Saturday, July 15, 2006

Verizon Minutes Used Firefox Extension Version 0.84

In light of the latest discussion on Digg, I have a few things to clarify.

I have had no problem hosting the extension on the Mozilla update site, until Verizon complained about the extension. I fixed a problem they claimed to cause excessive load on their servers, talked to Verizon and they said they were ok with the newer version. However since then, all my contacts with Mozilla were lost -- they never returned my email and refused to re-host the extension. I couldn't publish any update to the TMobile extension either.

I never intended to write a program to spam Verizon/TMobile's servers. Unfortunately there is no more "efficient" way to pull the data from Verizon. Ideally if wireless providers really wanted to provide consumers with this kind of data (not just #min, which is too passive and with no alert capabilities), they could have easily provided some efficient APIs to do it.

Having said that, I do agree with some readers that the default 5 minute interval is probably too frequent under the current circumstance. Therefore I have updated the latest version 0.84 here .(save the file locally and then open it from Firefox: File->Open File...)