Markus’ Blog

Everybody is writing about Rogers and their ridiculous iPhone plans these days. I will, too, but with the slight twist of comparing Roger’s plans to the plans available in Austria rather than the US.

The situation in Austria is different in the sense that the iPhone is offered by two cell phone providers: T-Mobile and One. That alone makes it more difficult for the individual provider to be as stupid as Rogers.

As of today, XE.com reports an exchange rate of $1.60 for €1, which makes things a little more expensive than they would have been even a month ago, compared to the Canadian Dollar.

T-Mobile:

Phone: €49 (8 GB), €99 (16 GB)
Contract duration: 24 months (changes to other iPhone plans allowed)
One-time activation fee: €49
Classic plan: €39/month: €0.25 per SMS, 1000 combined airtime minutes (mobile + landline in Austria)
Supreme plan: €55/month: 1000 SMS included, 1000 airtime minutes for each of the following categories T-Mobile, landline, other mobile carriers, voice mail (that’s 4000 minutes total)
Incoming calls: unlimited
Data plan: 3 GB of traffic included in the above
Data overage: €0.10/MB

One:

Phone: €149 (8 GB), €229 (16 GB)
Contract duration: 24 months (no changes allowed)
One-time activation fee: €0
Monthly fee: €10 for (Sep. ‘08 till Dec. ‘08), then €25
Airtime: 1000 minutes (all of Austria, cell and landline)
Incoming calls: unlimited
Data plan: €14/month for 100 SMS and 3 GB of traffic
Data overage: couldn’t find any information

Bottom line:

Not the greatest, but certainly more affordable than Rogers. From T-Mobile, you can purchase an iPhone for $158 ($79+$79), sign a 2-year contract and pay a monthly fee of $63, and that gives you more than Rogers: $199 for the phone and $115/month for the plan, locked in for 36 months. If you go over your bandwidth limit, it can still get expensive, but not as expensive as Rogers.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I’ll ever get the philosophy behind Roger’s iPhone plans. It’s the be sneaky, screw the customer over, take advantage of our monopoly, hope the customer runs past their bandwidth limit so we can charge even more approach. Customers are going to realize that (and they already have), and they’ll be rightfully pissed because of it. Rogers could have had a instead. Had they offered reasonable prices, they wouldn’t have been able to handle the stampede of eager customers, making good money in the process and not alienating their current and future clients. But no, they need to be stupid morons and try to make money the blunt (rub-it-in-our-face-we-are-the-monopoly) and sneaky (we-hope-you-exceed-your-bandwidth) way. I hope they get what they deserve, i. e. barely any iPhone sales. That’d be fun.

Would I, personally, be getting an iPhone if we had plans like the one offered by AT&T? Yes, absolutely. How about the T-Mobile or One plans from Austria? Maybe. Not sure. It’s on the verge, but still manageable enough that it could, realistically, be a yes. And with Roger’s plan? Hell, NO!

Apparently, a father held his own daughter captive for over two decades, abused, and had several children with her. I stuns and disgusts me how people can even think of doing anything like this.

All this happened in Amstetten, Lower Austria, maybe a 90 minute drive from where I grew up.

The story is making top headlines on CNN and the BBC, and probably most news broadcasters in the Western hemisphere.

Not even two years ago, a different case of a child being held hostage was finally discovered. That one happened even closer to where I used to live: in Gänserndorf, a mere 40 minute drive from Korneuburg. In that case, the victim managed to escape and the captor committed suicide.

It took over a year to get 10,000 spam comments, but only six months to get another 10,000.

Not a good trend.

If it keeps up, I’ll be hitting 30,000 in July.

I knew along with everybody else that there was some (indirect) price gouging going on in Canada with the US dollar losing more and more against the Canadian dollar. What I didn’t know is how bad it was in the consumer electronic market.

Take the new Canon Powershot G9 for instance, which I am considering getting myself (or have Santa get for me lol). My good old G1 is slowly coming to the end of its useful life. I like the G1, but there are so many more, nice features available now, seven years after the G1. One thing I will miss, however, will be the tilting LCD.

