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Gold yester

On Wednesday, October 3, T-Mobile USA's parent company Deutsche Telekom AG announced that it has worked out a merger deal between T-Mobile and its smaller competitor MetroPCS Communications --- an agreement that will bring together the fourth- and fifth-ranking wireless carriers in the US.

The US Federal Trade Commission has recently announced a multinational crackdown on the so-called tech support scams, in which consumers receive calls from supposed tech support staff from bigwig software or computer security companies, and are fooled into believing that some harmful software has been detected in their computers.

In a Wednesday announcement, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has revealed that a $163 million fine has been imposed by a federal court against Kristy Ross and her `Innovative Marketing' firm, for using scareware to trick over one million people in making needless payments to fix non-existent problems with their computers.

The well-thought-out and elaborate scareware scam ran between 2000 and 2008, with Ross and her company coming up with online ads that essentially displayed a bogus system-scan alert, which supposedly detected malware on the computer systems.

On Wednesday, popular social network Facebook rolled out an experimental feature - `Promote' - to a limited number of users in the US, giving them the ability to promote important photos or announcements by making a payment to the company.

Way back in the year 1983, Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs delivered a speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado; and, going by a recently-discovered rare recording of that speech, he forecast the inception of the iPad!

The audio related to Job's full speech at the conference has been posted by Marcel Brown to his Life, Liberty and Technology site; and it completely reinforces the `visionary' title which has often been used to describe his farsightedness in the technology arena.