November 2008 Archives

Green indeed!

We can now trade our used electronics in exchange for Amazon.com gift cards through third-party Gazelle.com.

This is both a convenience and additional way to save money this season. It's also a very handy option to trade in unwanted items for Amazon.com gift cards.

Gazelle, which recycles or resells the used devices depending on their condition, also provides users with the option to receive their payments in the form of a check or PayPal deposit -- or to have it donated to charity.

The company said that its customers earn an average of about $115 when selling their electronic devices -- but doesn't say how many gadgets that is.

Sears.com recently unveiled a similar offer through Venjuvo.com.

Thanks to TWICE. 

(And thanks to HowStuffWorkscom for the image.)

I'm getting mighty ticked off with Yahoo! Mail lately. I have industry contacts, family, and friends that use yahoo.com email accounts and I've been getting this "defer" messages lately. Yahoo is using an anti-spam tactic where they "defer" the message from your SMTP server. It's also known as "greylisting".

Yahoo mail denies the first delivery attempt of an email (421 Message temporarily deferred). Yahoo assumes that spammers don't try sending the same email twice, so they put the IP address of that email server in a list and then if the delivery is retried within a short amount of time, they assume that it is a good email and "accept" the SMTP connection for mail delivery. It's too resource intensive for spammers to retry emails, which is why spammers mass blast programs give up after one try.

The SMTP protocol, configured on valid email servers, was designed such that it will retry to send an email several times before failing. Unfortunately, Yahoo's greylisting has gotten super aggressive, often deferring tmcnet.com emails to yahoo.com email addresses so many times that eventually our email server gives up.

Even worse, often times 24 hours goes by before I get an email undeliverable message! I had an important email that I assumed was delivered and I didn't know until a day later that it bounced!

Here's an example:

This message could not be delivered. The TMC I.C.E. Box will not make any further attempts to deliver the message.

A record of the delivery attempts made follows:

We were unable to connect to the destination server(s):
On Thu Nov 13 at 14:51 EST, Message exceeded queue lifetime. Bouncing.
On Thu Nov 13 at 14:51 EST, Connected to 216.39.53.2 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Thu Nov 13 at 11:38 EST, 68.142.202.247 failed after I sent the message. \ Remote host said: 451 Message temporarily deferred - [70] On Thu Nov 13 at 08:38 EST, Connected to 66.196.82.7 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Thu Nov 13 at 05:51 EST, Connected to 206.190.53.191 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Thu Nov 13 at 03:18 EST, 209.191.88.247 failed after I sent the message. \ Remote host said: 451 Message temporarily deferred - [70] On Thu Nov 13 at 00:58 EST, Connected to 209.191.118.103 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 22:51 EST, Connected to 216.39.53.1 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 20:58 EST, Connected to 66.196.97.250 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 19:18 EST, Connected to 216.39.53.3 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 17:51 EST, Connected to 66.196.97.250 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 16:38 EST, Connected to 67.195.168.31 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 15:38 EST, Connected to 209.191.118.103 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 14:51 EST, 66.196.82.7 failed after I sent the message. \ Remote host said: 421 Message temporarily deferred - 4.16.51. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 14:18 EST, Connected to 209.191.118.103 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 13:58 EST, Connected to 209.191.88.247 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html
On Wed Nov 12 at 13:51 EST, Connected to 209.191.118.103 but greeting failed. \ Remote host said: 421 Message from (206.252.203.30) temporarily deferred - 4.16.50. Please refer to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-06.html

You'll notice that the IP addresses are all different, since Yahoo has tons of email servers. TMC uses a similar greylisting feature from Sendio's anti-spam appliance, but I have it set to "permissive" and not "aggressive". Were I to set it to "aggresive", then if an email came in from a different IP address, our Sendio appliance would defer the message again even if the email was previously deferred from a different IP address. By setting it to "permissive" it allows the same domain email to come in via different IP addresses.

My guess is Yahoo has their email servers set to "aggresive" and they don't have a centralized "defer" database. So when I send an email to a Yahoo address, it's going to be pure luck if I hit the same server again after being deferred. Thus, this will result in bouncebacks after being deferred ad infinitum.

Check out Yahoo's own Q&A, which essentially puts the onus on the "sender" and places no blame on themselves for failed email delivery :

421 Message temporarily deferred - [numeric code]

If you are seeing the error "421 Message temporarily deferred - [numeric code]", where "[numeric code]" shows a specific diagnostic code (e.g., "4.16.51", "4.16.52") in your SMTP logs, this indicates that:

1. the message you attempted to send exhibited characteristics indicative of spam,and/or
2. emails from your network have been generating complaints from Yahoo! Mail users.

