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1&1 quick to use debt collectors
Domain name and hosting provider 1&1 was quick to fire out threats from debt collectors to both myself and a friend recently.
Like any tech-heads, we've both got hosting packages and domain names bought from several companies including 34SP, CWSHosting, UK2, Low cost names and more. Most companies send out emails notifying you that a domain name is up for renewal and that if you don't act immediately then you'll lose the domain name.
In my experience (and my friend who suffered the same fate), 1&1 is different because I didn't get a notice email (or phone call) saying my domain was up for renewal. Instead the company just renewed it and, once they realised my debit card had expired, billed me via post afterwards.
Before I'd rung them and said I'd only wanted the domain name for the first year and I wouldn't pay for the second, 1&1 hired debt collectors who sent me an additional bill.
After some pleading with 1&1 customer support, who claimed I'd signed a rolling contract, it pulled its debt collectors off me but only after I'd paid for the renewal of my domain name.
It seems, in my opinion, a rather rash way to do business. But the market is extremely competitive and I'll show my discontent with my wallet and buy domains elsewhere from now on.
Will Femtocells revolutionise triple-play packages?
Mobile operators like Vodafone will bundle ADSL broadband, a femtocell router and two mobile phones by the end of the year, speculates femtocell-maker Thomson.
Sound interesting? Perhaps not at face value but femtocell routers, like Thomson’s new TG870, do so much more than just telephony and mobile broadband.
Femtocells are little 3G mobile phone masks and the premise is they will sit side-by-side with Wifi routers in the home, giving your mobile phone excellent coverage indoors. If you make a phone call through it, the call gets routed through your ADSL to the mobile phone operator’s “femtocell aggregator” which is plugged into the tradition phone network.
Sweden and Turkey in hacking war
A hacking war has broken out between Swedish and Turkish hackers after several newspapers in Sweden published a caricature of the prophet Muhammed. Around five thousand websites have been affected, including those of Linköping Cathedral and Gothenburg Council, according to the English-language Swedish newspaper The Local.
Swedish hackers are reported to have retaliated by breaking into Turkish forums and posting pornographic images of Muhammad and Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish state.
Stefan B Grinneby, head of the Swedish IT Incident Centre (SITIC), has asked local hackers to exercise restraint to prevent an escalation.
Inevitably security firms are using the battle as a dire warning for companies to beef up their protection. Geoff Sweeney, chief technology officer of Tier-3 said companies can learn a lot from the methodology of the hackers, and claimed "more advanced" measures like behavioural analysis offered better protection because it provided a safety net against unknown as well as known threats.
Watch YouTube on Google Earth
Google has just added a new feature to Google Earth that adds a YouTube video layer. YouTube users simply need to provide location information for their videos and permit embedding. This will then let Google Earth users see a clickable tag for the videos appear in the correct geographical location. the video runs in an embedded window within Google Earth.
The new layer will automatically appear in the 'Featured Content' section of Google Earth the next time you open the application.
Wimax nomads will skirt the law and create a charging headache
So, the good news is that Wimax services will start to rollout in Britain. The bad news is that we don’t know exactly when (though we can assume it will be a matter of months) nor how much they will cost.
The people from Freedom4, formerly known as Pipex Wireless, haven’t yet worked these things out themselves, judging from yesterday’s launch press conference.
The uncertainty starts with the company’s licence to use its precious spectrum. Cliff Mason, manager of Ofcom’s mobile and broadband wireless policy team, pointed out that the terms were agreed 13 years ago when the technological climate was very different from today.
24Mb broadband from Newnet (if you live in Portsmouth)
Newnet has announced its 24Mb broadband package will be debut in Portsmouth next month.
Of course, unless you're transferring a hell of a lot of data the actual usefulness of anything above 8Mb is questionable. What's more interesting is the 1Mb upload speed - allowing devices such as home network cameras to provide smooth video feeds etc.
If you're confused why the folk in Portsmouth are getting special treatment, Newnet is giving priority to areas where it has the most customers - which makes sense.
Sign up for a year, and the cheapest package is just £11.49/month - however this really is just a headline grabbing rate.
You can buy pre-paid additional gigabytes if you think you might go over the cap (and surely anyone requiring a 24Mb service would do so in a day or two) at a cost of 70p for 1GB. However, these come in 10GB blocks, so you'll have to splash out at least £7.
If you go over the cap without having pre-paid for extra gigabytes you'll be charged £1.30 per GB in 3GB blocks - so that's £3.90 each time you go over the cap.
Still, the Home M 24 rate seems good value at £18.49/month with a 12GB cap.
