Who says that behemoth corporations are heartless? Virgin Media had eleven engineers work for three days straight, just to find a single voicemail that 68-year-old Stan Beaton had thought he’d lost forever. It was the outgoing message recorded by his beloved wife Ruby, who died from cancer in 2003. Stan Beaton had kept wife Ruby Beaton’s outgoing voice message for all those years, listening to it himself on occassion, when a change in the Virgin Media voicemail system caused it to be deleted.

UK agencies have once again been surprised, or, at least, shown a stunning lack of clue about human nature, as many choose the unavoidable choice of disabling the porn filter on their Internet connection. This according to the UK’s Ofcom, who are the independent regulator for Britain’s communications industries. Yes, it turns out that broadband users want their porn and other inappropriate (or at least non-child-friendly) content.

The next time somebody tells you that they don’t understand what the big deal is about spam, you can tell them this story. Thousands and thousands of Virgin Media customers went without email service for two full days after a spam run took down the email servers of their email service provider, Tucows.