This is a temporary error and your mail server may automatically re-try sending emails at a later time. However, we do encourage you to examine your outbound queues to ensure that spammers are not abusing your mail server.

Are you seeing the same error consistently over an extended period of time? If so, we encourage you to provide us with detailed information, including the error and diagnostic code(s) you see in your logs, so that we can help diagnose your problem.

For bulk mailers, please visit this page to review our best practice recommendations and request assistance.

If your mail server does not primarily send bulk mailings (e.g., you run a personal, corporate, educational, or ISP mail server), please fill out this form instead.

If you're not the administrator of the mail server in question, please contact the administrator directly with the error message you're receiving.

This question/answer wasn't very helpful either:

Q: As a sender, how can I ensure uninterrupted SMTP access and prioritized delivery?

A: Yahoo! Mail has become more aggressive in its acceptance of SMTP connections and denies connections by IP address when these connections do not conform to Internet standard practices. To continue uninterrupted access and prioritized delivery, you should ensure that your email address lists are well maintained. If you are conforming to these standards, then these policies should only affect you positively. We anticipate improvements in delivery times and in available connections.

If you consistently see 451 SMTP error codes you should review your email practices and policies, especially the following:

• Remove email addresses that bounce. Bounces are an indication that the mail could not be delivered because the user does not exist, no longer exists, or is unable to accept your email. List managers should remove addresses that generate bounces. A particularly popular technique for managing bounces is to use VERP to identify the recipient address that has failed.
• Examine your retry policies. Messages that receive permanent errors, such as emails sent to accounts that do not exist or are over quota, should not be retried. Permanent errors that are retried increase the likelihood that delivery will not receive the priority it deserves.
• Pay attention to the responses from our SMTP servers.The SMTP protocol defines response codes that tell your server what to do next. In particular, our server will send "500" SMTP response codes to indicate problems that you need to investigate. For example, if an email is sent to an invalid recipient, our servers will respond with a "500" range SMTP code, indicating a permanent error. Large numbers of emails sent to non-existant accounts may be indicative of a systemic problem. Many companies following best email list practices treat email addresses that have received a "500" range SMTP codes specially. For instance, many companies place these addresses into a special queue that tests for continued bounces after longer and longer periods of time. This helps them maximize delivery to email addresses that exist and minimize wasted bandwidth costs.
• Don't send unsolicited email. Make sure that all email addresses are confirmed with an opt-in process that ensures the recipient wants to receive your mail. Obtaining permission from a third party to send an email does not ensure the email is solicited. Probably the best way to confirm an email addresses before adding them to a mailing list is by using closed-loop confirmation (sometimes referred to as "full confirmation," "full verification," "confirmed voluntary subscription," or "double opt-in"). In this process, after you receive a subscription request, you send a confirmation email to that address which requires some affirmative action before that email address is added to the mailing list. Since only the true owner of that email address can respond, you will know that the true owner has truly intended to subscribe and that the address is valid.
• Provide a method of unsubscribing from your list in each mail you send.
• Ensure that your mail servers are not open relays, and that your servers attempt to detect and deny connections to open proxies. At a minimum, your SMTP servers should identify the originating IP addresses that of the email and indicate this in the email headers to help you diagnose spam problems. There are a variety of open relay testers available.

If you conform to the above practices and are still seeing delivery problems, please fill out this form so that we can help you diagnose your problem. Please do not use this form to report spam

Today, TMC announced the launch of NGN Magazine focused on next generation networks and how service providers and carriers can build these networks and what they will need to know to maximize savings and ARPU (average revenue per user).

"We're in an interesting time," says TMC President and Group Publisher, Rich Tehrani. No, he's not referring to the American political scene or the chaotic American economy. Rich is referring to Next Generation Networks, which Rich believes will be critical to the future of service providers and carriers. Certainly, in these tough economic times, squeezing the most efficiency and most value-add services is critical. Verizon is probably the best example of that. They've been investing billions in their fiber-based FiOS service which supports high-speed Internet, voice, and TV/video/HDTV.  They are no doubt also looking to tie in their considerable wireless/cellular network with their FiOS network to offer customers a competitive advantage over competing solutions.

In his video interview with TMCnet Group Managing Editor Erik Linask, Rich discusses NGN Magazine. [click to visit video link]



The topics TMC's NGN magazine will address, some of which Rich mentions in the video interview:

» How do you deploy new services and applications ?
» What technology should you consider ?
» How do you integrate new technologies with legacy elements?