BestBuy in the US offers the G9 for US$499.99, BestBuy in Canada offers it for CA$599.99. Yep, thats $100 more in Canada, despite the fact that the Canadian dollar is worth more than the US dollar. According to XE.com, US$499.99 = CA$476.242 in today’s money. Granted, that’s a little unfair, because XE shows mid-market rates — better rates than anybody would ever get at a bank counter or through their credit card. So let’s assume US$499.99 = CA$489.99 if you did the exchange at the bank. And doesn’t $489.99 look like a perfect marketing price (seeming like a lot less than $500 while still being close)? Nope, apparently not. They want $600 instead.

Ain’t gonna happen, people. Not from me. I can get it shipped from the States and still save a bundle. And that’s without even looking at Amazon.com and other online stores, who will most likely be even cheaper.

I remember I did the same thing seven years ago, when I bought the G1. Except that I ordered it from Germany, where it was a lot cheaper than in Austria. — I guess, we’ve found yet another stunning similarity in how the relationship Canada vs. US mirrors the relationship Austria vs. Germany. There are quite a few that I have come to notice, but that’s material for another post.

Today, my site exceeded the threshold of 10,000 spam comments — according to my Akismet statistics. It only took about a year for my blog to reach that crazy number. Can’t remember exactly when I installed and activated the Akismet plugin for Wordpress (at that time it didn’t come bundled with Wordpress yet).

I briefly had other spam protection solutions (can’t even remember at this point what they were), but switched to Akismet when it became available. I am sure glad I did. I also turned on “automatically delete spam comments from old posts” when that feature became available, and I am very glad about that feature, too.

Without Akismet, I would have been forced to either make it much harder for people to leave legitimate comments (captchas, enforcing logging in, etc.) or turn off commenting altogether. I can’t believe that blog spamming is that bad these days that my tiny blog receives 10,000 spams in a year. Big sites receive 100 times the amount of spam. Basically, spammers are attacking the third Internet technology now:

• first they ruined usenet (news groups)
• then they made dealing with e-mail a pain in the rear
• and lastly (for now) they are going for web sites and are making blogging difficult, too (the same goes for forums, wikis, etc.)

They are putting the burden of their money making on the e-mail user (who needs spam filters) and the blog/web site owner (who, too, needs spam filters), and so on, and so forth. I hate those bastards. Let’s hope they die out some day. Unfortunately, I’m afraid there’s simply too much money to be made with not much financial risk or any (serious) legal implications.

I got another interesting specimen of e-mail today. It’s along the lines of this masterpiece I wrote about last year.

Here it comes. The e-mail address they published in the original has been removed, because I am certainly not going to help them with their scam by publishing their e-mail even more.

Dear PayPal,

This is a message to inform you about the CASE PP245621185, concerning your paypal account and 1 other

Beginning on 2 July 2007, a new PayPal company, PayPal (Europe) S.a r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. (PayPal Luxembourg), have become the service provider for PayPal in the EU.

Due some technical errors we face we have delayed some payments. You are now having 1 payments to you from [hotmail -email address removed] of a total of 321.65$ to be added in your account.

Please proceed to the payment of the fee (0.35$for each payment+1%) which is 3.26$.

Once your payment been received you will get a receipt via mail and your payment amount of 321.65$ will be visible and added in your account. If there is no amount in your account or you are not able to proceed with the payment your account access will be limited. Login in the following link and proceed with the process.

Sincerely,

PayPal Account Review Department

The first thing to notice, of course, is the bad English the mail is written in. Although I have to say it’s not nearly as bad as the “German” in that other e-mail from last year. At least this e-mail is understandable and only slightly off. Still, not the kind of publication you’d receive from a reputed company.

The scariest thing, though, is that here will actually be people replying to this scam by sending money. And you don’t need many people replying. Say it cost $500 to send the spam to 2 million e-mail addresses. All you need is 0.1% of those 2 million recipients to reply to you and you are making $(3.26*2000)-500=6020. More than $6000 in profits.

