New iPhone Could End AT&T's U.S. Monopoly

By YUKARI IWATANI KANE, TING-I TSAI And NIRAJ SHETH

Apple Inc. plans to begin producing this year a new iPhone that could allow U.S. phone carriers other than AT&T Inc. to sell the iconic gadget, said people briefed by the company.

The new iPhone would work on a type of wireless network called CDMA, these people said. CDMA is used by Verizon Wireless, AT&T's main competitor, as well as Sprint Nextel Corp. and a handful of cellular operators in countries including South Korea and Japan. The vast majority of carriers world-wide, including AT&T, use another technology called GSM.

With Apple developing a phone with CDMA capability, its exclusive U.S. arrangement with AT&T dating to 2007 appears set to end.

Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, declined to comment. An AT&T spokesman said: "There has been lots of incorrect speculation on CDMA iPhones for a long time. We haven't seen one yet and only Apple knows when that might occur." Apple declined to comment.

Separately, Apple plans to release a new version of its current iPhone this summer, continuing its practice of annual upgrades at about the same time of year, said people briefed on the matter. The model is likely to be thinner and have a faster processor, two people familiar with the device said.

For AT&T, the Apple relationship has been crucial, helping to make the carrier the U.S. leader in lucrative smart-phone market share. According to comScore Inc., AT&T has over 43% of all U.S. smart-phone customers, compared with 23% for Verizon. These customers are especially attractive because they generally pay higher monthly rates for data plans.

For several quarters, AT&T's growth has come almost single-handedly from the iPhone. In the fourth quarter of 2009, the carrier said it activated 3.1 million new iPhones. In comparison, it counted only a net total of 2.7 million new subscribers as some customers moved from other phones to iPhones.

"You're not going to lose the iPhone [exclusivity] and make up growth somewhere else without bearing the cost," said Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. research analyst Craig Moffett.

The people briefed on the matter said the upgraded GSM iPhone is being made by Taiwanese contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., which produced Apple's previous iPhones. The CDMA iPhone model is being made by Pegatron Technology Corp., the contract manufacturing subsidiary of Taiwan's ASUSTeK Computer Inc., said these people.

One person familiar with the situation said Pegatron is scheduled to start mass producing CDMA iPhones in September. Other people said, however, that the schedule could change and the phone may not be available to consumers immediately after production begins.

Representatives of Pegatron and Hon Hai declined to comment.

>>Read on for the full news report..

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iPhone is really a monopoly is only one single factor that brought AT&T's market share up. This reminds me of SingTel before Starhub and M1 gets to sell iPhone in Singapore. Many people like myself have ported to SingTel just because of the need to get our hands on iPhones.

[NEWS] Baiting the cyber-scammers

By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writerMarch 26, 2010: 4:54 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- To Internet fraudsters promising vast riches in exchange for advance fees: meet the scambaiters.

These self-described Web vigilantes go after alleged e-mail scammers claiming to be Nigerian princes, U.S. soldiers in Iraq or Chinese businessmen. They say they need your help (i.e. your money) to access fake multi-million dollar accounts or palaces full of gold.

Most people recognize these e-mails for what they are and delete them without replying, but enough victims actually fall for these scams to keep them coming.

And then there are the scambaiters who answer the e-mails and feign genuine interest in sending money, as a ploy to send the scammers on a wild goose chase.

Mike Sodini, a firearms importer and owner of the Web site ebolamonkeyman.com, says he started scambaiting in 2001, when he worked at an Internet real estate marketing firm that got inundated with scam e-mails.

Sodini started writing back out of curiosity "to see how the operation would go" and he said it soon became a hit with his co-workers, who would gather around his computer to read his farcical dialogue.

"I started it to make my friends laugh and see what was going on," he says. "I didn't have a motive of, 'Let's get these guys."

In his responses, he would masquerade as characters that were "crazier than the scammers," he says, including a porn star and a racist rube. "There were times when I would pretend I was a Nigerian scammer and I would say, 'Dude, what are doing? I'm one of you."

For further fun, Sodini got alleged scammers to make fools of themselves by posing in photos and holding signs with offensive statements. He says he would get them to do this by claiming it was "for tax purposes," which was a ruse, since he never intended to send them money. He says he'd also convince them to make numerous trips to airports and Western Unions, lured by the promise of money packages that never arrived.
More financial scandals to come?

The name of his site comes from his first scambait, a long-running e-mail dialogue that ended when he finally accused his fraudulent pen-pal of being a scammer and said he wasn't good enough to win the scammer-of-the-year award, which was "a cute Ebola monkey." He has posted this exchange on his Web site.

Sodini says he "retired" from active scambaiting about four years ago, when the fraudsters got savvy to his ploys and started identifying him as "Ebola Monkey Man" within the first couple of e-mails. But he continues to run his site, featuring past dialogue with scammers and photographs of them holding signs, as well as fan mail and hate mail.
Death threats and witch doctors

"Rover," a scambaiter since the 1990s who would not provide his real name, doesn't see his efforts as a joke, but as a mission. In stringing along alleged fraudsters, his goal is "to take their eye off the ball" by luring them away from potential victims, because "they're spending time with us instead of spending time with other people."

Rover owns the scambaiting site 419eater.com, which is a reference to the Nigerian criminal code for fraud. He says many of the fraudulent e-mails originate in Nigeria, but they also come from England, the Netherlands and China. Some scams are ripped from recent headlines, with fraudulent appeals to help earthquake victims of Haiti and Chile.

"[The scammers] will go after anybody that they perceive has the time to give them," he says. "They're obviously just sending out hundreds and hundreds of e-mails."

>>Visit the original article news post for full report

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