TalkTalk fined £750,000 for calling you and hanging up

TalkTalk has been given a talktalking to for calling people and hanging up. Ofcom has fined the phone company £750,000 over excessive silent and abandoned phone calls.

Telecoms watchdog Ofcom slapped TalkTalk with the fine for making 9,000 silent or abandoned calls to potential customers during a telesales campaign in 2011.

TalkTalk blames two call centres, run by Teleperformance Limited and McAlpine Marketing Limited, that went over the limit for telemarketing calls on four separate occasions in two months. TalkTalk has cut ties with the companies and intends to get them to pay the fine.

If you have a landline you probably know the drill: you've just settled down to watch The One Show with some cold cuts and a flagon of mead, when the phone goes. When you answer, you're greeted by silence or a dead line.

Automated calls often fail to realise the phone has been answered by a real person. Thinking you're an answering machine, the robophone either ends the call -- an abandoned call -- or fails to play the intended message -- a silent call.

The maximum fine for abandoned calls is £2m.

[Source: CNET]

Microsoft landed with £486m EU fine in browser-choice row

Microsoft has been landed with a staggering €561m (roughly £486m) fine, after European regulators found the software giant hadn't offered PC owners enough of a choice when it came to their browser.

The fine was handed down by the European Commission, as punishment for neglecting an anti-monopoly settlement from 2009, the New York Times reports. In that settlement the company behind Clippy vowed to offer Windows users a choice of which browser they wanted to use, instead of simply defaulting to its own Internet Explorer.

The result was 2010's browser ballot, which you may have spied yourself if you've started up a new Windows PC in the last couple of years. The ballot offered rival operating systems such as Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple's Safari browser.

The order in which rival browsers would appear on the ballot was a subject of heated debate, but eventually Microsoft plumped for the five most popular Web browsers appearing in random order.

Good stuff, but Microsoft seemingly dropped the ball, with a version of Windows 7 (SP1) not offering users the choice. The company reportedly says it has updated both Windows 7 andWindows 8 to include the ballot, but that hasn't stopped anti-monopoly officials sending the firm a monstrous bill.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser remains popular, though critics say a huge part of that success is because it's been the default software on Windows PCs for a long time.

[Source: CNET]