Great news for all web application developers: David Heinemeier Hansson, the rails-core-team and many others from the rails community put an early present under the xmas tree: Ruby on Rails 2.0.1. Thank you!

Great to see, that T-Mobile can listen to the complains of their customers. At the start of the holiday season the big "magenta" touched up the iPhone-rates in Germany:

• You don’t find any EDGE-bandwidth throttling in the rate description. Finally, the data-flatrate is a data-flatrate.
• The Complete XL package is now extremely interesting for heavy telephone users: Any Minute above the included 1.000 free Minutes is charged at low rate of 0,09 Euros.
• Also the additional Minutes of the smaller packages are cheaper, now.
• The "Rate-Designers" of T-Mobile upped the ante by adding a weekend telephone flat to all the packages.

Overall, T-Mobile took severe criticism to heart. So, it’s time for kudos to the "Magenta"-team for that reaction! The other mobile operators can take a leaf out of T-Mobile’s book.

Also the first movers, who signed a iPhone contract can respire: All of them will benefit automatically from the new rates.

Source: t-mobile.de

The Deutsche Telekom - and its subsidiary T-Mobile - antagonize designers and creatives by claiming a trademark for the color magenta at the European brandoffice. No other company should be allowed to use this color for their stationary advertising campaigns. Strictly speaking, this would lead to the fact that only the Deutsche Telekom would be allowed to print in full color: Finally nearly all full color prints are realized with the four colors C - cyan, M - magenta, Y - yellow and K - black.
Graphic designers in the Netherlands started a "consumer created content campaign" against the prohibition to use magenta in advertisement.

As a result, the claiming of the color magenta as a trademark may damage the value of the Deutsche Telekom image substantially.

Source & picture: freemagenta.nl, source: connectedmarketing.de

It really looked that easy: Apple picks one exclusive mobile network operator, negotiates a data flat fee fort he iPhone customers and makes money out of hardware sales and mobile spendings of the iPhone customers. And by the way Apple creates an iPhone-hype for the market rollout. The media loves the long lines of waiting iPhone-fans in front of the AppleStores at the first rollout day.

It still worked out great in the United States with their partner AT&T. But in Europe - and especially in Germany - the iPhone rollout evolves into a farce:

• The iPhone can only play to it’s strength with a data flat rate. The customer must not think about the costs of fetching those e-mails, loading a web-page or getting the directions with GoogleMaps. The iPhone concept is only working this way! But T-Mobile seems to afraid of their customers: They sell them a data flat rate which, strictly speaking, isn’t a data flat rate: Depending on the rate plan, customers get a bandwidth limitation to a max. 64 kbit/s download and 16 kbit/s upload starting after downloading 200 MB (Complete M), 1 GB (Complete L) and 5 GB (Complete XL) per month. In plain language: T-Mobile is not charging any additional fees for heavy data usage, but they punish those customers by drastically throttling their data bandwidth.
• The competitor Vodafone was able to provoke T-Mobile to offer a SIM-lock free iPhone for 999 Euro with an interim injunction against the exclusive T-Mobile iPhone bundle. The SIM-lock free iPhone is a world premiere - and a new uncertainty for the customers. Only the worldwide developer community has to thank Vodafone for that step: Now it will be much easier to get a SIM-lock-free test-device, worldwide. There will also be a SIM-lock-free iPhone in France - but anyway this fact is clear before the rollout on November 29th.

Maybe T-Mobile realizes that it would help them to cross their bandwidth-throttling footnote out of their contracts - then the farce would turn into a winter tale. Christmas is near

Sources: fscklog.com, macwelt.de, heise.de

According to techcrunch, Chine declared war on western search engines, like Google and Yahoo. All requests to those search engine sites from within China are redirected to Baidu. This takes cyberwar to a next level. Or should we say DNS-cyberwar? A cyberwar against companies like Google and Yahoo, but also a fight against the freedom of speech and the freedom of information. But to be honest … this cyberwar against honest citizens who want user their right for freedom of speech or freedom of information … is not only situated in China. Also in western democracies like, the US or within the EU these fundamental citizen rights are called into question also. So, let’s hope that freedom and democracy are on the winning side at the end.

Source: techcrunch.com