I wasn’t planning on starting the new year with a complaint, but allow me to vent about Yahoo’s horrible customer support. I’ve been using Yahoo Music to load songs onto my iriver MP3 player. Until it stopped working last week. I followed all the instructions about re-acquiring DRM licenses and resetting various things. Nothing worked (though I ended up cursing once again the idiocy of copy-protection that punishes paying customers with this kind of nonsense – it’s enough to make me want to pirate music). Finally, I decided to contact tech support. They make you fill out a long form listing all the details of what went wrong. At the end I hit send and got an error message telling me to enable ActiveX. Since I’m using Firefox, this makes no sense. So I switched over to IE, reluctantly installed their Active X control, filled out the form again, hit send and the ActiveX thingy started scanning my computer – I assume to gather information to send back to their support (an explanation would have been nice). Then after a while it stopped and told me it failed to gather all the required info. So now what! Am I supposed to contact support for the broken support form? Apparently this hideous piece of support software is made by a company called Kana. What a mess. As a former Yahoo employee this kind of stuff makes me cringe.