New York Times writer Brad Stone was on the phone with a pair of Comcast execs and experienced some technical difficulties. First, he was disconnected suddenly. Then, two minutes after calling back, the call was interrupted and Stone was inexplicably connected to the wife of another Comcast employee, who was trying to call her husband at work. After sitting in silence talking nonstop for 15 minutes, figuring the lack of response was just the Stone-cold Timesman's attempt to make them sweat, the Comcasters called him back and lamely theorized that maintenance was being performed on their phone system. This must be part of the "best broadband experience" that Comcast works so hard to provide. [Bits]

When I was younger, we had to stand outside in the cold for hours to buy World Series tickets. Now, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we can buy them online from the comfort of our pajamas. At least, that was the theory when the Colorado Rockies decided to offer World Series ticket online only. A nice idea, if you're prepared for it. The company that was serving up the tickets for the Rockies had an "unspecified problem" and its servers are offline. In the 90 minutes after the sale started, 8.5 million connection attempts were made for 60,000 tickets. (Photo by AP/Ed Andrieski)

When Snocap and music retailer CD Baby ended their partnership earlier this month, Snocap made like it pulled the plug. But today CD Baby president Derek Sivers put out numbers that show why it's no surprise Snocap had to lay off 31 of its 57 employees. Its partnership with CD Baby only generated $12,000 in revenues.

Well, that's cheery: According to the San Jose Mercury News, we're living over a "tectonic time bomb." The East Bay's Hayward Fault is the Yahoo of earthquake generators, always playing second fiddle to our seismic Google, the better-known San Andreas. But, like Yahoo, it still sells a lot of online ads — I mean, packs a wallop. On average, the Hayward Fault shakes its groove thing once every 140 years, and the last big one came in 1868. Ask yourself if your business plan has been seismically retrofitted — because a 7.3-magnitude earthquake is sure to pop all but the strongest of bubbles. (Photo by UC-Berkeley)

Skype is the gift that keeps on taking. Yesterday, the Internet phone service weighed down record revenues from eBay with a massive writeoff. Today's its just annoying customers. The site is reporting technical difficulties with Skype gift certificates that have been issued since Tuesday. [Heartbeat]

For a bunch of geeks, the people running the Web 2.0 Summit, organized by geek-book publisher O'Reilly Media and tech-conferences specialist CMP, don't seem to be very good at pushing around the A/V cart. A conference attendee writes us to complain that every session he's been to has had a different technical issue. Video and audio were out of sync during Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's presentation. Marissa Mayer's presentation on Google Health was broken too. Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki had to deal with video without sound. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, a broken microphone. Wealthy has-been Ted Leonsis, pushed out of AOL and now pushing a new venture, couldn't get a network for his demonstration. Our bitter tipster tells us, "WTF! and the wifi completely sucks." That's why smart people like my boss bring EVDO cards, chump. (Photo by pingnews.com)

Being an intrepid tech reporter, I buy books related to my work. I just picked up The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media (obligatory: it is the greatest work ever put to print. You should buy copies for yourself and all your friends). I preordered Options by Forbes editor Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, way back in July. I've been pantingly awaiting the arrival of my copy from Amazon.com. A few days ago, I got an email from Amazon saying my book arrival date was getting pushed back — to December 14. I thought it was just a mixup, but now we've heard from other sources that Amazon sent them the same email. What's going on? Here's what Fake Steve himself has to say about it.

Expressing frustration with the seemingly routine outages of microblogging service Twitter, tech journalist Andy Ihnatko warns, "I have written down a number. The (x)th time I see Twitter's 'Whoops! Something went wrong!' page, I'm switching so something else for good." [Twitter]

Reaffirming Gawker's claim that the New York Times is just a fancy blog, the paper experienced a three-hour-long network outage Wednesday that screwed up the publishing schedule for the Thursday edition. It could be worse: They could be stuck using Google's Blogger, which — along with YouTube — is the worst offender for downtime among Alexa's top-20 sites. [Gawker]

Estimates pegged TD Ameritrade's initial security breach to, approximately, October 2006. Well, they were wrong. Network World got ahold of emails from a security expert to Ameritrade dating back to January 9, 2006. Valleywag commenter Snarkosaurus claims to have evidence that the online stock broker was hacked as early as December 2005. Not only does this mean Ameritrade was hacked almost two years ago, but the company has known about it for an equal span of time. The reason the company offered for not notifying the 6 million or so affected accounts sooner? It didn't know how the information was getting out, so there was nothing it could have done. If you work for Ameritrade security, apparently ignorance is bliss.

