A massive Comcast telephone outage is affecting businesses and homes alike across the United States for the second day in a row. States coast to coast are affected, including California, Washington state, New York, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, along with inland states like Colorado and Illinois. Major cities that are effected include Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Houston, Atlanta, Manhattan, and Philadelphia, along with many outlying cities in those areas.
Category: VoIP
As the next generation of 911 systems is being worked on, experts have fears of an increase in swatting incidents. Swatting is the act of calling in a fake emergency call designed to have a SWAT team deployed to the target’s location. Swatting is often attributed to hostility (or a practical joke) between rival online gamers, although of course people who play online games are not the only ones to call in false 911 calls.
Most large online companies now offer live support via a chat support system, and Skype is no different. Where Skype is different from many companies is that it makes its live chat help very difficult to find. Rather than having a live support link through which you can chat with a live Skype representative readily accessible on every page, you have to jump through a series of hoops before you are offered the opportunity to talk with a live person. So, here, to save you the frustration of “just where the heck is Skype’s live support chat”, we show you how to find it.
The phone spam calls start out essentially the same, “Hi, this is Rachel from cardholder services..” or “Hi, this is Rachel from cardmember services…”.. then usually it will either say something like “..calling in reference to your current credit card account. It is urgent that you {take some action}”, or “Please hold for an important message…” or she will ask you to select from several options with your phone’s touch pad. Most often it is “Press 1 to speak to an operator, press 2 to be removed from the call list.” Stacey and Stacy have been making a lot of these calls too, about extended warranties. These are so-called “robocalls” – generated (often overseas) with the Rachel or other similar script and computerized dialing, and almost always peddaling some scam, be it debt relief, credit card consolidation, mortgage refinancing, or some similar financial scam. It has gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ran a “Robocall Challenge”, offering a $50,000 reward for the best proposed technology to deal with the burgeoning robocall problem.
Yesterday we featured an article on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) contest challenging anyone from the public to come up with a way to beat spam phone calls. The reason for expanding their efforts, says the FTC, is because complaints about spam phone calls, or, “robocalls,” more than doubled in April of 2012, from their last high in October 2010 . So what should we do to avoid these nuisance calls until our unknown hero steps forward with the answer?
Did you get a phone call from 760-705-8888, and you are wondering who was calling? Or maybe you answered a call from 760-705-8888, only to hear heavy breathing on the other end, or, worse, some scam artist trying to scam you. The reason that your caller I.D. is showing this number is because they are using Google Chat to call you, and 760-705-8888 is the outbound number that Google Chat uses.
Facebook announced today that it has integrated Skype into the Facebook framework, to allow users to make video calls right from Facebook. The announcement took place days after Google soft-launched the new Google social network, Google+, which also includes a video chat feature in the form of G+ Hangouts.
There are several reports that Facebook and Skype are about to enter into digital matrimony or, at very least, are becoming friends with benefits. According to the reports, while rumours that Facebook and Skype may merge are not true, it is true that a partnership is apparently in the offing, and that Facebook users are going to be able to talk to each other over Facebook, using technology that is, under the hood, decidedly Skypeish.
If you use Gmail, you may have noticed something new in the past day or so. When you logged into Gmail yesterday or today, you may have seen a little notice that said “Make Phone Calls from Gmail”. This is a new feature that Google has added to their ‘Google Voice’ service: making telephone calls, over the Internet, directly from Gmail.
Users eager to test whether Skype would work over the AT and T 3G network on their 3G iPads came up disappointed, and empty-handed. “You need wifi to call over Skype” reads the message displayed to those who try to use Skype with the 3G network on their iPads. “Skype calls over 3G networks are currently not allowed due to contractual restrictions.”
If you’ve always wished that your cell phone could be used as a Skype wifi phone, well, your wish for a Skype phone just came true – at least if your phone is a Nokia phone running the Symbian operating system. Now instead of having to have two phones (both a Skype wireless phone and a cell phone) in order to effectively use a Skype internet phone plus have cell service, you can have it all on one phone – your regular cellular service plus free Skype to Skype calling, free Skype text messaging, and all the other Skype goodies. Unlike those Skype cordless VoIP phones, Skype for your Nokia mobile phone works both on wifi and on your 3G network, turning your cell phone into a wireless Skype phone wherever you are! And, your nifty new Skype mobile wireless phone works for global Skype to Skype calls, too! Remember – this isn’t cellular provider dependent – “Will Skype work on a Nextel cell phone,” or “Will Skype work on a Verizon or AT and T cell phone” is no longer the question to ask (although there is also a Verizon-specific Skype available) – all you need to ask yourself is “Is there a Skype application for my brand of cell phone,” and if your phone is one of the Nokia phones with which this Skype for Nokia works, the answer is “Yes,” regardless of who your cell phone provider is!
Canadian activist group Citizen Lab, with the help of an article in the New York Times, has blown the lid off the newest Chinese censorship scandal: the government of China is eavesdropping on, and in some cases intercepting, text messages sent via the Skype network.
Imagine our shock to discover that VoIP provider Vonage has turned to comment spamming. Oh, they will probably deny it, but what else can you call it when their Online Marketing Manager, Costas Kariolis, shows up at an article about Skype on the Internet Patrol, and posts a comment about the Vonage offerings, with an SEO-formatted link back to the Vonage site? and also posts the exact same comment to articles about Skype on other sites?
Skype, eBay’s internet telephone service, has just announced a great Skype dela – an unlimited international calling plan for a mere $9.95 monthly fee, allowing Skype telephone conversations to 34 countries including the U.S., Canada, much of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Korea and others. That’s right, for the price of two skinny no-whip double-decaf mochaccinos you can make a Skype phone call to over a third of the world’s population, as long as it’s to a land-line phone.
The FBI is warning of an increase in what have come to be known as “vishing attacks” – where scammers call someone on the telephone, but make the call using VoIP, which not only is much more difficult to trace, but allows the scammer to spoof the phone number from which they are calling (making the number which shows up on the caller I.D. appear to be from someone else).