A South African framed his own hijacking through SMS

A technician at KwaZulu-Natal proved to have enough unconscious courage when he sent some SMS messages pretending to be hijacked and putting the police on national alert. The police was alerted after the technician sent a message to one of his colleagues saying: ”Hijacked. Please help. In Durban Road. Phone going off”. The "victim" indicated that the hijackers had overpowered him in Port Shepstone and stuffed him into the boot of his company's car.
But in fact, the young technician spent all R9000 taken from his boss on clothes and parties with prostitutes. During the day he sent more SMS saying that the hijackers stopped every 30 minutes to check if he was still alright. The police from many towns was alerted. But at one moment a policeman from Umtata said he had seen the young man picking up prostitutes together with another man. The man was caught and he will appear in Court soon being accused of theft and as well as of defeating the ends of justice.

Real estate company punished for SMS spamming

Intelig, a real estate developer from Beijing will respond in front of the law for illegal distribution of SMS. Chinese Industry and Commerce Bureau investigated two technology companies employed by Intelig to distribute short message advertisements using the name of the government. The two SMS distributors will have to bear the legal responsibility in accordance with the Advertising law. Montsnet Technologies and One To One Information Company were not qualified to run advertisements but Intelig signed contracts with the two to distribute 490,000 short messages.

Paying parking fees through SMS

The drivers in Bristol will no longer need to pay directly their parking fee next week. A new system of payment was invented and will be launched. The system allows sending a code via text message in order to trigger an automatic payment against their pre-registered credit or debit card. The people will also receive a smartcard, based on radio frequency identity (RFID) technology, which can be displayed in car windscreens. Parking attendants have RFID-enabled Nokia 5140 mobile phones to read the smartcard and check that a vehicle owner has paid.

SMS is businessmen favourite communication method

High ranked businessmen prefer to communicate with colleagues or business partners via SMS service, instead of using the phone. This was the conclusion of a poll made recently by Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Cisco System, the giant American networking. The poll, which studied 1,500 executives, including 26 percent in the Asia-Pacific region revealed that more than 66 percent of the subjects had preferred to send text messages or e-mails to solve business problems. According EIU findings, 81 percent of the respondents said that automated communications methods made them very efficient in the workplace.

Tsunami alert SMS

The Malaysian government plans to use SMS for warning about imminent disasters like earthquakes and tsunami tidal waves. “As many people own hand-phones, SMS is the best and fastest way of communication to alert the public in the shortest possible time”, said the Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Seri Mohamed Nazri Abdul Aziz.
Aziz added that telcos should allow the government to relay messages through SMS when the country was on the brink of a disaster. The idea of using the SMS has been proposed recently by the Finnish Embassy. Tuesday, when tremors caused by an undersea earthquake in West Sumatra were felt in several areas, the government used radio to warn people of the imminent tsunami danger.

Track your friends by SMS (via GPS)

You’ll have more fun with GPS devices from now on: GPS.pi is a new way
to track your friends’ position and movements over a map. The service is supposed to function by coupling a GPS receiver with a PPCPE device, but it will work with a cell-phone aswell. GPS.pi needs e-mails or SMSes with the exact location of persons to be tracked, and it is really useful on trips and even long journeys.

Dumping by sms

[Via MSN]
You have one message.

Dear John. We're thru :-(. It seems to me things aren't working that well. I'm sorry!

If you're a mobile user, then it's probably not the first time you've been dumped by sms. In March alone, Britain's Mobile Data Association says Britons sent 2.1 billion text messages, a 25 percent increase from the same month last year. Americans started also to use more the sms'es. So the "Dear John" sms dumping model is spreading fast I guess. Anyway,keep the discovery mode on...searching for new prospects. According to a last year poll( sorry, no updates yet) conducted by a market research firm called NOP for Sicap, a messaging services provider based in Bern, Switzerland,uh, nine percent of Britons admit dumping partner with text messages. I can't wait to see the results to the divorce by sms poll...or to the pregnancy test results sent by sms. 'Dear John, I'm pregnant. We're thru :-(. I'm sure you are not the father. It's the guy from Minolta. I'm sorry! In this case,it's good she told you to bug off. If you can pick up by SMS/MSN/email, then you can dump via them too, right? Fair's fair. Easier texted than done...

Prostitutes in Hong Kong are expanding their “business” through SMS

The prostitutes in Hong Kong who are allowed to activate legally have found a new way to get more clients. They are advertising their services through cell-phone voice messages. The prostitutes operate from their homes and send out automated messages in which they advertise their addresses and phone number. “Our girls are only doing it part-time but you will like them. They are young but very experienced in all kinds of techniques," one message says. The sex messages came to light when a female reader contacted the newspaper to complain she had received repeated spam communications of this kind on her phone. The police started an investigation.

