At last there is a silver lining to this T-Mobile Sidekick disaster: you can get out of your contract.
As we reported yesterday, it appears that T-Mobile not only made Sidekick users go without their data for a week, they ended up completely losing everything.
Originally T-Mobile was offering a free month of data services as an apology for the week long outage, but now at least one person is reporting to Gizmodo that you can get out of your contract for free due to the data loss. According to the T-Mobile customer, they were offered a slightly discounted G1, a phone that runs on Google Android, told about BlackBerry units or apparently you can just leave the carrier all together.
The T-Mobile site is also currently showing all versions of the Sidekick as “Temporarily out of stock.”
No matter how you slice it, this was a disaster for T-Mobile and for their customers. While it is understandable that some consumers didn’t have their data backed up locally, what possible excuse is there for people who work professionally in the data industry to have not done so? One of the first rules of any upgrade is to back up your data, so why didn’t T-Mobile?
If I was a Sidekick user, I wouldn’t only be getting out of my contract, but leaving the carrier all together. (I was with T-Mobile for one 2-year contract from 2005 to 2007 … that was enough)
I have no clue why, but people sure do seem to want to call the day and date of email’s death.
Every so often someone comes up with the idea that sites like Facebook or Twitter are going to kill off email. I first wrote a story about this in July 2007, and I thought it was stupid then, but I think it is even stupider now.
The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece today saying that products like Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave are moving us away from email because we can be constantly connected. This is true to some extent, but horribly wrong in others.
My argument about Facebook replacing email has always been that it isn’t conducive to business communication. You have no way to back it up, you can’t attach files and corporations can’t control it. You will never see a Fortune 500 company saying, “Okay, no more email, all communication must now run through a third-party system that limits what we can do and how much control we have over it.” This is simply never going to happen.
As for Twitter … you have 140 characters to communicate in, can’t attach files, has had a spotty history with security and is far too public. Sure it is good for short communications between friends, but are you ever going to broker a deal for oil futures on it? No.
Google Wave is the newest weapon in this silly fight against email, and while it is still in “Preview” mode, you receive no notifications of when you have an update to a Wave to read and there is no way yet to access it while mobile. Sure these things may change as development move forward, but for now it is just an interesting tool for people to try out.
What I will agree with is that these services are killing the short, blurby style emails of “what are we doing tonight?”, “what do you want for dinner?”, etc, but the concept that they will completely kill off email is just silly. Email has been here for 40 years for a reason: it works.
Never let it be said that you shouldn’t back up your data.
After a week of issues, T-Mobile and Danger (a subsidiary of Microsoft) have announced that users of the Sidekick cell phone have had all their data lost. Apparently an upgrade was being performed on the network, and no one thought to make a backup before preceding. After the upgrade failed, all contacts, calendars, to-do lists and so on that were stored on the servers was erased.
Sidekick users who do not power down their phones, pull the batteries for a reset or let their phones run out of power will still be able to backup the data locally on their computers, but if no backup is done, you will lose all of your information fairly quickly.
While storing data in a “cloud” is always convenient, this is exactly why you don’t want to rely on it 100%. It never hurts to save your data locally as well as off-site.
T-Mobile released the statement below, and we are sorry to hear this has happened to so many people.
T-MOBILE AND MICROSOFT/DANGER STATUS UPDATE ON SIDEKICK DATA DISRUPTION
Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:
T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption. We appreciate your patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability, and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers.
Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips at the T-Mobile Sidekick Forums (http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick ). We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.
In addition, we plan to communicate with you on Monday (Oct. 12) the status of the remaining issues caused by the service disruption, including the data recovery efforts and the Download Catalog restoration which we are continuing to resolve. We also will communicate any additional tips or suggestions that may help in restoring your content.
We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers’ personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.
We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.
Once again, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger regret any and all inconvenience this matter has caused.
Move over Kindle, Barnes & Noble wants a piece of that ebook reader pie.
A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal (registration required) broke the news that well-known bookseller Barnes & Noble was about to launch its own ebook reader. This is no huge surprise as the company launched an ebook store back in July, and it has been rumored for some time that the company wanted to take on Amazon’s Kindle.
This all has remained rumor since the announcement as the company wouldn’t comment, but The New York Times is now reporting that Barnes & Noble has a press event for an unknown announcement set for October 20th. It would make sense to launch this new item before the all important holiday shopping season, but don’t get too excited quite yet.
Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable, my former employers, spoke with a Barnes & Noble representative at the CITA show in San Diego this week, and he confirmed the device, but with a drastically different release date.
According to this short interview, the device isn’t due until spring 2010, and no price is known, but the big news here is that it will be a color screen.
I have long said a color screen would be the game changer when it came to ebook readers as it means that they will now be able to handle textbooks with ease. The only question remaining now is the price. Some rumors indicate there will be low-end and high-end models, but if the price is still too high for your average consumer, this will remain a niche product. If they can get it down to a manageable price, get it into universities due to its color screen, and you could have a major hit product on your hands.
While all the news about Microsoft has focused on Windows 7 lately, there is some interesting stuff coming down the pipeline for Office 2010.
Microsoft Office has long reigned as the king of productivity software, but while it has been the primary choice of users for years, Microsoft still had a free option that pretty much everyone wondered why it still existed: Microsoft Works. Sure it did some things Office did, but it did all of them poorly. Well, now Works is going to the great software Heaven in the sky, and is being replaced by Office Starter.
The new Office Starter option will come pre-loaded on new computers, and will offer you the chance to use reduced-functionality versions of Word and Excel. These versions will allow you to create, view and edit documents, but that will be the extent of it. For as long as you choose to use the Starter version of the software it will be ad-supported. If you should choose to upgrade to Office Home & Student 2010, Office Home & Business 2010, or Office Professional 2010, you will be able to purchase a Product Key Card that will let you do so. This will be a card sold in retail stores like all of those gift cards you see now, meaning far less packaging and no need for an actual CD-ROM. A rather environmentally friendly idea we must say.
The Starter version of Office will only come on new computers, but if you have a current computer and want to try Office, you will be able to download a copy now to do that. It will also allow you to install it separately from any other version of Office you may already have installed so that you may compare them side-by-side on your system.
Watch out world, it looks like Microsoft may finally be getting more consumer friendly.
Even though Microsoft isn’t releasing Windows 7 until Oct. 22nd, it seems that the company is already hard at work on Windows 8 and Windows 9.
According to Ars Technica, the first serious hints came out of a software engineer’s LinkedIn profile. Once he realized people were figuring out that his brief mention of working with 128 bit processing meant Windows 8 was probably going to double the current systems processing power, he took that info out of his profile.
The cat is out of the bag though, and Windows 8 News has even gotten Robert Morgan, the engineer in question to agree to an interview since there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Before any one gets too worried though, figured you have 3 -4 years before Windows 8 shows up on store shelves, so if you skipped Vista to wait for Windows 7, don’t go thinking you can wait for the next iteration.
Confused when you went to Google today? Don’t worry, every one was.
Google has a long history of playing with the logo on their search page to honor various little known anniversaries and holidays, and the one for today is no different. 57 years ago today, the ubiquitous barcode was invented. If you head over to OnlineBarcodeReader.com you’ll be able to decrypt the image, and all it says is “Google”, nothing insidious!
If you want to make you own barcode for just about anything, head over to Barcodes Inc. and you can make your very own in just a matter of seconds.
Those dastardly phishers have been up to their tricks again, and this time it seems they reeled in over 30,000 email passwords.
The BBC is reporting that a phishing attack first reported yesterday, and thought to be limited to Hotmail, has actually proven to be even larger than first suspected. The account holders that were hit in the latest attack came from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast and Earthlink.
The phishers used fake web sites to lure people into using their passwords to “log in”, but in actuality they were capturing those passwords for nefarious uses. The total list of the captured accounts and passwords were later posted on a web site for hackers to download. The list has since been removed, but it is highly probable that multiple copies were downloaded before that action was taken.
Google was the quickest to respond, and has pinpointed the affected Gmail accounts. All of those account holders have been contacted and instructed to change their passwords after having a forced reset done on them by Google.
A Google spokesperson said to the BBC:
We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts. As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.
This is not viewed as a security breach by any of the companies as in all of the cases the users had to take an action to use their passwords.
The Federal Trade Commission has officially adopted new rules that could send the entire tech blogosphere into a tailspin.
The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has officially adopted some new guidelines for disclosure of “material connections” that they have been promising for some time now. The odd part is that they seem to impact everyone but print media.
The part of the press release that just makes this whole thing a mess is as follows:
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.
