Gigaom reported on Samsung TVs inserting ads into third party content.

Thought you could watch that video on your local hard drive without ads? Think again: A number of owners of Samsung’s smart TVs are reporting this week that their TV sets started to interrupt their movie viewing with Pepsi ads, which seem to be dynamically inserted into third-party content.

“Every movie I play 20-30 minutes in it plays the pepsi ad, no audio but crisp clear ad. It has happened on 6 movies today,” a user reported on Reddit, where a number of others were struggling with the same problem.

You pay for your device but you are forced to watch advertisements. If Samsung are earning from the ads, shouldn’t they be giving away the TV for free? Watch out for Samsung phones that forces you to watch advertisements.

Wired reported on Comcast renaming a customer SuperBitch Bauer.

Yesterday Mary Bauer received her Comcast bill in the mail. But the 63-year-old Chicago area resident says she’s not going to open it. That’s because someone at Comcast switched her name on the bill, addressing it instead to “SuperBitch Bauer.”

Bauer has been having problems with Comcast for months. As she related her story to Chicago’s WGN television station, she’s had a lot of service and billing issues. Technicians have been dispatched to her place a whopping 39 times, and she recently got into it with telephone support after her bills stopped arriving.

This comes after Comcast renamed a customer Asshole Brown.

John Gruber shared an amusing claim chowder of the day.

Grartner predicted back in 2011:

Imagine a world where Windows Phone is more popular than Apple’s iPhone.

That may just sound like Steve Ballmer’s fantasy, but a recent Gartner report claims that it may very well happen by 2015, thanks to a boost from Nokia as Microsoft’s mobile partner.

The prediction is far from crazy: I’ve argued in the past that Microsoft will doggedly fight to reclaim its mobile relevance, and it could very well achieve that with Nokia being the premiere Windows Phone 7 device maker.

John Gruber wrote about Christopher Dawson of ZDNet writing on the lack of Flash support on iOS.

Dawson:

I give Apple a year until they cave. Android tablets will just be too cool and too useful for both entertainment and enterprise applications if they don’t.

YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video instead of Flash.

Ben Thompson wrote on Stratechery about bad assumptions.

And yet, the perception that Apple is somehow hanging on by the skin of their teeth persists. I was speaking to someone about Apple’s particularly excellent China results this afternoon, and was struck at how their questions were so focused on threats to Apple – “How will Apple respond to Xiaomi” for example. This is in stark contrast to the way most think about a company like Google, where their dominance in whatever field they choose to enter is assumed, just as Microsoft’s was a decade ago. Apple, though, is always a step away from catastrophe.

It’s difficult to overstate just how absurd this is, but here’s my best attempt: last quarter Apple’s revenue was downright decimated by the strengthening U.S. dollar; currency fluctuations reduced Apple’s revenue by 5% – a cool $3.73 billion dollars. That, though, is more than Google made in profit last quarter ($2.83 billion). Apple lost more money to currency fluctuations than Google makes in a quarter. And yet it’s Google that is feared, and Apple that is feared for.

To quote a comment I came across: Apple has been feared for since 1987, but people still assume the worst.

Wired reported on Comcast renaming a customer Asshole Brown for trying to cancel his subscription.

Consider the case of Ricardo Brown. After Brown’s wife had a disagreement with the cable company recently, Comcast started sending him monthly statements under the name “Asshole Brown.”

Comcast employees revealed that the company values sales above customer service. Comcast admitted that their retention specialists are trained to make it easy for customers to choose to stay instead of leaving the service.

Changing the customer’s name to a rude name on an official statement is a new low.