EQO mobile does mobile phone VoIP without Wi-Fi
Eqo mobile is offering a slightly different way for mobile phone uses to call abroad cheaply.
It first launched its VoIP service in 2006 but it's been refined and changed and now works on all java enabled mobile phones.
To use the service you make a national phone call. In the UK's case it's an 0208-London number but this is, of course, different for different countries. The recipient of the phone call also (but unknowingly) calls an exchange in his/her country.
This all sounds complicated, but the magic bit is that it's easy as pie because it's all done in software.
Eqo's software negotiates between the caller and the recipient so that there are no numbers involved and it works like a normal mobile phone conversation would do.
The magic bit is Eqo's software that looks like instant messaging software, with a contacts list you can call. It'll also let you speak to your msn messenger and aim contacts too.
Eqo mobile won't charge you for Eqo – Eqo calls, but it does charge you for calls from an Eqo enabled phone to a non Eqo mobile phone or landline. Users are also billed for national telephone charges by their mobile phone operator separately.
The problems with this service are obvious though; it's not for landline phones, it won't work for national calls and an Eqo-enabled mobile phone must pay national rate telephone charges even if they are the recipient of a conversation.
Paying to receive a call is never popular with anyone and is likely to confuse people.
Windows Mobile support will come in the next two months and Eqo is looking to expand to 40 support countries. Every county needs to be specifically enabled with a VoIP-analogue converter before it can be used for Eqo calls.
New Opera mobile phone web-browser brings Wii functionality
Opera has released a new mobile phone browser that can zoom in and out of a page like on the Nintendo Wii.
Combined with a cheap mobile phone it is the "iPhone for the poor man today", according to Opera's vice president of engineering, Christen Krogh.
This is because phones using the browser will be able to surf the net faster than Apple's iPhone can, despite the iPhone using relatively high-bandwidth Wi-Fi to transfer data.
To back up his claims, Krogh demonstrated a GPRS enabled phone downloading a website at a comparable rate to a video of the iPhone doing the same when Steve Jobs demonstrated it in January.
Opera Mini 4 uses server-side compression techniques that render websites for a small screen on Opera's servers before sending them to a mobile phone at 5-20 per cent of the original size.
Pages have their original layout plus there's support for Flash 7 animations. Krogh said transfer times are "a bit faster as well" compared with the Mini 3.
Opera Mini 4 is available today as a free beta download. A final version of the software will be available over the summer.
The company is also proud to announce that Opera Mini, present on 15 million unique phones, is more widely used than Apple's Safari browser… in the Ukraine.
Perhaps Opera's sniping at Apple is because it sees the iPhone as a threat, since it's a closed device that probably won't ever feature Opera's software.
How to make and take web calls on your mobile phone
We have two products in for review that offer a home or small-office version of the gateways many cheap-call vendors use to undercut the big telcos. The Mobigater, from a Bulgarian firm of the same name, and the IP Voicelink for IPDrum, both allow you to make and receive web calls on a mobile phone.
You insert SIM card from an operator of your choice, which gives the device is a phone number. You can call that number to make an international web call; conversely any web call to the number can be diverted to your mobile. If you are always ringing your mum in, say, Kuala Lumpa, you could have a gateway at either end of the line.
The Mobigator is restricted to Skpe calls but the IP Voicelink has a SIP option.
So can you make this cheaper than using one of the cut-price operators? Well some operators allow you to call one designated number for free, and all offer deals bundling hundreds of minutes for local calls, so you probably can.
We've been slow to review the Mobigater due to factors beyond our control but we will be looking at both devices in the next few days.
Website offers 700 TV channels
Our attention has been drawn to Viewmy.tv, a website that aggregates over 700 TV channels from around the world.
Although there's the usual spate of shopping and religious channels, there's also a lot of quality content including BBC News 24, Aljazeera, BBC Parliament, Bloomberg, MTV, CNN… the list goes on and on.
The London based company claims channels are regularly monitored for stream availability and quality, and I've certainly found picture very good.
All the website does it pull together IPTV streams that are available on individual websites; viewmy.tv even provides the individual channel urls it uses, along with some basic HTML code so you can embed each individual channel into your own website. Most channels are formatted in Windows Media Video 9 codec at 300-700kbits/sec and should be viewable on handheld devices.
The site launched some months ago and remains as a 'beta' site. The company states: "Zero ad clutter and the absence of annoying banners and text ads means that the site not only looks sophisticated, but is straightforward and easy to navigate, a quality that attracts visitors to the site and encourages them to register."
Trying to be a social networking site is probably a step to far, but it's an excellent progression for IPTV - maybe it could be integrated into set-top boxes, like the Evesham iPlayer, so non-tech heads can enjoy TV from around the world.