Erik points out that a lot of publishing companies have been cutting down on staff and even folding print publications. Rich addresses this point by pointing out that 2-3 million executives visit tmcnet.com to read the content digitally. He also discusses how TMC offers digital (PDF) versions of the print magazines which greatly reduces costs. Thousands of people subscribe to the digital PDF format.

While all facets of the economy seem to be slowing down, TMC continues to grow -- not only launching a new magazine, but recently adding new telecom/wireless industry talent such as Carl Ford, Scott Kargman, and more. Newspapers may die, print magazines may fold, but good information and news will always be needed. And where there is a need for good information, people will pay for it. Publishing companies which are nimble enough to adjust to the trend towards online news dissemination will survive, while those that can't will die.

Case in point is the NY Times, which must deliver $400 million to lenders in May of 2009 or face bankruptcy. But if you're a New York Times fan, don't worry. I'm sure President-elect Barrack Obama will add them to the $700+ billion bailout. Can't have the NY Times go bankrupt, can we? Don't answer that question...

As one of my sources told me a few days ago, IBM and Microsoft planned on offering Sametime and OCS 2007 integration to be announced at VoiceCon. Three days ago I wrote:

Rumor has it that Microsoft and/or IBM will announce integration between Office Communications Server 2007 and IBM's Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" platform at this week's VoiceCon show. If true, this would combine approximately 20 million Sametime users with Microsoft's fast growing OCS 2007 user base creating the largest unified communications user base.

Well, it just hit the newswires. At Voicecon, IBM and Microsoft announced that IBM Sametime and OCS will offer Interdomain Federation in Q4 of 2008, using SIP/SIMPLE.

The support will require an update to the Sametime Gateway 8.0.2. It will support OCS 2007 and OCE 2007 R2.

Keynote Systems released their latest VoIP quality report with some interesting findings. For one, Comcast, a cable company dominated the voice quality rankings beating the closest competitor by nearly 300 points. As for reliability, to no surprise AT&T won this category, no doubt to their decades of experience in building reliable voice and data networks.

Keynote Systems measures VoIP quality (MOS scores), call completion, etc. by automatically placing calls from corporate apartments using residential VoIP services and network services just like a typical residential customer would.  Service Reliability scores are based on the key performance metrics of Service Availability, Average Answer Time and Number of Dropped Calls. Additionally,  Audio Quality is an aggregate of Audio Clarity and Audio Delay (latency, jitter) performance factors. The study compares the relative performance of PSTN (regular analog) service, Broadband VoIP providers (e.g. Vonage, Verizon VoiceWing, EarthLink trueVoice, AT&T CallVantage etc), and cable voice services (e.g. Time Warner Digital Phone, Comcast Digital Voice). Test calls were placed from residential locations in New York and San Francisco.

Keynote ranked VoIP Service Providers in two categories: Reliability and Audio Quality. The Service Availability, Call Completion, Average Answer Time, and Dropped Audio performance factors all contribute to the Reliability ranking.

In the summary report they only list the top 3 VoIP provider names and then have Provider D - I as anonymous. You have to purchase the full report to see the names. I'm guessing Packet8 and Vonage are somewhere in this anonymous list.

Provider                   Reliability Points    Rank 
AT&T Landline                    996                1
Time Warner Digital Phone        925                2
Verizon VoiceWing                872                3
Provider D                       859                4
Provider E                       793                5
Provider F                       687                6
Provider G                       643                7
Provider H                       408                8
Provider I                       374                9

Audio Quality
Provider                   Reliability Points     Rank 
Comcast Digital Voice            901                1
Verizon VoiceWing                609                2
AT&T Landline                    506                3
Provider D                       500                4
Provider E                       487                5
Provider F                       480                6
Provider G                       462                7
Provider H                       252                8
Provider I                       0                  9

General Observations
• The best providers always deliver dial tine and connect the call to the number dialed in a timely fashion.
• Only one of the providers in the study failed to provide dial tone 99.9% of the time or better.
• All providers had very small percentages of calls with dropped audio, but only two providers had zero calls with dropped audio.
• One VoIP provider required two seconds more than any other voice provider to connect calls after dialing.
• Most providers had slightly more audio delay and slightly lower MOS in Wave 6 as compared to Wave 5.
• Eight of the nine providers in the study had a better call completion rate in Wave 6 than was evidenced in the Wave 5 results.