Chinese hackers attack the Singaporean mobiles

It seems that Chinese hackers are attacking the mobile phones of the Singapore subscribers. Although the Consumers Association of Singapore, Chinese Embassy in Singapore and the Police haven’t received any complaints yet about SMS scams originating from China, some Singaporeans claimed to have received them. One of the Singaporeans who ended up on a fraudster's list was Edward Tan, 29 years old, who works for a multimedia company. He received last month an SMS sent from a phone in China, claiming that he had won $130,000 in a lucky draw held by the Hua Tai Group. To claim the money, the winner must have paid $3,900 upfront to settle “government taxes.” But Tan knew it was a scam.

An SMS nearly killed a fashion designer

A lot of people think nowadays that SMS is a very good service for fast and precise communication. But texting, unfortunately, can also... kill when used by careless drivers. This is the case of the Australian fashion designer Peter Morrissey who was in danger to be badly hurt in his Jaguar by a taxi driver who was very focused on sending an SMS.
The designer told that one of the passengers noticed the taxi driver was head down and that he was doing something at his cell-phone. The driver, who admitted that he was texting, hit the Jaguar severely. The passengers, although was seriously shaken, were fine.

Getting a house through SMS

A new service launched in Scotland allows texting to house hunters, in an attempt to ease the frustration of searching for a home. The new service allows buyers to tap a reference code displayed on "For Sale" or "To Let" signs outside properties into their mobile phone. They receive in return a text message containing edited property particulars. The instant text reply includes the property’s price, viewing times and contact details for the agent. It will also announce the house hunter if the property is under offer, if a closing date has been fixed or if it has already been sold.

SMS saves a life

Text messages received from his family helped a scientist to survive in the Malaysian jungle. At least this is what microbiologist John Gillatt said, when he was found after he had missed five days. In fact, Gillatt, 55 years old, was rescued after making a mobile phone call to his wife, who was in Boston, 6,000 miles away. Until he was found he survived eating only some biscuits, an orange and an apple. He told his family that their text messages helped him to stay alive.
Gillatt was in a holiday and stayed at a hotel in Fraser’s Hill, near Kuala Lumpur. He got lost and spent two days trying to find on his own his way back. He dind't succeed, so he called his wife, who alerted the hotel. The scientist was found near a waterfall, exhausted, dehydrated, and bruised but otherwise unhurt.
Gillatt works for a chemicals company in Cheshire, and he has traveled widely, living for a year in Kuala Lumpur, but he said it was the first time he had been jungle trekking. The family's last text from Mr Gillatt came as he was taken back to his hotel yesterday. It read: "My darlings and friends. My battery is almost dead. How will I sleep in a bed after four nights under stars? Your love got me through. Love you all."

Send text and receive voice

SWN Communications promotes a communication system which will allow users to write down a text message on their computer, the message being converted through software in an ordinary phone call. More exactly, the words chosen by the sender on PC are changed in "talks" received by the receivers' phones. The system's strongpoint is that texts can be sent to thousdands of receivers (up to 8,000! now that's mass communication). Send Word Now (SWN) works like this: the words chosen by the sender on PC are changed in "talks" received by the receivers' phones. The sender of the message can ask an immediate confirmation about the receiving of the message while the receiver can chose to get the message in its original form (text) or in any other vocal alternative.
The service will be fully operational on 7th of April.

Truancy will be eliminated by a SMS service

The texting services that announce parents about how much their children play truant are expanding day by day. After Australia and England, a scheme to send SMSes to parents whose children fail to turn up at school is being rolled out across Scotland. Education minister Peter Peacock announced that the executive will pay for the technology to be fitted in around half of all secondary schools. The decision was made because statistics that one in five pupils in Scotland plays truant during the school year. The officials from Minister of Education think that modern technology can solve this problem. A small number of schools are already using the truant text alarms, where parents are sent either messages or automated calls or both, informing them their child has not turned up.

New sms:“The pooch has left the fenced area!”

You don’t have to worry anymore about your escape pet artists. You'll soon receive this message on your mobile:“The pooch has left the fenced area”! GlobalPet Finder, powered by Syniverse's newly developed Mobile Device Control Service, provides pet owners with the ability to remotely monitor their pet's location. When my husky escapes, he does not return for at least 4 hours. I can’t wait to gadgetize my dog with this thing. This could really help the eagle, crocodile or snake owners too. I think the Pitt-bulls aren’t the case for GlobalPetFinder. If their on the loose, the owner’s Mobile Device Control Service which sends a SMS identifying the pet's location directly to a GSM mobile device such as a phone, pager or PDA , might turn useless or fall short, uh, with 2 feet. I hope I will draw my footstep marks outside that escape area. The GlobalPetFinder device allows the pet's owner to set safe boundaries within which the pet can roam and notifies the owner if the pet wanders outside of the boundary.
So you’ll have roaming included. Not for you, but for your pooch. The GlobalPetFinder device attaches to any collar and operates on three rechargeable AAA batteries. Syniverse also provided the registration, implementation and provisioning of the SMS short code "FOUND" for use with the GlobalPetFinder device. We should see then more signs with the “Found pet” inscription.

