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UK mobile users fear 'bill shock'

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 11 Apr 2011

UK mobile users fear 'bill shock'

Three-quarters of mobile phone subscribers are wasting an average of nearly £200 a year, because they are on the wrong contract, research suggests, says the BBC.

Billmonitor said people were going on higher price plans than they needed to avoid being penalised for exceeding their free minutes. The fear of "bill shock" was so great that customers typically bought four times more talk time than they needed.

Researchers concluded that the UK's mobile phone users were wasting nearly £5 billion a year on misjudged contracts.

Wozniak mulls Apple comeback

Steve Wozniak - Apple co-founder, chief scientist at SSD start-up Fusion-io, and renowned prankster - has told Reuters that he's willing to add another chapter to his storied career: a return to Apple, reports The Register.

“I'd consider it, yeah,” he told an interviewer, who asked if he would be willing to “play a more active role” at Apple if approached by Jobs and Co.

The interview took place in Brighton, where Wozniak is attending the SQLbits conference to present awards to winners of the “Crappy Code Games” in conjunction with his position at Fusion-io, a sponsor of the conference.

Russia rejects Web sites ban bid

A Kremlin official has rejected a proposal from within Russia's main domestic security agency to ban Skype, Gmail and Hotmail as a major threat to national security, notes the Associated Press.

A senior FSB official made the proposal on Friday, according to Russian news agencies. It came after cyber attacks on Russia's most popular blogging site and the Web site of a popular independent newspaper.

While a Kremlin official condemned the cyber attacks on condition of anonymity on Saturday and dismissed the proposal to ban foreign Internet services, commentators saw them as an attempt by authorities to tighten controls on communications before parliamentary elections in December and a presidential vote next March.

Jobs' biography on the cards

It's official: the first official biography of Steve Jobs will make its debut sometime in early 2012, writes Mashable.

The book, iSteve: The Book of Jobs, is being penned by Walter Isaacson, famed biographer and the former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time.

While little is known about the contents of the book, Isaacson did manage to obtain unprecedented access to Apple, Steve Jobs and even Jobs' family. Simon & Schuster will publish and distribute the book.

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