Yes, 2000 people is lots, but 2000 people out of 2 million is not that many. Still, I don’t know if it is actually reasonable to expect 2000 people to fall for this scheme, but it is certainly a possibility.

The funniest detail I haven’t even mentioned yet. They didn’t even get their calculation right. It says “Please proceed to the payment of the fee (0.35$for each payment+1%) which is 3.26$.” If I understand correctly, that means 321.65*0.01+0.35, but the result of that calculation is 3.56, not 3.26 as they claim.

Obviously, they are not very thorough scammers.

In one of my more glorious moments I managed to scratch/dent the front bumper on the driver’s side yesterday afternoon as I was backing up. I am not very impressed with myself. Especially, since it was very stupid and totally avoidable. I’m hoping it’s just the bumper and there’s no other damage. (The odds are not too bad that that’s all.)

I don’t know yet how much it’ll be to fix it, but I do know that it’s a needless way to spend money. If I am lucky, it’ll be less than $1,000, but you never know. Car repairs get expensive quickly.

Gotta take the car to a few body shops to have the damage checked out. They have to see it in order to be able to provide a quote. It’s a big pain in the rear, but it makes sense, I guess.

The other big pain in the rear is that I have to take time off work. None of the body shops seem to be open Saturdays. Hopefully these memories of hassles and wasted money serve me well and cause me to be more careful in the future.

Without Akismet (or similar software for other blogging platforms), I think blogging might be starting to die a slow death or at least change completely in the way it’s done (less freedom and openness).

Why? Because comment spam, which has already been quite bad, seems to have taken a huge turn for the worse over the last few weeks. Example: between 5:00pm yesterday evening and 9:00am this morning 74 spam comments were left on my blog. Mind you, all of them were caught.

74 spam and that’s just for my low-traffic, mostly unknown and therefore not really targeted blog. One can only imagine what the big sites are facing. I guess Matt Muellenweg’s spam counter (784,370 total spam rejected at the time of writing this post) gives a small indication. As a comparison, my spam rejected counter is currently at 1,862 (that’s since September 2006).

Without spam detection software that either quarantines or right out deletes “suspicious” comments, the only other choice would be to either severely limit who can leave a comment (require registration) and how to leave a comment (ask to type in a captcha), or to turn off commenting, which is an integral part of blogging, entirely.

There would simply be no other way to handle it. Sites would just be overwhelmed and turned into unwilling advertisers for all kinds of junk. Usenet pretty much went down that route. That’s were spam originated. People got fed up and stopped using it — at least for the purpose it was originally created to serve.

Let’s hope spammers won’t be able to do the same to the blogging community. For Internet-wide Akismet statistics, see their statistics page. It’s scary stuff.

Yesterday was the day. I finally got to see and hear the performer, who I heard so much about over the last three years, live and in person. — And I have to say: Oh boy, can that guy ever sing.

But it’s not only that, he’s a good entertainer. He’s fun to watch, makes his audience laugh and is not at all concerned making a bit of a fool out of himself right on stage in front of thousands of fans (taking dance lessons from his opening act, Angelique Kidjo, for instance). On top of everything else, he just seems to be having a real blast being out there performing for his audience.

It was a great show. I’m glad I got to see him.

According to this BBC article, Alcatel-Lucent sued Microsoft for violating MP3 patents. Microsoft said they shouldn’t have to pay Alcatel, since they already paid Fraunhofer Institute. The Federal District Court in San Diego agreed with Alcatel-Lucent and ordered Microsoft to pay Alcatel $1.52 billion. Microsoft appealed.

After this court decision, other companies using MP3 technology are concerned. Amongst them are Apple, RealNetworks and Sony. They fear that Alcatel-Lucent will come after them next.

While I have to say that at first glance, without any further knowledge of the case, it seems that Microsoft has a pretty strong argument going for them, it sure shows how software patents can come back and bite you.

Microsoft had the choice of going with the patent-free and fully open OGG format. Nobody forced them to use MP3. They chose to go with the patented, proprietary format instead (just like they love to create proprietary “standards” themselves) and now they may have to pay the price for that.