE BLOATWARE? appeared first on Bullitt Communications.

Enter sling.com.  Now she can watch ESPN in all of its glory! – almost all.  We had a game between Liberty and the Grizzlies yesterday.  She found that it was being aired on ESPN 3 but it wasn’t playing on ESPN via sling.com.  Because we had an account with sling.com, I downloaded the watchESPN app on her tablet, logged in with our sling.com credentials and Voila she was able to watch the Grizzlies get defeated.  It turns out she still wasn’t very happy, but I am sure the Grizzlies will do much better next time.

If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!

The post LETS WATCH GRIZZLY FOOTBALL! appeared first on Bullitt Communications.