OTG Daily News

(Atlantic Wire)If a number's not in our address book, attached to a very familiar name, there's no reason to pick it up -- it's probably something evil. Before, if a number even had a familiar area code, it was probably okay to pick it up. It was the hairdresser confirming an appointment, or the school calling about your good-for-nothing kids. But now that telemarketers and debt collectors have figured out ways to game call-screeners by spoofing phone numbers, as The New York Times's Matt Richtel points out , we have completely lost trust in any unknown numbers. "You don’t know who is on the other end of the line, no matter what your caller ID might say," Sandy Chalmers, a division manager at the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection in Wisconsin, told Richtel. But in an age when many people carry cell phones stocked with hundreds or thousands of phone numbers accumulated over the years, Caller ID is already behind the times. We're trai...

LONDON/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - AT&T said it would take a $4 billion charge in case its takeover of T-Mobile USA fails, reflecting the dwindling chances for the deal seen as job-destroying by powerful political opponents. The telecommunications group and T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom, said they would continue to pursue anti-trust approval for the $39 billion takeover from the U.S. Department of Justice, but withdrew for now applications to the industry regulator. "AT&T Inc and Deutsche Telekom AG are continuing to pursue the sale of Deutsche Telekom's U.S. wireless assets to AT&T," they said in a statement on Thursday, the Thanksgiving Day holiday in the United States. AT&T declined to comment on the timing of the announcement beyond the statement. Both the DOJ and telecoms watchdog the Federal Communications Commission oppose the deal, which would reduce the number of national mobile carriers to three while consumers are struggling to make ends mee...

The U.S. government is giving a nearly half-million dollar grant to a beer maker in Alaska that aims to install a first-of-its-kind boiler that is fueled entirely by spent grain. All brewers are confronted with mountains of spent grains — mostly barley. Many get rid of the waste by routing it to farmers for animal feed, a noble service that can help grow a steak to accompany your fine ale. For the Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juneau, this has involved an added step, since the closest market for its grains is a long-distance, boat-ride away in Seattle. To keep the grains from decomposing during transport, the brewery first dries them in a machine that is heated by a biomass burner that uses about 50 percent of the spent grain as a fuel source. Now, with the help of the $458,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Energy for America program, the brewery is installing a machine that will use the dried grain to power a biomass steam boiler. "The new boiler...

"I saw two this evening," one Facebook user wrote us Monday night, in an email that contained two screenshots from her Newsfeed. "The porn, to each their own ... but the dog and the blood just turned my stomach ... disgusting." She's not alone. In the past two days, Facebook users have become increasingly vocal about graphic photos — pornography and mutilated corpses of humans and animals — showing up on Facebook Newsfeeds. Facebook users forwarded several screen shots to Technolog, which we forwarded to the social network, but won't publish at this time. Facebook did not specifically address the images but they did provide this official statement: Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us and we are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms. We have recently experienced an increase in reports and we are investigating and addressing the issue. Face...

This post comes from Jeffry Bartash at partner site MarketWatch . Electronic gadgets are huge holiday sellers but it's hard to find really cool stuff for $100 or less. Most of the popular items such as iPads and laptops cost considerably more. With a half-nod toward thriftiness in these tough economic times, here are some gifts to consider that won't cost more than a C-note. uNu battery case for iPhones ($35 for the Power DX-1700B model ). Are you constantly running out of juice? The uNu might be the answer. It's a nifty device that protects your iPhone from damage -- and recharges a dead battery. That's because the uNu is a battery pack shaped like a cover. Beyond Talk wireless plan ($35 a month). Want iPhone capabilities without iPhone costs? Sprint-owned Virgin Mobile has the best-value plan among the major carriers. Beyond Talk allows unlimited text and Internet. The catch: Voice minutes are limited to 300 and customers have to pay full price for a phone. ...

We r so thru! Using the Internet or a cell phone to end that romantic relationship may be somewhat cold-hearted, but more and more people are doing it, a quirky new survey shows. Of 550 social media users polled by Lab42, a Chicago-based research firm, 33% admitted to have broken off a romance using text messages, email or Facebook. Even more — 40% of those questioned — said they would have no qualms about using a technological medium to tell a lover to take a hike. The survey may not have been scientific, but it provided a peek into how the Internet is changing people’s love lives — and making the always painful breakup conversation impersonal and in many ways less messy. Those questioned in the poll were all over the age of 18. Among the respondents, about 41% were single, 24% were in a relationship and 24% said they were married. New Yorkers, meanwhile, offered mixed reviews as to whether they would give “likes” to dumping a lover via text or the Internet. “Breaking up...