Where are the newspapers and magazines in all of this? Companies send out “review units” for products all the time to both bloggers and print media: sometimes they request they be returned, other times they don’t. So why are only bloggers being mentioned specifically in this? True, the entire new guidelines also cover celebrity endorsements, but the only written word people covered are bloggers. And if we are caught doing a review without disclosing a “material connection”, we face fines of up to $11,000.
There are some other rather large questions left by these new rules.
Will we have to go back and add disclosures to old posts?
Imagine a site like Engadget or Gizmodo having to go back and go through all of their old posts. This probably won’t happen, but if it did, it would be the biggest mess ever. (For the record, StarterTech has received exactly two items as a “freebie” to review thus far, that was a Chumby and another item that was so horrible that we skipped reviewing it.)
Why is print media not covered by this?
How did “old media” get off completely free in this? Print journalists also receive “freebies”, and have been taken on many “junkets” (i.e. paid trips) to cover stories, but somehow only bloggers are covered by this? The only difference is where we publish.
What form must the disclosures take?
Does it have to be lengthy? Can we write just one disclosure and link back to it? What points must it cover?
What will happen if I am sent a product to review that is to appear on a blog based in another country?
The FTC is a body governing only the United States, but the Internet is global. I happen to work for two blogs based in other countries. Let me give you the scenario for one of them: BLORGE.com is based in Australia, so technically it doesn’t fall under the FTC, but would I? One of the other writers at BLORGE is based in the United Kingdom, so obviously he doesn’t fall under the rules, so would I have to disclose information, but he wouldn’t? That would kind of look odd on the site.
What if a blogger lives elsewhere, but the server their blog is hosted on is inside the United States? Technically the FTC can’t do anything to them, but maybe they would shut down the blog?
Questions, Questions, Questions
Why now? What has so drastically changed that bloggers must now disclose everything we do? Don’t get me wrong, these new guidelines will have little to no impact on StarterTech at this time due to us not being on enough review lists, but this is something we were going to focus on more heavily in 2010. At this time though, this is purely written from a view point of, “you have to be kidding me.”
There is a severe shortage of four-letter Twitter names, so if you happen to own one, and you want to raise money for charity, why don’t you auction it off?
Drew Olanoff, the man behind #BlameDrewsCancer that we wrote about a while back, appears to be winning his battle with Hodgkins Lymphoma, but that doesn’t mean he is going to give up his fighting the scourge known as cancer just because he’s beaten it. So, what do you do when you want to raise money to continue the fight? You hold a charity auction, of course. What do you put up for auction? Your name … well, at least if your name happens to also be a highly desirable four-letter Twitter handle such as @drew.
Mr. Olanoff has opted to auction off his Twitter name with all the funds going to the Livestrong Foundation, Lance Armstrong’s organization that fights for cancer research and support. By simply placing the hashtag #drewbid in a Tweet, you can place a bid for the user name (followers not included), but be mindful that the minimum bid is $10,000.
… well, it was $10,000, and then that damned Drew Carey from The Price is Right had to step in and take it straight to $25,000.
You see, Mr. Carey got stuck with the unfortunate user name of @drewfromTV, so of course he’d like to have @drew, and luckily he has the money to back it up. However, Mr. Carey is willing to bid against himself it seems.
See, the auction for @drew ends at 12 AM PST on Nov. 9th, and while Mr. Carey is already willing to pay $25,000, he has promised to up it to $100,000 if he can get 100,000 followers to his current user name by that time. About 15 hours before this post he was at 13,000 followers, and he is now up to over 20,000. All you need to do to help is go to his Twitter page and click “Follow”, and you can help him get to 100,000 followers, and in turn raise $100,000 for cancer research.
So, if you have a Twitter account, what are you waiting for? Go follow @drewfromTV and help raise money to fight cancer!
At last there is a silver lining to this T-Mobile Sidekick disaster: you can get out of your contract.
I have no clue why, but people sure do seem to want to call the day and date of email’s death.
Move over Kindle, Barnes & Noble wants a piece of that ebook reader pie.
While all the news about Microsoft has focused on Windows 7 lately, there is some interesting stuff coming down the pipeline for Office 2010.
Windows 7 is so yesterday.
Those dastardly phishers have been up to their tricks again, and this time it seems they reeled in over 30,000 email passwords.
The Federal Trade Commission has officially adopted new rules that could send the entire tech blogosphere into a tailspin.
There is a severe shortage of four-letter Twitter names, so if you happen to own one, and you want to raise money for charity, why don’t you auction it off?
