While you probably won’t be surprised to learn you are overpaying for your text messages, you may be surprised by just how much you really are.

The New York Times has taken a look in to the Senate antitrust subcommittee’s investigation of text messaging rates, and it is a scary result to be sure.  While the main focus of the investigation has been to determine why text messaging rates have doubled over the past three years, it seems that even $.01 would be too much to pay for a text.

According to a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Srinivasan Keshav, text messaging costs are too minuscule to even be calculated.  This is because he reveals that text messages transmit in an area known as “the control channel” which is essential to the operation of a wireless network, and this also attributes to why text messages are kept to 160 characters so they don’t interfere with the operation of the network itself.  In short, so long as the network is running, text messages are going to pass through a channel that needs to be running any way which means the companies are not paying anything extra to transmit your message.

So when you pay $.20 on a pay-as-you-go plan, the phone companies are making essentially $.20.  Unlimited text plans may look appealing, but they are also pretty much pure profit.

The government is going to continue to look in to this, but I am certainly going to be groaning a little louder each month when I pay my wireless bill.

Hotlinking, something we first discussed back in June of 2008, is something you might expect from smaller blogs, but not one of the best known web sites on the Web.

Founded by Harry Knowles in 1996, Ain’t It Cool News has grown to be a leading source of movie news and gossip, but it has always had a bit of a amateur feel to it, and this feeling is still coming through.  While perusing the article “Harry’s Picks For The Top Ten Films of 2008!!!“, I noticed the image you see to the right.  What was supposed to be an image from the movie The Wrestler was replaced with an image built specifically to thrawt people who hotlink images from the specific site.

For those who don’t remember what hotlinking is, I will quote what I said in the original article:

Hotlinking, or remote linking, is the act of using a file hosted on someone else’s web server on another site without their permission.

In short, it is a shady practice, and particuraly reprehensible if you are running a successful site.

This is not the first time I have seen similar actions from this particular site as back in 2006 they were hotlinking a site I am friendly with called BlogD, run by a man in Japan named Luis.  He detailed his battle with Ain’t It Cool News as it was happening, and all told they hit him for 1.5 GB in file transfers, a hefty sum for any personal blog.  If he had been close to his bandwidth allocation for that month, it would have ended up costing him money.   I checked other imaes in the same article I took the screenshot from, and all of them were hotlinked from various sites from around the Internet.

Seeing as it has been two years since I first learned of them doing this, I am shocked to discover they are still doing it.  This is not something any website should partake in, especially one that is a money making site that is a leader in its specialty niche.

Take a valuable lesson from this that it is not a good idea for any site to do this, and especially one that can be embarrassed by being a big name Web site stealing bandwidth from sites much smaller than itself.

“I can help you with that, just let me have your password and I’ll be able to take care of that straight away for you.”

As hard as it may be to believe, people will just go ahead and give someone their password after being asked such a question.  After you’ve gone through the trouble of picking a strong password, it would be a shame to waste it by just giving it away to someone.

It is amazing how often this actually comes up online, even after this many years of the Internet being a popular past time for people.  So here are a few do’s and don’ts of online password safety.

Do’s

• Make sure you went to a web site by typing in the address yourself, and not clicking on a link in an email
• Make sure the site is secure

Don’ts

• Click on links in emails that then ask you for your password
• Give your password out to anyone in a chat room
• Give it to a friend so they can help you out with something
• Give out over the phone

Basically, treat passwords like you would anything like your passport or social security number, don’t just tell it to anyone on a whim.  If you are curious what prompted this,  I actually saw someone in a game chat room tonight trying to get someone else’s password, so it does still happen.

Be careful out there!

Now that you’re recovered from your Christmas dinner stupor, now is the time to hunt for those after Christmas bargains.

With the economy not in the best of shape, retailers did not have the sales success they had hoped for during the sales period leading up to the 25th.  It appears that starting today all of the major retailers will be having enormous sales to help make up some of the lost difference, and this can only benefit people looking for deals on electronics.  To give you an idea of how severe these discounts will be, some people are now referring to it as “Black Friday 2″.

Circuit City

It is well known that Circuit City is in financial trouble, so make doubly sure not to purchase an extended warranty through them.  For outright purchases, they should have some amazing deals across all over their product lines such as HDTVs, computers, video cameras, video games and more.

Target

The sales at Target will begin on the 26th and be in every department, and they have no set end date, but will be on a “while supplies last” format.  Expect to find heavy discounts in DVDs and HDTVs.

Walmart

Apparently Walmart is going to be having huge sales, but they are hiding the details pretty close to the vest. The only thing that seems certain is the sales will be both for in-store and online, and there will be a heavy focus on HDTVs.  It looks like the sale will begin on Sunday the 28th.

Make sure to check all of your favorite retailers to see what kind of sales they are having on this day.

Now with all of your Christmas bounty unwrapped, don’t forget there are some things you need to do quickly!

After all the excitement of unwrapping gifts is over, there is still some work you need to do with all of your new gadgets, computers, gift cards and so on.

Gift Cards

As we recently discussed in Are Gift Cards A Safe Gift This Holiday Season, these are uncertain economic times, and those cards may not be worth the plastic they are made out of if you don’t act quickly.  First you need to see if the company the card is for has published any news about bankruptcy or going out of business.  Even if they haven’t, do not throw them in the back of a drawer and forget about them, use them as quickly as possible just to be safe.

