A Better Title

Ever since Tuesday, I’ve been having problems connecting to the Internet using my mobile phone. Being someone who is addicted to the mobile Internet, imagine my frustration when applications that require Internet connectivity stopped working, and websites that I could normally surf to were then broken.

Opera Mini gave out a “Failed to connect to the Internet” error. I was sure it wasn’t Opera Mini’s fault, since it worked flawlessly the previous day. It was confirmed when Google Maps gave out a similar error. I could surf “normal” websites (such as blogs) on the phone’s default browser, but those that require authentication (i.e. username and password) didn’t work. Outlook Mobile Access for NTU’s webmail kept on asking me for my username and password without letting me in, and Twitter refused to let me send an update.

One thing I noticed at that time was that there was a header and footer added to the pages. These belong to MobileSurf, a so-called enhancement for M1 users, which according to the website “intelligently customises webpages to fit different mobile screen sizes. It can also handle flash animation and multi-languages.” It “provides a friendlier way to browse the Web on your mobile phone, making it easier to go online wherever you may be.”

Friendlier way my ass.

First, I must admit that larger websites now load up much faster, and the feature no doubt will be useful for people who have older phones which can’t load normal websites (i.e. those not designed with mobile phones in mind) using the default browser. It can also be useful when the website is so large that it can’t be loaded in the phone.

The thing is that I don’t need these features, since I am already using Opera Mini. And judging by the way a lot of websites are now broken, it’s more of an annoyance than it is useful.

My hypothesis was that since the header and footer are added on-the-fly, these interfered with how the websites work. Not only that, Opera Mini and Google Maps require their own specialized data format to be transmitted correctly in order to work. Adding the header and footer might modify the data in a way that can’t be read by the applications.

It’s like trying to open a Microsoft Word document in Notepad. Yes the text is still there, but it will be garbled for any practical purpose.

I called the customer service hotline on Tuesday at 10.15 am, and immediately requested to disable the service. The customer service officer told me that the service was only launched at 9 am that morning, meaning that I was probably one of the first to complain about the service. At first she couldn’t pinpoint the problem, and promised to call me back. She did in the afternoon, and advised me that she would send the Internet connectivity settings to my phone.

Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem, and as I was busy doing other things, I didn’t bother to call back.

Until morning today, when I realised that I couldn’t Twitter from the phone, even using the default browser (reading Twitters is not a problem, which was all I did on Tuesday).

I called the customer service hotline again, and after being redirected twice to the technical support officer, I described the problem and he immediately walked through with me steps to rectify the problem. He adviced me to use the Sunsurf internet profile instead of the default Mi_World_GPRS in order to bypass the MobileSurf feature, and lo and behold, all the problems were solved.

Opera Mini, Google Maps, Outlook Mobile Access, and Twitter work again.

In case you’re having a similar problem, here’s the walkthrough to rectify it. I am describing the solution on a Sony Ericsson K618i. Adjust to your phone accordingly.

1. Go to Menu > Settings > scroll right to Connectivity > Data comm. > Data accounts.
2. Check that “Sunsurf” exists in Data accounts. If it doesn’t, go to New Account > PS data, and name it “Sunsurf”. Fill in the following data in the subsequent page:
   1. APN: sunsurf
   2. Username: 65
   3. Password: (blank)
3. Edit the “Sunsurf” profile, and verify/fill in the following:
   1. APN: sunsurf
   2. Username: 65
   3. Password: (blank)
   4. Login request: Off
   5. Allow Calls: Automatic
   6. IP Address: … (yes, those are three dots)
   7. DNS Address: …
   8. Security/authentication: PAP only
   9. Data Compression: Off
   10. Header Compression: Off
4. Go to Menu > Settings > scroll right to Connectivity > Internet settings > Internet profiles and select Sunsurf. Also go to Settings for Java and select Sunsurf.

The connection should now work properly. Note that if you like the MobileSurf feature, you can enable it only for the default phone browser by selecting Mi_World_GPRS under Internet profiles, while selecting Sunsurf under Settings for Java.

I hope this helps M1 customers having problems connecting to the mobile Internet after they introduced the MobileSurf feature!

Still an M1 customer,
hendri

If you actually fell for the trick and tried the service provided by BlockDelete.com, please change your MSN password IMMEDIATELY!

I tested the service using my test MSN account two days ago. It’s the same account I used to test Blockoo a while ago. The test account has my main MSN account in the contact list.

Until now, my main account keeps on getting spammed by BlockDelete.com under the test account’s name, even when I used their service only once. This is a very clear evidence that BlockDelete.com has kept the test account’s username and password for future use (spamming or otherwise). If you used BlockDelete.com before, your data would have been kept by them too, and this is a huge security risk!

As you can see on the screenshot, initially the URL being spammed was http://www.msn-friend.com. Apparently, MSN has blocked the URL from being sent in MSN conversations (go ahead, type the URL on your conversation window. You’ll get a “message could not be delivered” message) and so, now they use http://www.kuncu.info. I’ve read that they change the URL as and when MSN blocks the currently used URL.

So, please, for your own security, change your password if you’ve ever used BlockDelete.com. And one more thing: NEVER give out your MSN username and password to anyone else other than MSN itself.

PS: You might notice that I didn’t hyperlink any of the links above. Visit at your own risk.