Hasta La Gadget!

It looks like Verizon customers will have less telemarketing calls to deal with, but there are still plenty of other ways to protect yourself from unwanted calls.

1. Ditch the landline: Landline telephone numbers are usually easy to find. I mean, if you are in the phone book you are just asking for it. To be honest, I don’t see much of a reason to keep one around in the first place, but if you must at least take steps with your provider to privatize your number.

2. Do Not Call Registry: One of the easiest things you can do to prevent telemarketing calls is to sign up for the Do Not Call Registry. As of February, updated laws have made the registry permanent, and it prohibits telemarketers from calling you (starting a month after you sign up). Should someone decide to harass you anyway, you can file a complaint. The FTC has the power to levy hefty fines on telemarketers for each infringement.

3. “Take Me Off Your Calling List”: Keep in mind that the Do Not Call Registry does not protect you from being contacted by political organizations, charities, surveyors, companies that you have done business with in the past 18 months (or submitted an inquiry to in the past 3 months) or companies you have given permission to contact you. Should you receive an unwanted call from any of these groups, they are obligated by law to remove your name from their calling list should you request it. Keep in mind that they have a 31-day buffer to update their records.

4. Block Unwanted Calls: Most service providers offer some sort of option to block anonymous calls and texts. All you need to do is request it.

5. Research With the Better Business Bureau: If you are solicited by a business or charity and and are interested in further contact, make sure to do a search with the Better Business Bureau to make sure that they are legit.

6. Be Careful About What You Sign Up For: As mentioned in the Do Not Call Registry guidelines, you can be legally contacted by a company if you have given permission for them to do so. However, “permission” can come in various forms. If you are signing up for a service on a website or filling out a entry form in a contest, you may be opening up yourself to a world of spam and telemarketing calls. The bottom line: make sure to read the fine print.

7. Google Voice: The idea is in it’s infancy, but managing calls, texts and voicemail through Google Voice could evolve into a useful tool to weed out telemarketers. The ability to use it with your own phone number would be a good start.

While the British military has had a love-hate relationship with Apple’s darling, the US armed forces are reportedly warming up quite well to the iPod touch. A fresh Newsweek report asserts that the touch is increasingly replacing far more expensive dedicated devices in the field, noting that it is being used to spearhead the future of “networked warfare.” Equipped with a rugged shell and software developed by language translation firms (among others), the device is being used to aid communications and acquire information from databases. In fact, the US Department of Defense is “developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe,” and snipers are already utilizing a ballistics calculator to add precision to shots. And hey, it’s not like easy access to Tap Tap Revenge is really bad for morale, either.

[Via CNET]

Filed under: Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Apple’s iPod touch tackling “networked warfare” for US military originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, what do you know? All those meetings over the proposed National Broadband Plan has amounted to something: a “yeah, we should probably hit this up.” Today, the FCC has kicked off an immensely ambitious project to bring “high-speed internet access to every corner of the United States.” $7.2 billion of the economic stimulus package has already been allocated for the task, but it’ll be ages before anything becomes of this. For starters, the FCC is asking for input from consumers, businesses, etc, yet it doesn’t require a response until February of 2010. Meanwhile, nations like South Korea, Japan and Australia are all looking to implement similar rollouts, albeit with much higher speeds. You see, the FCC currently defines “broadband” as 786Kpbs, which obviously isn’t anywhere near median rates in some of the aforementioned countries. Pardon our skepticism in this becoming a reality, but at least we’ll be extra elated if our rock-bottom expectations are met.

Filed under: Wireless, Networking

National Broadband Plan to bring high-speed access to all Americans… ideally originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week, we learned President Obama’s anti-trust chief pick said Google, and not usual suspect Microsoft, may be sent directly to jail for monopolistic behavior. My oh my, how the tables have turned, eh?

“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” said Christine A. Varney, Obama’s pick to head the U.S. government’s antitrust division (ouch!). To which I say, has she seen those cute new Windows “I’m a PC” ads with the toddlers? If anything, Microsoft is adorable these days.

“[The U.S. economy will] continually see a problem — potentially with Google [because it already] has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising,” she said.

The comments were made all the way back in June during a panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute, but we’re only hearing of them now, most likely because Varney is set to be confirmed by the Senate very soon.

But even as Varney was stretching her legs with lofty antitrust rhetoric last year, she was also praising the Google for being a “spectacular innovator” that dominated the industry with “terrific work” and that obtained its monopoly through lawful business practice. They were the kind of comments that inevitably set up a “but…” statement, and lo and behold, here it is:

“[Google is] quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online computing environment in the clouds. When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive solution, you are going to see the same repeat of Microsoft,” she said.

Related to all this is an article I keep thinking about as I learn more about the all-but-confirmed legal onslaught that’s growing larger in Google’s HUD. In Wired’s current 3mm thin issue, there’s an article called “The Plot to Kill Google,” which starts off with Google lawyers preparing to enter the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust wing, of all places. The discussion was about, wait for it, online advertising. This time with Yahoo. The Wired story took place in October, so the legal wrangling has actually already begun.

Google, for its part, has already started preparing a defense. Bloomberg reports Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in an email response that stiff competition “is literally one click away” on the Internet. Customers are also free to search the internet using any engine they wish, he said, and nothing Google does prevents that from happening. “Cloud computing is really in its infancy,” he said. “There’s going to be rich competition in that space for a long time to come.”

My personal thought on all this? It’s what happens when your sea floor mapping platform discovers Atlantis. [Bloomberg via ComputerWorld]

Next week’s US presidential inauguration of Barack Obama will have one sour note for the Illinois senator. Sure, he’s gonna be the leader of the free world, but the notorious BlackBerry addict will have to give up his smartphone — and frankly, if given the choice, we’d probably choose cellphone over country. There is hope, however, as CNET outlines two Windows Mobile devices that met the NSA’s seal of approval for governmental use back in 2007: General Dynamics’ Sectera Edge and L-3 Communications’ Guardian. Unfortunately, both options look about as dated as the Treo 650, with exceptionally large antennas to boot. Hey NSA, any chance we can get something a bit sexier on the approval list?

Filed under: Cellphones

NSA-approved smartphones leaves Obama with some ugly choices originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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