I gotta say, if there was a possible way to fuck up the marketing of the NHL Winter Classic, the various outlets found a way to do so.

I should not have seen empty seats in the stands. But, when you’re setting extortionate purchase-terms for season ticket holders (you had to buy tickets to all three WC events if you wanted to be allowed to buy the “main event” tickets), you pretty much guarantee that a significant chunk of the tickets will go to scalpers ticket purchasing services and package promoters. And when those outlets are charging as much for a pair of seats as an entire season ticket plan, you’re gonna have a hard time filling all the seats.

Back in November, when the NHL Shop started the Winter Classic marketing blitz, I’d ordered a pair of “authentic” Winter Classic jerseys. I’d figured “since I can’t reasonably afford to go to the event, I can splurge on jerseys for my wife and me”. So, I put in the order for the customized jerseys - a Hartnell/19 for Donna and a Timonen/44 jersey for myself. The order sheet said to expect fulfillment around Decemer 15th. At the time, that was a nearly three-week wait, but, “whatever”.

Christmas came and went and still no jerseys. So, I called up the NHL Shop to find out where the hell they were. I was told, “they haven’t arrived at the warehouse, yet, but we’re expecting them in soon enough to have them to you in time for the game.” This was not at all reassuring, but, “what can you do?”

The week of the Winter Classic, still no box with jerseys were to be found at my door. So, I called them again. “They still haven’t arrived at the warehouse”. I was a touch incredulous at this and pointed out that there wasn’t much time for them to get them and get them to us. I was told how sorry they were for the delay but that there was nothing to be done.

The Winter Classic came and went. Jerseys never arrived and no indication of what the fuck had happened to them showed up in my email. Yesterday, I called to find out “whut the fuck.” The person I got hold of gave me the same story of “they still haven’t arrived at the warehouse.” This time, however, they told me I could call back the following week to open an investigation or I could cancel the order. Having been waiting nearly two months for this disappointment, I told the CSR that I wanted to just cancel the order since they were well late and they were able to give me no indication of when or if I might ever see them. She canceled the order and gave me a cancellation number and told me to expect cancellation confirmation to show up in my Inbox (no such confirmation ever came). She then asked if there was anything else she could do for me. I took this opportunity to point out that she and the NHL had, to date, done nothing for me, so how could she do “more”. I also pointed out that their order fulfillment was abysmal and that I’d never bother to try to use their service again (and, to anyone reading this, I’d advise a similar path). She gave another useless apology before we concluded the call.

Today, I spoke to someone that sells NHL merchandise for a living. I was informed that he’d only been able to get a very limited quantity of them and had sold out several days ago. Additionally, the manufacturer, who clearly had a hot commodity on their hands, wasn’t going to make any more (and, looking at shop.nhl.com, today, even they aren’t advertising them any more).

I am, to say the least, a touch incredulous at how stupid this is. I mean, they were selling these jerseys for $350 per unit. Rather than cranking out more to sell, they opted to discontinue them and sell only the much cheaper “replica” and “Premier” jerseys. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll hear how problematic mechandise forgeries and the like are to these companies (I’ve already seen the “don’t settle for cheap immitations from Asia” on some sites selling the Indonesian made “Premier” jerseys). Yet, when they have the opportunity to sell things that people want and are demonstrably willing to pay for, they choose not to. That leaves people with the choice: of be price-gouged by third parties that bought big, early so they could price-gouge later; settle for lesser goods from “legitimate sources” or, since you can’t get the thing you really wanted in the first place, buy fakes. If the recording and movie industries have shown us anything, it’s that people will either do without, or will resort to piracy to get the things they want.

Stupid.

All I can say is, “fuck you, NHL” and “fuck you, Reebok”. I hope the lot of them die in a goddamned fire.

I am a StumbleUpon user. It’s an unbelievably efficient time-suck. Any time you press that Stumble! button, you get taken to some random page that, four times out of five, appeals to you. Granted there’s a crapton of junk. And, sometimes the things you get, you’re not really sure “what interest did I click that I got this page??”

I think, somewhere, I must have clicked some mislabled “conspiracy theory” interest button. Frequently, I get Stumbles that are purportedly factual, but, if you question the content, there’s little corroborating content available. And, no, I don’t consider other unknown/fringe sources to be either reliable or corroborating.

Yesterday, I stumbled a Mashable article about DHS/ICE supposedly seizing a bunch of piracy-oriented web sites. The content of the article struck me as odd, because, the last I’d heard from sources like EFF (and similar sites), COICA had not been passed by the last Congress or Senate, nor had it made it to Obama’s desk for signing. It was my understanding that COICA was being formulated because the federal government currently couldn’t act as the various IP-holders’ (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) proxy as they’d never been delegated the power.

The Mashable article did reference a NY Times article, but that was the closest to a “known” news site I could find. The rest were various left-field sites whose coverage consisted mostly of quoting the Mashable and NY Times articles (and with miles-long “comments” sections). I’ve yet to see anything from EFF - at their website, via their FaceBook group or even their Twitter feed - on the subject. I’ve not even seen anything posted, yet, by Declan McCullagh. Both sources tend to be pretty on top of and vocal about news stories in this vein.

Absent the other usual suspects’ mention, I became suspicious. I mean, while the TSA and other organizations frequently trample on the 4th Amendment, they at least try to make it look like they aren’t. And, when they do, EFF, ACLU and other organizations are generally pretty vocal and public with their opposition. Secondly, governmental seizures are usually the domain of the DoJ and FBI, not DHS and certainly not ICE. DHS is usually “terrorism” oriented and ICE is generally immigration oriented. Piracy-enabling websites wouldn’t really seem to logically fall under either of those domains.So, I started digging.

First of all, the sites that were supposedly taken down by ICE are all redirected to seizedservers.com. This seems odd, to me. I mean, if these were truly the result of governmental actions, wouldn’t they have redirected to seizedservers.GOV, instead. So, I poked about a bit more.

I did an IP lookup on the seizedservers.com web site. Using `nslookup`, I found that the IP associated with that site was “74.81.170.109”. Next, I queried the ARIN to see who owned that IP address. The results indicated that the IP address was owned by a Carolina-based ISP.

Curiouser and curiouser: why would the IP be owned by a Charlotte-area ISP rather than some government agency. I mean, it’s not like the Federal government’s short on IP addresses they could delegate to DHS or ICE. After all, both Senate.Gov and House.Gov are run off of Federal IP ranges. And, yes, I get that many of the Federal government’s public webhosting is done through external providers (I used to work for a site that hosted USPS’s stuff). However, most of the sites I’ve done lookups against that are externally hosted, seem to be hosted by Akamai, these days. For example, both the White House and the main DHS web site seemed to be hosted by them. ICE, as a sub-department of DHS would, logically, have similar hosting arrangements. 

Lastly, seizedservers.com was only registered on November 24th of this year and just days prior to the supposed domain seizures. I’ve done a lot of work with governmental groups over the years. None of them go from “just registered” to actively working in less than a week (usually, you’re talking months, quarters or even years).

I realize I could easily be wrong, but none of it seems to “add up”. To me, it looks more like it’s either a hoax to get the file-sharing community up in arms or that the sites got their domains stolen (by “hackers”, not the US government). Can anyone provide definitive proof that this is “for real”. It seems like a pretty big story for the mainstream news outlets and the various rights and privacy groups to be asleep at the wheel on.