Woman in the mirror?

Ok, this has nothing to do with technology but I just read this on Reuters and found this so weird. Michael Jackson went shopping in Bahrain dressed as a woman. A Reuters photographer saw him in the mall dressed in an ‘Abaya’, which is a full length robe. He was in all black, with sunglasses and gloves and a veil covering his face and his men’s shoes were peeping out. For company, he had 3 western looking children (???) and an unidentified woman.
"Please, no!" Jackson shouted to photographers before making a rapid exit with the children and woman via the back door of the mall and into a white car.
I thought he is broke, where is he getting money to shop from? Oh wait, that’s not the thing I should be focusing on

What can we do to protect ourselves?

The U.S government is asking Google to give up all its data collected on its search engine but Google does not want to follow Yahoo and msn. What can we do to protect our privacy even before search engines get to know everything about us? One of the solutions is to use a service called ‘Tor’. Tor allows users to surf the internet, chat and send instant messages anonymously. It works by transferring traffic three times through random servers, or nodes, on its way from sender to recipient to make it difficult for anyone to trace the data back to its source.
The downside of Tor is that it takes longer to surf the internet as the data has to travel through these random servers but if you are paranoid about your privacy, then click here to check out Tor.

Schools begin to offer Gym classes online

One of the unlikely online offerings of public schools is the gym. The course allows students to meet requirements by exercising how they want, when they want.

They are required to work out hard for 30 minutes four times a week and report to their teachers by e-mail. Parents must certify that the students did the workouts.

Physical education is one of 27 online courses now offered by the Minneapolis Public Schools, which had none four years ago.

MP3 goes surround sound

The inventors of the file format MP3 have taken the format to a new level. MP3s can now have surround sound. Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (Fraunhofer IIS) and France's Thomson SA have added two new elements to MP3 Surround demonstration software: MP3 SX (MP3 Stereo eXtended), which enhances MP3 stereo files for multichannel playback; and Ensonido, which provides portable MP3 Surround sound using stereo headphones

You can get additional information about MP3 surround by clicking here

Merry Xmas

Here’s wishing you and your family a very merry Christmas and a fabulous New year. Lets hope this new year has no war and more hope. And in 2006, if you can, try and help the people who have not been as fortunate as us.

Santa starts phone service

In the early days, talking to Santa meant a trip to the mall but now Santa talks to children on the phone. Parents are now turning increasingly to commercial services that provide phone calls from a Santa who knows not only what is on the child's wish list but also the names of siblings, friends and teachers, favorite vacation spots and what was under the tree last year.

Owners of the services, mostly mom-and-pop Internet start-ups with names like Santa Calls Kids and Santa Speaking, report an exponential increase in business each season, with prices ranging from under $10 to a $39.95 package for up to three children that include a digital recording of the call.

When will the cat learn?

Napster is getting sued again. Although the brand is now associated with legal downloads, it has still managed to break copyright laws.

MCS Music America, which owns the copyrights for 45,000 songs, claims that Napster is selling the songs controlled by MCS without obtaining licenses.

Napster sent a form to MCS seeking an agreement but neither party signed the agreement. MCS is asking Napster to pay $150,000 which shouldn’t be much for the cat to cough up.

Back to the Future

Anyone who has seen the ‘Back to the Future’ movies, might feel that getting a note from the past is a very cool thing. At least I think so. Futureme.org allows you to do just that.

The site is one of a handful that let people send e-mails to themselves and others years in the future. They are technology's answer to time capsules, trading on people's sense of curiosity, accountability and nostalgia. Futureme.org allows people to send messages 30 years from now but most choose the message to be sent within 3 years.

According to the founders, a large number of the messages sent do one of two basic things: tell the future person what the past person was doing at the time and ask the future person if he or she met the aspirations of the past person.

Visit Futureme.Org and send yourself an email.

All I want is your money - Ted

When Susan Drummond returned from a month long trip to Israel, she was greeted by a Rogers phone bill for $12,237.60. The Rogers Wireless bill included a five-page list of calls charged to her phone, almost all of them to foreign countries that included Pakistan, Libya, Syria, India and Russia.

Susan figured out that someone had stolen her phone and when she called Rogers Wireless, they told her there was nothing it could do, and she would have to pay the entire amount. ( As I will explain later, this is the tactic they use often)

Since making that call to Rogers last August, Ms. Drummond and her partner, Harry Gefen, have been researching the cell phone company, yielding some unexpected discoveries, among them that the phones of senior Rogers executives, including Mr. Rogers himself, were repeatedly "cloned" by terrorist groups that used them to make thousands of overseas calls.

Now comes the good part. After what happened to Ted, Rogers installed an automated security system that alerts the company if anyone’s phone is being misused or rather if the number is being misused to make unauthorized long distance calls. After Susan found this out, she decided to sue the company stating that although Rogers knew her number was being misused, they let the meters run.

I have personally had a lot of problems with Rogers as far as their billing and their customer service goes but they are riding on their monopoly in this area and if any customer approaches them a problem, they get the same answer Susan Drummond got, “There’s nothing we can do, you will have to Suffer” or is it “There’s nothing WE WANT to do, all we want is your money”. The Rogers customer service could easily be rated as the worst anyone can experience and I just hope Aliant comes out with their TV service soon.

In July, when we called Rogers to set up a Cable and Internet connection, the company offered a promotion package and ever since, they have been charging us extra every month and when we approached them, they claim they never offered the promotion to us and asked us if we knew who we spoke to. Now, you are a customer calling up Rogers to get a connection, would you ask who you are speaking to and what their employment number was and write it down in case Rogers wants to rob you? No, but you might want to start taking down a lot of notes if you are a customer of Rogers. We have been calling and arguing every month since we got that connection and since no one else offers TV here and I can’t go in for the Bell Express package due to installation prohibitions in apartments, we are stuck with this company.

If you are a customer of Rogers, do yourself a favor and get out of it if you can. I mean, there must be a reason why the company is called Rogers because that’s what they do to you (if you know what I mean).

You are not alone Susan.