The price of friends
According to The Telegraph, a woman has inadvertently run up a bill of thousands of pounds after downloading four episodes of "Friends" using her husband's laptop.
It has been reported that Vodafone contacted one of its business customers, concerned about the possibility of fraud, after the customer had run up more than £10,000 in cellphone roaming charges. It appears that the wife of the customer concerned had used her husband's laptop to download four episodes of the US sitcom, Friends, using software which queues up the video requests and downloads files in the background for later viewing. However, her husband took the laptop with him on a business trip to Germany. When he powered up his laptop, the software quietly resumed its downloads, keeping him connected to the Internet for hours through an expensive GSM Roaming connection.
It isn't the first time that people have been caught out by roaming fees for Internet usage. Some mobile phones, such as Apple's iPhone, can connect to the Internet automatically to periodically check for email. This is a great feature if you are in the UK and using connectivity that is included in your monthly contract, but if you travel overseas and forget to turn this off then your phone will happily continue checking your mail once a minute or so at international roaming rates. So if you were given a shiny new iPhone last Christmas, make sure you read the manual before you jet off to the sun this summer.
26th March 2008