SHINY VIDEO PREVIEW: Nokia E75

Although I was told in no uncertain terms that I’m not allowed to label this a ‘review’, I really liked the Nokia E75. Its QWERTY keyboard complements the keypad nicely.

Shame the screen’s a little on the small side, but you can’t have everything, I suppose. If you’re a prolific text communicator, then you’ll find a lot to like here. If you’re more into your multimedia, then it might be worth sitting tight till the N97, which isn’t far off now. Check out my full thoughts in the video above.

CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith, instructs protest group

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The government is rather keen on the idea of creating a massive database that will store all your emails, texts, calls and internet use. It’s an idea that’s understandably raised a few eyebrows, even outside of privacy and consumer-based pressure groups. Even I’m a little alarmed about this one, despite generally not being that fussed about privacy issues.

In protest, some enterprising sorts have created a campaign called “CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith day”. On one day – June 15th – they want you to copy all your email correspondence in to [email protected], the idea being that they get so overwhelmed by a mountain of correspondence, so much of it inane and useless, that they realize it’s a rubbish idea.

Of course, it could backfire. On the FAQ section of the site under ‘is this legal?’, the organizers claim: “This is unclear. You personally are certainly at no risk from prosecution. But it is possible that if the volume of emails crashes the servers, it could be seen as a Denial of Service attack – although there is no precedent for such an attack coming from multiple people sending a small number of emails.”

There’s also a Facebook group, though as the Register points out, they’re fairly keen on keeping all your private data themselves, so you might just want to plump for the email option. Sign up on the website, right here.

“CC all your emails to Jacqui Smith day”

Spammers take advantage of Obama's inauguration

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Later today, Barack Hussein Obama will be inaugurated as President of the United States, and thousands of spammers are using it an opportunity to.. well… do what they do best. Emails are circulating with subjects like “Barack Obama refused to be president of the USA” complete with links to phishing sites and viruses. Symantec warns of one in particular called W32.waledac.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened – the people who run these spam networks are well in-tune with current events and often use major holidays and other big world events as social engineering to get people to click links that they might normally be wise to. So be careful, you hear?

Symantec’s Warning (via TechRadar)

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UK Lycos/Tripod users: you're unprofitable, get lost

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There was a time when the black labrador at Lycos was a fairly common sight, but times change and the RSPCA may have to step in shortly to rescue the poor little mutt.

That is, if Lycos UK does to him what it’s doing to its email and web hosting users.

You see, it’s not very profitable running free email and web hosting services, particularly when there are much bigger (Hotmail) and better (Gmail) ones out there.

From 15th February, users with Lycos Mail or Tripod web hosting accounts will lose all of their data and no longer be able to send or receive emails. While I’ve not visited a Tripod page in about ten years, nor seen anyone in the UK with a Lycos email address for about the same period of time, a little piece of Internet history is slipping away…

Virus infects Royal Navy computers; sailors lose vital access to Facebook

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It seems there’s been a nasty virus floating around some of the Navy’s finest warships — and no it’s not something one of the crew caught during their last shore leave, but in fact a computer virus that’s caused the loss of email and Internet access.

The affected computers are part of the Fujitsu-supplied NavyStar N* system and also handle storekeeping and various support functions…

MySpace launching webmail service

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Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail will all be a little on the worried side this morning as the news broke overnight that social networking giant MySpace is launching a webmail service.

All MySpace users will be automatically assigned an inbox on the service, guaranteeing the site 125 million active users at launch – more than Gmail and AOL Mail, but fewer than Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Let’s hope the interface is a little better than the terrible messaging service currently integrated into MySpace.

MySpace (via TechCrunch)

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Panasonic to launch first fully paperless fax machine

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Hey faxers, don’t get too excited, but Panasonic will be releasing a paperless fax machine before the end of January. The bad news? For the moment, it’s Japan-only. I’m actually quite surprised that it’s taken the human race this long to develop a machine that sends faxes without actually having to feed in paper.

To send, you can type messages mobile-phone-keypad-style on the big built-in buttons, or alternatively you can send Word docs, as well as docs saved in ‘other formats’. Presumably PDF will be among them. Fax messages can be read on the device’s screen and, sadly, printed out if you absolutely have to.

Panasonic Paperless Fax (via CrunchGear)

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Nokia expands Ovi beta – adds 12 languages, tweaks sign-ups and promises web mail portal

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It’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to set up a POP3 email account on a mobile phone that there’s a GAPING HOLE in the market for a simple, decent mobile email service that (a) works and (b) your dad can set up on his own without having to spend five hours on the phone to Nokia, Carphone Warehouse and, inevitably, you.

It’s a gap Nokia hopes its Mail on Ovi mobile service will ably fill. The Ovi mail beta has been expanded to include 12 languages, with the simple Series 40 app allowing mobile users from those 12 bits of the world to set up new Ovi email accounts directly on their handsets…