What's amazing is that Comcast has been adding a ton of new VoIP customers each quarter. In fact, Comcast has become the nation's fourth largest phone company. The cable company has signed up four million VoIP customers in just the last two years. Relatedly, Forrester Research analysts have projected that Cable VoIP providers will claim up to 80% of the 28.4 million residential VoIP users by 2013. This forecast includes an expected growth from the approximately 19 million installed lines in 2008.

Check out the summary report.

Crazy Eddie take note!
 
The Friday immediately following Thanksgiving has long been known as "Black Friday" because it represents the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season, or the day when retailers hold massive sales in hopes of steering their (red) losses into (black) profits.

And from what I've been reading about holiday shopping this year, gadgets may be one of the few bright spots ... 

Among the most heavily discounted electronics items poised to dominate this year's sales are low cost notebooks, according to sources, who note that Dell plans to offer $299 linux model via its website, while Wal-Mart markets a $299 Compaq and Best Buy a $299 eMachines portable.

And do yo think Apple will be sitting quietly ...

... Didn't think so; so check out AppleInsider.

And thanks to blogs.phillynews.com for the image.

Hopefully, these prices are insane!!!!!

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations allegedy engaged in spam activity was taken offline, according to security firms that monitor spam distribution online. 

Immediately after two Internet providers cut off MoColo's connectivity to the Internet, security companies charted a precipitous drop in spam volumes worldwide.

E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66% as of Tuesday evening, and Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from approximatley 40 spam e-mails per second to 10 per second.

Did you notice?

And let us all say, Amen.

Click The Washington Post for more.

Yes, there was a commuter this morning waiting for the 7:17 reading his Kindle.

And that's all I needed to start thinking about ebooks and ebook readers and how maybe someday all printed material will be digital and there will be no more newspapers or magazines.

Wait! I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.

Do find the whole thing pretty cool so was intrigued by this piece of writing today.  

So all you ever wanted to know about the Sony Reader PRS-700 is here at Mobile Tech Review. A very positive review, but there is something amiss ...

What's the catch? The touch screen layer reduces contrast. Yikes!!!

Digital readers like the Reader and Amazon's Kindle use e-ink technology, a very low power, paper-like display that's non-glare and high contrast (much like a book's pages).

Touch isn't part of the e-ink technology, nor is backlighting, so we rarely see a reader offering these. Sony, cutting-edge company that they are, found a way to add these two desirable features.

Sony added a touch layer on top of the e-ink display and embedded LED side-lights into the frame that surrounds the display. Clever.  

That's the good, and like I said, check out the whole story at Mobile Tech Review.

I'm always a bit skeptical of VoIP security vulnerabilities discovered by firms which sell security products. Nevertheless, I thought it was worth sharing this bit of news.

Update: Microsoft responded that VoIPShield's test is "on a non-secure implementation of OCS, which you would have to disable as we are secure with a default installation."

See, that's why I was "a bit skeptical"!

VoIPshield Laboratories, the research division of VoIPshield Systems Inc., is making its first-ever announcement in a new category of research related to security vulnerabilities in VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) systems. These vulnerabilities affect applications that use media stream protocols like RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol), a popular standardized packet format for delivering audio and instant messaging over the Internet.

The Microsoft products affected are Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator and Windows Live Messenger. These products deliver software-powered VoIP, presence, instant messaging and audio/video/Web conferencing functionality to end users. Microsoft estimates that over 250 million computers worldwide run these applications. All use RTP to deliver the content of the message; therefore all are vulnerable to this class of attack.

"Most of the attention in enterprise VoIP/UC security has been paid to the control channel, where SIP and other signalling protocols are used," said Ken Kousky, CEO of security research and analysis firm IP3 and advisor to the VoIP Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology. "Until now, the media stream has been largely ignored by the security community as a source of malicious activity. But attacks from these vectors have the potential to be dangerously persistent and widespread."

The Microsoft vulnerabilities announced today, if exploited, cause a Denial of Service (DoS) condition against not only the stated applications but the entire desktop environment.

"Today's announcements are just the tip of the iceberg," said Andriy Markov, director of VoIPshield Labs. "Although they are specific to Microsoft's applications, similar flaws exist in other VoIP vendors' products. And many other media stream attacks exist that have more severe implications than service availability. We're presently validating new research that shows an attacker can gain unauthorized access to an unsuspecting user's laptop by manipulating the packets of a VoIP phone call. We believe that these attacks can even be made to traverse a PSTN gateway."