Be careful what you ask for. You may get it. MediaDefender had hoped to lure file sharers using a fake site. It's certainly drawn the attention of sophisticated hackers. The antipriacy organization has been hit twice by hackers since an initial breach spilled 6,000 of the company's emails onto the Web. As Wired News reports, hackers hit the database that holds the dummy files that MediaDefender floods file-sharing networks with — a tactic meant to discourage use of those networks to download music and videos. The second managed to scoop up a recorded phone conversation in which MediaDefender assures the New York attorney general's office of its security. (Photo by aussiegall)

Is it sheer pride that prohibits companies from admitting the fallibility of their data servers? TD Ameritrade is the latest in a string of security-breach deniers. Possibly hacked as early as October 2006, Ameritrade's servers divulged users' names, addresses, email accounts and account activity. When email accounts were pumped full of spam messages, a couple users sued Ameritrade in late May — indicating that there was a breach. Ameritrade delayed issuing an official release until last Friday, conveniently timed to beat a lawsuit that sought a court ordered release.

Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company most adept at preying on male insecurities, has come down with a bad case of zombies. For the past six months, its computers have, coincidentally, been spamming the Internet with unsanctioned advertisements for its erectile-dysfunction medication, Viagra. Apparently a group of hackers has taken control of some of the corporation's PCs — called "zombies" in computer-security parlance — to hawk penny stocks and fake Rolexes alongside Pfizer's own flagship product. According to researchers at security firm Support Intelligence, who tipped off Wired News, Pfizer doesn't even realize it has an infection. Or perhaps it's just figured out a sweet new marketing campaign. (Photo by Len Peralta)

At McGraw-Hill's business newsweekly, someone decided, apparently, to do some late-summer database cleaning. BusinessWeek accidentally updating its RSS feed with some really thrilling stories. Headlines include: "More news today than ever," "Headline bla bla," and "just another headline that we need to fill in." Subheads — known in the news business as "decks" — also suffered: "Deck bla Deck bla Deck bla," "But this time we are testing FedEx campaign handling," and "testing the pp9 ad."

Ever since Justin.tv moved in, Crystal Tower Apartments in San Francisco's Russian Hill neighborhood has gotten the reputation as a dorm for 20something startuppers. A recent elevator breakdown, now fixed, left some residents to hoof it all the way up the 12-story building. Justin.tv has moved out, but current residents include the entire staff of email startup Xobni and Web-page builder Weebly, as well as employees of Snipshot and Scribd. The connection? All four companies were backed by entrepreneur Paul Graham's Y Combinator incubator. And more are moving in soon, Weebly CEO David Rusenko says. The proximity is a bonus for the tightly networked group of companies — but the elevator episode should be a sobering reminder to all of them of what happens when your startup has a single point of failure.

The Australian government recently spent about $70 million to distribute Internet filter software so parents could save their children from the evils of online pornography. It took a student 30 minutes to crack the software. [Techdirt]

"Monster.com waited five days to tell its users about a security breach that resulted in the theft of confidential information from some 1.3 million job seekers," reports Reuters. It wasn't until after computer security firm Symantec issued a warning that Monster took action. If no one knows about it, it's apparently not a problem. [Boing Boing]

Poor Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The athletic and very identical twins are suing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over claims that he stole their idea for a college social network. Now, too, though, they're suffering much the same security woes as their better-known rival, and, if that's possible, not as gracefully. Just as Facebook had its source code leaked, someone has discovered that ConnectU, the comely twins' site, has major security flaws of its own. Flaws so obvious, says the engineer who discovered the flaw, that they beggar the imagination.

Mark Jarvis, the first chief marketing officer of computer maker Dell, perfected his art at Oracle: Deny, deny, deny, and when denials fail, spin, spin, spin. He boldly slashes at the branding and advertising strategies of Dell's past while outlining, with Oracular swagger, his new strategy for Dell. He says, of his own job, "It's not rocket science, funnily enough" — in a Wall Street Journal interview (subscription required). Unfortunately for Jarvis, the Journal ran a companion piece that paints a different picture: Jarvis's marketing rhetoric doesn't conform to the reality of Dell's production woes.

As an apology for its two-day absence from their lives, Skype is giving paying subscribers seven days of free service. Skype hopes that its "faithful," "love"-filled, relationship can be mended through the simple gesture of buying a gift. Flowers, candy, a contract credit — it's all the same, right?