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The Internet

World Wide Web Turns 20 Today 169

girlmad writes "On 6 August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then a humble scientist at CERN, made the first page on the World Wide Web publicly available in a move that, unbeknown to him at the time, would change the world more quickly and profoundly than anything before or since." Wired also has a retrospective, noting that "[i]t can be hard now, even for many of us who regularly used the Internet before there was a World Wide Web, to remember that there was a time when the two terms weren’t considered nearly synonymous by the general public." For those who remember, what was your first experience with the Web per se? For me, it was in 1993 or early 1994, with an excited demonstration of Mosaic on Sun workstations in the Geology department at the University of Texas.
Cellphones

Submission + - Verizon Tells Customer To Get A Lawyer & A Sub (techdirt.com) 1

suraj.sun writes: Verizon Tells Customer To Get A Lawyer & A Subpoena To Get An Itemized Bill:

A woman, who called Verizon to try to find out about the $4.19 she was being charged for six local calls, was told by Verizon reps that the only way it would provide her an itemized bill was to get a lawyer and have the lawyer get a subpoena to force Verizon to disclose the information.

Instead, the woman went to court (by herself) and a judge told Verizon to hand over the itemized bill info.

        It is a basic matter of fair business practice that a consumer should be able to contact a utility about a charge on a bill and learn what the charge is for and learn that the charge was correctly applied. The only verification that Verizon's witness could offer that a charge like [the customer's] $4.19 measured use charge was accurate and billed correctly was her faith in the accuracy of Verizon's computer system. The only way that Verizon would offer any information about a past charge in response to a consumer inquiry was to require that customer to hire a lawyer and subpoena their own usage information. By no reasonable standard could this be considered reasonable customer service.

The judge has also suggested Verizon should be fined $1,000 for its failure here, and that suggestion will be reviewed by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

Techdirt: http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20110715/02212815101/verizon-tells-customer-to-get-lawyer-subpoena-to-get-itemized-bill.shtml

News

Submission + - 25% of car accidents are because of gadgets (winbeta.org) 1

BogenDorpher writes: "In a recent study by the Governors Highway Safety Association, driving distractions such as cell phones and other electronic devices, cause as much as 25% of all US car accidents. It is common knowledge that driving while distracted is not a safe thing to do, but now we have some scientific data that goes in-depth on the topic."
Cloud

Submission + - Microsoft Pays University $250K to use Office 365 (winbeta.org)

BogenDorpher writes: "Microsoft has offered to give the University of Nebraska $250,000 dollars to make the switch from IBM Lotus Notes to a much more feature-rich Office 365, which offers newer technology, greater flexibility, and operational savings. Microsoft did this in hopes that the University would not make the transition over to Google Apps."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Seeks Patent for Wiretapping Technology (winbeta.org)

BogenDorpher writes: "Microsoft is looking to attain a patent for technology that allows the company to eavesdrop on VoIP calls, only weeks after the purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion dollars. Apparently, Microsoft applied for this patent back in 2009. Microsoft has been working on intercepting calls on similar voice messaging software such as Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft releases IE10 Platform Preview 2 (winbeta.org)

BogenDorpher writes: "Microsoft today has announced the availability of the second platform preview for its upcoming browser, Internet Explorer 10. The first platform preview was released in April. This new platform preview contains the same HTML5 engine seen in the recent public Windows 8 demos."

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