Under its Responsible Disclosure Policy, VoIPshield confidentially discloses full details of the vulnerabilities to the affected vendors, and works with them to facilitate the development of application fixes. Details of the vulnerabilities are not publicly disclosed.

Securing the media stream is particularly challenging because once the messaging session is established, the flow of voice packets is not always monitored and managed by the call server.

"Media traffic, whether it's voice or video, can travel peer-to-peer," Kousky added. "Security practitioners have historically considered blocking peer-to-peer traffic as the best protection practice. Unfortunately, for voice packets that strategy doesn't work and so careful consideration has to be given to the placement of the protection mechanisms within the network."

"VoIP and Unified Communications represent not only new technologies, but new paradigms in the way information is communicated and consumed," said Rick Dalmazzi, VoIPshield's president & CEO. "The result is brand new vectors of attack against the entire corporate IT infrastructure. Companies must start now to educate themselves in this new area of security. VoIPshield has been working exclusively in VoIP and UC security since 2004 and has compiled a number of assessment and protection techniques and products for enterprise networks."

Effective immediately, customers of VoIPshield's VoIPguardTM VoIP/UC Intrusion Prevention System can download the new signatures using the VoIPshield UpdateTM subscription service. VoIPguard contains over 500 VoIP/UC specific signatures to detect and prevent malicious signalling and media traffic.

In April, VoIPshield was named one of five "Cool Vendors in Infrastructure Protection for 2008" by Gartner. In October VoIPshield was named one of the "Top 50 Canadian Companies" by Red Herring.

Internet Explorer 6 Mobile browser is close to release, with the Windows Mobile Team Blog announcing the availability of emulator images of Windows Mobile 6.1.4 containing the updated browser. Even though Microsoft is finalizing IE 8 for PCs, it's only up to version IE 6 for its mobile platform, though IE8's javascript engine is backported to IE6 Mobile.

Check out the features in Pocket Internet Explorer 6 Mobile (PIE6):

• Improved fidelity (support for full fidelity desktop rendering)
• Layout fixes to accommodate a mobile screen (text wrap)
• Enhanced Script and AJAX support (Jscript v5.7 from Internet Explorer 8)
• Improved multimedia experience (Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 for Adobe Flash content)
• Deeper integration with search
• Enhanced cursor navigation model
• Touch and gesture support - pan support
• Multiple zoom levels
• Easy switching between mobile / desktop versions of sites by specifying UA strings.

The question is, is this too little, too late? Several browsers have surpassed Pocket Internet Explorer to become the mobile browser of choice, including Opera Mini, which just released Opera Mini 4.2 yesterday, but also Opera Mobile 9.5, and Skyfire, which handles video streaming Flash sites such Youtube. And let's not forget the forthcoming mobile Fennec browser by Mozilla. Still, the touch and gesture support in PIE6 is a welcome addition and no doubt in response to the popularity of the Apple iPhone web browser.

You can download the emulator images from Microsoft here. If you're really good, you can pull out the emulator code, convert it to a .cab and install the browser on your Windows Mobile.

Cisco Systems unveiled a supercharged router called the ASR 9000, which is capable of moving 6.4 terabytes per second of traffic. The router is aimed at service providers with next-generation networks which plan to run bandwidth heavy services such as video, IPTV, mobile broadband, and more. With the explosion of Youtube videos, and other bandwidth-hungry apps, service providers are looking to stay ahead of the bandwidth demand curve. The ASR 9000 hopes to address that need with the ability to support the future "Zettabyte era". According to CRN, "The Cisco Aggregation Services Router 9000 Series (ASR 9000) is designed to be the carrier Ethernet foundation for the "Zettabyte era," said Doug Webster, Cisco's senior director of service provider marketing. According to Webster, Cisco expects IP traffic to reach half of a Zettabyte by 2012."

Cisco's Pankaj Patel, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Service Provider Technology Group called and left me a message stating that their new hardware took four years and a whopping $200 million to develop.

The ASR 9000 router is capable of transmitting data at a rate of 6.4 trillion bits per second, and it has 10 times the bandwidth capacity of Cisco's ASR 1000 router.

Pankaj Patel also told the San Jones Mercury Times, "We truly believe consumer IP traffic will more than quadruple by 2012," He said the new router is capable of delivering 200 movies per second or 250,000 MP3s per second.

Price: It's expected to go for around $80,000.

