Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

No joke. There’s a simple way to get free unlimited long distance calling minutes to almost any country in the world. You’ll just need a T-Mobile plan with MyFaves and a little information! See, MyFaves lets you make unlimited calls to any of five people in the United States at no cost, but it is limited to this country only. You can’t call someone internationally.

However, there’s a company in Iowa offering free unlimited long distance calling around the world (actually, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Christmas & Coco’s Island, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, UK and the USA). All Free Calls is a telephone arbitrage agent, taking advantage of complications in inter-state telephone fees to make a few cents per minute on the calls you place.

So, what do you do?

• Add 712-858-8094 to your MyFaves numbers
• Call and enter 011 + country code + international number
• Enjoy your unlimited free call

It’s simple, easy, and consumer-friendly. There’s no telling if T-mobile will block this number in the future, though, as it represents a limitless expense for them.

Update: AllFreeCalls hopes to be up and running again next week, if they can work out a deal to get around the AT&T lawsuit.

I am: H.G. Wells ~ The first major literary talent to make himself at home in the science fiction field, greatly expanding its popularity.

Which science fiction writer are you?

If you search Google for the phrase “miserable failure” you won’t find Bush in the top result anymore:

Google has turned over new algorithms that know how to handle Googlebombing:

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs).

Wikipedia is fast on the scene, but only noting that:

On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have “an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”

There’s a bit of an edit war going on to try and decide what this means. How do you detect an intentional Google bomb from simply a newly popular site? This could have an accidental impact on a lot of smaller websites.