Facebook users, beware: There is a nasty virus quickly spreading across the social network that floods accounts with gruesome images of beastiality, hardcore pornography, self-mutilation and a variety of other very-NSFW pictures, reports Emil Protalinski at ZDnet . Facebook has confirmed the presence of the virus, and says it is currently investigating the matter. “Facebook is aware of these reports and we are investigating the issue,” said a Facebook spokesperson in a statement. According to The Christian Post , which first reported the virus, the nasty cyber attack maybe be the work of Anonymous, whose members have previously vowed to launch an attack on the social network as retribution for “selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world.” The involvement of Anonymous is so far unconfirmed. While we have not yet been exposed to the spam virus ourselves, others say t...

NEW YORK (AP) — The Kindle was always an odd product name. Amazon  used a verb to name a thing, raising the question: Kindle what? Now we have the answer: Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is the first full-color, touch-screen Kindle. It's available in the U.S. starting Monday for $199. A price like that for what's essentially a small iPad is bound to light the flames of desire this holiday season. I want to cool those down a bit, or some of you will buy the Fire and feel burned. The Fire is the best Kindle yet, no doubt about it. It's amazing that it costs half of what the first Kindle cost, just four years ago, yet does so much more than display books. It's more of an all-purpose computer than an e-reader. It shows movies, TV shows and Web pages. It does email and lets you play games. You'll be lucky to get any reading done, with so many other things to do. But it has to be weighed against the competition. When you do that, it becomes apparent just how spare Amazon ha...

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University as a dropout with a novel idea. He returned Monday with a triumphant message: He's hiring. The 27-year-old CEO received a rock-star welcome during his first official visit since he left for California's Silicon Valley in 2004 . He made his recruitment pitch to 250 students at Harvard after a similar meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . "We're just getting started," he told reporters and a few hundred students who gathered at the Harvard campus to catch a glimpse of the Internet pioneer. "The next five or 10 years are going to be about all the different products and industries that can be rethought." So many students turned out to see the sweatshirted billionaire outside a university library that campus officials had to set up temporary barriers to separate him from his audience. Aaron Perez, an 18-year-old freshman from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said...

A new app called Card Case foretells a world without cash and plastic. Paying for stuff with your phone sounds awesome until you stop to think about it. It seems like every major tech company, including Google , is touting the fact that we’ll soon be able to buy anything and everything by waving our phones against a pay pad. Wait a second: Why is this supposed to be any better than pulling out a credit card? It’s not faster, it’s not more convenient, and it’s not any safer. Plus, many phones—and most stores’ pay pads—don’t yet have the necessary “ near-field communication ” chips required for these sorts of transactions, so the whole idea is kind of a fantasy anyway. I pointed out this flaw several months ago , and I still haven’t heard any good argument for why we should be paying for stuff with our phones. Sure, I’d like to ditch my wallet, and I’d love if old-school shops and services (like buses and parking meters) stopped requiring cash. But if we’re going to adopt some new way ...

By Rosa Golijan Google Street View — the Google Maps feature which provides panoramic views of streets — is getting a little upgrade. It is now able to take you off the streets and inside some buildings. BBC News reports that an extension of the Google Street View project will provide users with 360-degree views of some building interiors. This means that you'll essentially be able to take a virtual tour of certain places. Now before you panic and worry about privacy, it's worth noting that participation in this project is entirely voluntary and focuses on businesses such as restaurants, hotels, shops and gyms — and excludes private residences and locations such as law offices or hospitals. Whew! That settles some fears, right? Even more reassuring are Google's guidelines for the businesses which opt to participate in the project: Business owners are told they must warn their customers and employees about the photoshoot before it begins. Google has promised it ...

You've seen the 4G advertisements from T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon, bragging about a much-better wireless network with blazing fast speeds. Here's the secret the carriers don't advertise: 4G is a myth. Like the unicorn, it hasn't been spotted anywhere in the wild just yet -- and won't be any time in the near future. The International Telecommunication Union, the global wireless standards-setting organization, determined last month that 4G is defined as a network capable of download speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps). That's fast enough to download an average high-definition movie in about three minutes. None of the new networks the carriers are rolling out meet that standard. More from CNNMoney.com: • AT&T, Verizon and Sprint 4G: Not So Fast • iPhone, Android Tied For 'Most Desired' Smartphone • Epic Web Wars: Blackberry Overtakes iPhone Sprint (NYSE: S - News) was the first to launch a network called 4G, going live with it earl...

Take THAT, bike robbers!! Conrad, a German company, has built a contraption that attaches a lock to motorized skateboard wheels so it can scale a lamp post. Basically, attach your bike to the lock and the lock to the post and it’ll zoom up out of arm’s reach. It’s a pretty genius idea that’ll surely curb bike robbers…until they start using a ladder. Watch the vid here : We may not understand what they're saying but, it aint hard to tell that this idea is GENIUS!