Tag: MISTAKE

Last week, the U.S. Government triumphantly shut down several domain names linked to counterfeit goods and child pornography. But it also shut down about 84,000 other sites that, it turns out, were completely legal. As part of its ongoing 'Operation Save Our Children' campaign, the Department of Justice and Homeland Security's ICE office recently obtained a seizure warrant from a District ...

A Zurich-based photoblogger named Mirco Wilhelm is really, really upset today, because Flickr accidentally deleted his account, along with some 4,000 of his online photographs. The mishap occurred a few days ago, after Wilhelm sent in a support ticket to complain about a user who was posting photos that appeared to be stolen. The Flickr staff member who received the complaint mixed up the two ...

We've seen Google Maps misplace cities and mislead pedestrians, but we never thought the navigational service's occasional inaccuracies could spark an international conflict -- until now. It all began when Nicaraguan military commander Eden Pastora sent a group of troops into a region around San Juan Lake, near the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Upon arriving, the soldiers promptly ...

Share As we know all too well here at Switched, everyone makes mistakes. Not everyone, however, makes mistakes quite as far-reaching as was the blunder that private DNA-testing company 23andMe recently made. On Friday, the company announced that "a number of new 23andMe customer samples were incorrectly processed" by the third-party lab that conducts the DNA tests, and confessed that "up to" ...

When Amazon.com went into Kindle devices across the country to delete unauthorized copies of 'Animal Farm' and '1984' by George Orwell, the irony was certainly not lost on users. A Big Brother move, no doubt, especially because no one was informed of the invasion of privacy -- and customers thought the reclaimed content had been legally purchased. Amazon did issue refunds, but the blogosphere ...

Here's another tale of e-mail messages gone awry that ought to teach you to be careful the next time you hit the "send" button. A lawyer for pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly mistakenly sent an important e-mail to a New York Times reporter whose name is similar to that of another lawyer working with her on a billion dollar settlement between the drug company and the U.S. government. Eli Lilly is ...

Let this be a lesson to you: spell check, spell check, spell check. We can't say it enough. We're not spelling snobs. We don't even care if other people think you're a doofus. We just want to save you the pain and humiliation of losing $500,000 due to a bonehead-spelling mistake -- something one poor sap recently experienced on the mean streets of eBay through the sale of a priceless bottle of ...

Earlier this week, a particular ATM machine in Queenstown, NZ, suddenly became the city's hottest hangout, with lines of up to 20 people formed around it at all times of the day and night. Had this machine temporarily suspended those annoying ATM fees for a day? No, even better: It was accidentally spitting out $20 bills instead of $10 bills. A contractor hired to maintain the machine had ...