Opera Mini 4.2 beta just launched today. Opera Mini is one of my favorite mobile phone Internet browsers. It's a tough call between Opera Mini and Skyfire. Skyfire supports Flash and video, so it's better at multimedia, however, I find Opera Mini better suited to regular web pages with just graphics and text. Opera Mini is much faster at loading web pages and scrolling than Skyfire. Still, I use both on my Windows Mobile.

That said, today Opera Mini is trying to add video streaming support. Ironically, yesterday I was trying to figure out how to copy/paste my Orb TV streaming links from Opera Mini 4.1 to Pocket IE so I could stream live TV. I prefer browsing via Opera Mini, but I have to use Pocket IE to stream video/audio. I could use the popular MortScript to add copy/paste functionality, but unfortunately, it only allows pasting into Opera Mini and not from Opera Mini. In any event, in 4.2 when you are browsing video content, such as Youtube, Opera Mini will launch your regular Windows mobile browser (Pocket IE) with a prompt that says "Open URL? Yes / No" with a link similar to this - http://server4.operamini.com/hr02-14/5oxerx.../2/196. I figured out that this is like Opera Mini's version of tinyURL to point directly to the Youtube video. If you click 'Yes', it then launches Pocket Internet Explorer with a single URL on the web page "Start Stream". When I clicked this link it then said "Running a system command on this item might be unsafe. Do you wish to continue? Yes / No" with no option to save my preference for the future. (Pocket IE's fault not Opera Mini).  My default media player launched and then I got "An unknown error 0X8007274D has occurred." I looked at the URL it was trying to open and it looked similar to this:
rtsp://prug.rtsp-youtube.I.google.com/CkcLENy73wIaPgn43DiE8... (bunch more letters and numbers)

I'm guessing Windows Media Player couldn't handle the long string. It probably has a character limit.

Even if it did work, it's a bit of kludge, though I'm glad they're finally working on video support. I toggle to Skyfire when I need video. Opera said, "We are working to make video content available on more phones through Opera Mini. If you have a new Sony Ericsson or Nokia phone, the chance is high that you can take Opera Mini for a spin on m.youtube.com". So I guess Ericsson and Nokia users might have better luck than me.

Some other benefits of Opera Mini 4.2 over 4.1:
- Opera Mini 4.2 can use their newly established server park in the U.S. for faster performance.

- Sync your notes. The handy Notes functionality from the Opera Desktop Web browser just got more portable through Opera Link. All of your notes are available in Opera Mini directly from the Bookmarks menu.

- Personalize Opera Mini by choosing a new colorful skin. They reintroduced the popular skinning feature from Opera Mini 3.

Overall, I like the new version, especially the speed bump. No need for my Opera Mini browser to connect to Opera's servers in Norway and then back across the Atlantic. Still, I wish they allowed me to copy/paste links for cases when I need to use my alternate browser.

more info here.

The snom 820, snom's high-end IP phone, today will debut for the North American enterprise and small and medium-sized business (SMB) markets. I remarked on the snom 820's sleek design, large high-resolution TFT color display, and wideband codec support when the product first launched last month.

The snom 820 is now generally available today in the US, Canada, and Mexico through snom's network of North American distributors and resellers and has an MSRP of US $419.

I have an 820 that I'm currently testing. Below is a couple photos I took. Full-fledged review coming soon!

Shipments of four classes of wireless audio and video connectivity products for the home will increase nearly 500% by the end of 2013, according to a new study from ABI Research.

The four technologies involved are named as Bluetooth, WiFi, ultra-wideband (UWB) and 60 GHz. The last one is described by ABI Research as the "likely standard-bearer" for in-home wireless distribution of uncompressed high-definition video.

The research firm adds that as the wireless home electronics market grows, these technologies will coexist and become closely integrated according to their strengths and specialities.

More at Connected Home News. 

An upcoming Wal-Mart sale will offer Black Friday-like deals, including a notebook for $298 and 46-inch 1080p LCD HDTV for $798.

Just as it did last year with a sale that lured shoppers into its maze of fluorescent lighting for $350 laptops, Wal-Mart will once again begin its holiday sales early with a one-day shopping event to precede Black Friday.

The company's sale will include several high-profile deals, including a laptop for $298, a 46-inch Sanyo LCD HDTV for $798, and a PS3 that comes with a $100 gift card.

Specifications on the $298 laptop, a Compaq CQ50-139WM, have moved up significantly from the models offered as last year's doorbusters. Though it will still get a single-core Intel Celeron M processor clocked at 2GHz, the CQ50 also gets 2GB of DDR2 RAM a 160GB hard drive, and Intel's 4500MHD media accelerator. 

More at DigitalTrends.