JohnTyra.com

So, you think our data and voice plans are expensive here in the US? Try Canada: to get a mear 2GB of data, 300 text messages and 800 minutes (with Rogers , a Canadian wireless provider) will set you back $115 per month. To compare, for roughly the same price in the US, you can get unlimited data + unlimited text messaging with 900~1000 minutes of talk time.

Noticed this story over at lifehacker , and thought it was pretty amusing. Basically, someone got tired of the Bzzzz noise that their iPhone was making and decided to create something ‘low-cost’ as a solution. Granted, it works, but personally I’d be more worried that this solution would slice open my hand when I reached for my phone. But…that’s just me.

Thumbs up or thumbs down?

I know, I know, it seems like every other story is about Yahoo! lately and you’re probably right. They’ve been in the news more than I’d like to comment on, and I’ll leave it at that.

Yesterday, however, they released a letter to their stockholders updating them the current Google-Yahoo! ad agreement and "the outcome of our discussions with Microsoft regarding a potential transaction", according to the letter. It also contains some negative comments regarding Mr. Icahn’s opinions on the Microsoft-Yahoo!-Google situation, which may be interesting.

The full letter can be found here:

http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=318447

Yet another reason to consider an alternative browser. Or, at the very least, update your Windows machine to IE7 since this version of the browser is not affected. However, IE6 on Windows XP SP2 and even SP3 are affected and represent the largest part of the computing population currently. While I would ~never~ say you should use one specific browser over another, I might make suddle hints if you read between the lines.

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This exploit was originally posted by the Ph4nt0m Security Team , but you’ll need to use the Google language tools to translate it. ZDNet also has a post about this in their blog .

Microsoft must have given up on Yahoo! and decided to aquire someone else. Today, Microsoft announced their plans to aquire MobiComp, but they are not a replacement for Yahoo! by any means. Instead, MobiComp is more of a technology company that deals with mobile "social network" content delivery plus backup and restore solutions. In their press release, Microsoft did mention MobiComp in conjunction with some big names like Facebook so it looks like this aquisition is not exactly ’small potatoes’.

Some of the named services that MobiComp offers is "MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities, and Active mTicker" Microsoft says. The company has been around since 2000.

Is Microsoft trying to put pressure on Apple’s offering of services?

Just a quick note, according to InfoWorld’s hinting of ‘internal Microsoft email ‘ and an unspecified source, Microsoft may be releasing their Hyper-V technology this Thursday. This technology allows direct virtualization to be used on Server 2008 installs, depending on the flavor of the install, which competes directly with VMWare and other virtualization solutions.

Are you kidding? I can’t even claim Photoshop editing on this one because the story is believable enough. Quick version: A tenent in a building had to move down a floor but left their ‘Datacenter’ on the original floor for various reasons. The new tenent that moved into the floor wanted to use all of their space, and the result was a Datacenter that you access…you guessed it…via the restroom.

I’m at a loss for words on this one…wow…

Original story here: LINK

Parents: Be careful if you kids are playing with Spore’s Creature Creator…

So everyone is excited about EA’s new “Spore” game, which is set to ship out in September. Ok, no problem, until you think about their new (free) “Character Creator” that allows users to create their own characters and then upload them to EA’s server.

Whoops, did EA forget about all of the…um…’imaginative’ users (you know who you are) out there on the internet? I guess so, because now there are user-generated characters that are not, let’s say, rated ‘G’. It’s sad, really, considering that this game appears to be geared towards the younger audience; aka NOT the PG-13 and up crowd. Since there have been over one million characters uploaded since the tool became available last week, it’s going to be hard for EA — or anyone else for that matter — to easily filter these non-child friendly characters.

Will EA have to put a PG-13 (or higher?) rating on their game now? Hmmm…let’s get your thoughts on this! =)

VoIP security firm VoIPshield is going to announce multiple VoIP-based vulnerabilites in conjunction with some of the big telecom vendors: Avaya, Cisco and Nortel to name a few. This announcement is going to occur today, 6/25/08, at 12PM Eastern/11AM Central/9AM Pacific.

So, we can bet that the big enterprise telecom guys and gals will be pretty busy the next few days, because you can be sure that the hackers out there are also going to be listening in on this announcement. Will there be any big-named companies in the news this week who didn’t patch their systems, and as a result got caught? As my favorite saying goes, "only time will tell".

What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear how you feel about this! =)

NTT Communications announced today that, starting August 1st, they will be limiting daily uploads to 30GB . Wait…30GB?!? Are you kidding? Who in the heck uploads (key word, uploads not downloads ) 30GB in a week, or even a month, less every day? Ok, ok…I’m sure the file sharing P2P crowd might hate this, but it would be no big deal here in the US because of our upload caps. 30GB in a 24hr window is roughly 21MB every minute, or a MB every 3 seconds. Most residential broadband packages can’t reach that cap (again, here in the US) so we shouldn’t be worried anytime soon.

Let’s say you’ve got a high-end (residential) broadband connection that has a 1Mbps upload cap. That 1Mbps translates to about 7.5MB/min — remember the bits to bytes conversion — so it would take about a 3Mbps upstream connection to hit the 30GB/day upload cap. And, even then, that’s assuming that you would be doing nothing but uploading all day long with no downloading or other internet usage.

Conclusion: Unless this gets down to the 5~10GB/day range, and comes to the US, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. =)