Rebates

With all of the sales going on this holiday season, some items required you to mail-in for your rebates.  Make sure to sit down and do this as soon as possible so you don’t lost out on them.  Believe us, there is nothing the companies would like you to do more than to put it off and forget to mail it in.

Returns

Most stores have limited return windows, and while doing it on the 26th may not sound appealing, you need to do it as quickly as possible for the same reason you have to worry about the gift cards.  And if they only want to issue you store credit, use it immediately, do not wait!

Warranty Cards

Did your new electronics come with a mail-in warranty card?  Just like with the rebates, the companies are hoping you forget to send that in.  Make sure to sit down and fill it out immediately, and get it mailed in.  Even if it is an online registration, do it as soon as you can to make sure you don’t lose out.

Do you know where Santa Claus is?

If this is a question you have a burning desire to learn the answer to, then you’re in luck!  For the past several years,the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), has been using all of their sophisticated equipment to keep track of the jolly old man as he crosses the planet.  Complete with interactive maps and computer generated videos, the NORAD Santa Tracker site draws around one billion hits during the 24 hours of the journey.

While all in good fun, it has become one of the most popular websites in the world during the time the government agency is tracking the man in the red suit.  It is also a great opportunity to teach kids about different parts of the world, the different time zones as he starts his journey at midnight in the first time zone and so on.

So, if you’ve never been by the site, make sure you stop by to at least check it out.  And, if you have kids in the house, it is a must stop site, if for no other reason than to motivate them to get to bed that much earlier!

How old are the cables connected to your computer?

While at the office today, my main computer started having some serious issues with the Internet.  The first thing I did was check to see if the cable modem had stopped working.  All seemed in order, and a second computer in the office was having no problems.

My next thing to do was to test my speed connection by going to SpeedTest.net.  The slow computer was having a problem running the test, but the second computer wasn’t.

So at this point I knew the entirety of the office was online, but not my main computer.  I rebooted the computer and when it came back on it had no Internet at all.  I went to “Start” in Windows XP, clicked on “Control Panel” and then on “Network Connections”.  It showed my connection as being dead and a “Network Cable Unplugged” message.  Okay, so this narrowed down my hunt some.  I unplugged the cable from the bad computer, then took the cable from the working computer and plugged it in to the non-working one.

Presto, I was back on the Internet.

Luckily I always keep spare Ethernet cables laying around, so I took out the apparently dead one, plugged the other computer in to the same port on the switch to test the switch port with a new cable, and it worked.

Just another example of how panic inducing problems with computers often have simple solutions.  Always use a process of elimination to figure out the problem, and it is almost always the simpliest thing as it was in this case.  Just remember to stay calm, no matter how frustrating the situation is, and go step-by-step to eliminate possible causes of your problem.

Windows XP seems to be the operating system that just won’t die.

No matter how many times Microsoft may try to kill off Windows XP so that Windows Vista can be the sole operating system, it just never quite seems to take off.  According to Channel Web, manufacturers originally were going to be out of time to sell the older system as of January 31st, 2009.  Under the new scheme, computer builders must submit sales forcasts by December 31st, 2008 for what they expect to sell through May 30th, 2009.  They will only take delivery on the software licenses as the systems are actually sold, so they won’t be sititng on large inventories.

This is yet another sign that Windows Vista is just not all it was promised to be, and that many buyers, myself included, are simply skipping this iteration of the operating system.  All we can hope for is that Windows 7 will live up to expectations and not be the disaster Vista was.  Why Microsoft insists on killing off XP before Windows 7 ships is beyond me because it is obviously what consumers want, but this isn’t the first time that the company has made no sense.

Windows 7 is expected anywhere from mid-2009 to early 2010 for release.

It seems Google is set on making December 2008 known as the month where they upgraded everything.

We’ve already seen Google do things like add PDF reading in Gmail, Chrome exiting Beta mode, adding to-do lists in Gmail and a whole slew of other things, but now they are upgrading their original business, search products.  According to the Official Google Blog, Google has now upgraded their image search

Image Search is a popular of finding images for your blog, presentation and so on, but up until now the results have been spotty at best, and not always the most helpful.  Now your results should be far more relevant as the system will also try to match up similar lines and designs in the images and be able to see that they are somehow related.  You can see an example provided by Google at the right.

Considering some of the odd ball things I have seem turn up in image searches, this is a great, and much needed, upgrade to the popular search tool.

Cross your fingers that we continue to have Internet in the very near future.

Reports have emerged that three of the four cables that run along the Pacific ocean floor, and connect Asia to the United States, have somehow been severed.  Accoording to the Times Online, there are fall back plans when a cable breaks that traffic is routed to a second cable, and before January of this year, there had never been more than one cable broken at a time.

With three of the four cables broken, there are outages being reported in Egypt, and traffic is delayed between Asia and North America.  Due to these delays, strains are also being placed on the cellular networks as companies roll over to back up plans for communications needs.

Seeing as this is the second time in the span of a year there have been multiple line breaks, it sounds to me like it is time for more lines to be dropped across the oceans for even more redundancy.