Bus texting...

The Indians who hate waiting at the bus stop will have soon enough a pleasant surprise. The transport department plans to provide information about buses through GPS technology. Vehicle-tracking device would be installed in around 7,000 stage carriage buses, including private ones. The officials say that they are still working at the details, but it is supposed that any person SMSing to a designated number, with details of his/her location and the bus route number, will be able to be fed with vehicle's ETA (estimated time of arrival).

Sms taxi service in Shanghai

[Via Xinhuanet]
Shanghai taxi authority launched yesterday a short message service for its citywide call center, providing locals with easier access to book a cab. So goes the credo that you could only call a taxi by phoning or whistling. The service allows people to send a short message of their detailed location via their mobile phones to the call center's SMS platform. Isn’t that cute? The call center will then try to find the nearest free taxi and give the person a reply on whether it can dispatch a cab or not about 10 minutes later. 10 minutes? A bicycle service would me more appropriate I think. In that period of time I will start wondering if that taxi is really coming to take my tired legs home...
The Shanghai Taxi Administration Office said there will be no discrimination when selecting customers which call or send sms . I wouldn’t bet my sms’es on that. Sms senders are by far in the no-tip category. I’m exaggerating of course…there is no such thing as a tip mentality in China. But hey, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that someday they’ll come with the ‘tipping by sms’ concept.

Mobile Pizzeria answers SMS and online orders

Fast delivery is not something new but Super Fast Pizza really means fast delivery. They accept SMS and online orders and before you finish to say or write down what you want, the pizza is already rolling its way to your door. This is one of the wonders of wireless telecom mated to a fleet of Chrysler Sprinter vans outfitted with kitchen equipment (60,000 $ each, quite an investment for the pizza guys). An order is answered in about 15 minutes and the service is apparently growing fast in its hometown of tiny Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Scott Matthew, the guy who started this, plans to extend his business all over US.

A Scotsman is the fastest SMSer in the world

Craig Crosbie entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest SMSer in the world. The 24 year old Scotsman earned this title during a competition in London, managing to type a complicated 25-word SMS on his cell-phone in just 48 seconds. That's 19 seconds faster than previous record holder, James Trsuler. Crosbie, a factory worker, defeated 11 finalists in the competition and won a prize £50 000. To be able to win, Crosbie trained himself hard: he used to send a whopping 75 text messages per day.
The phrase he had to text was: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." Seems like Crosbie will luv piranhas from now on :)

Don’t let them marry me!

A simple SMS can change people’s lives and can also bring happiness. This was the case of Ahmed, a young man from Midlands, who was about to be forced by his parents to marry a girl he barely knew. Ahmed has a girlfriend that his family doesn’t like, and his parents tried to separate him from her forever. They told Ahmed to go with them in Pakistan to see his grandmother who was ill. But when he and his family arrived in Pakistan, his grandmother was just fine. Ahmed was told he can’t leave home until he married the girl they had chosen. Fortunately, Ahmed owns a cellular and sent many text messages to his girlfriend in Britain, explaining the whole story. The girl alerted the Foreign Office, which contacted its consular officials in Pakistan. There waa a rescue operation, but we don't know yet if the ones meant to eachother lived happily everafter :)

"Courtship" sms sends a soldier to the hospital

[ Via New Strait Times]
A nervous malaysian husband started to kick around when he found that a man send his wife an sms. This happened last night in Taman Tengku Anis in Pengkalan Chepa , Malysia. He almost killed off the man, a malaysian soldier, beating him with iron rods. He was assisted by two of his friends also in the activity. The soldier is laid up in a hospital probably regreting sending that sms to his lady-friend.
We all know that oral or written language had brought the shy people to power. Improved communication between members of communities produced partnerships between the shy people . Small 'revolutions' of the shy members had caused the "human bulls" to leave. It was thought that genetic evolution made the bullies dissaper. Apparently, the poor soldier didn't knew that there's one left and also didn't thought that human language could lead him to eventual dangereous causes of the written communication via the sms chanel . He perhaps wasn't aware that communication produces a feed back.They feeded back him allright. He is now under treatment at Kota Baru Hospital suffering from facial and bodily injuries. I know that the military servce is very stressful...but hey, hormons sometimes turn into small oral or written messages which produce good or bad effects. This time the effect was influenced by other factors though...some iron rods.

SMSes announce traffic problems

Contact Wireless, an Albuquerque paging company has recently invented a
new service that sends out text messages to phones, e-mails or pagers whenever traffic gets jammed. When an accident occurs or the traffic is crowded, the people that want to have this service - it's free by the way :) - will receive an SMS. The service is functioning in Albuquerque, but will be expanded in a short time.

Those greedy telcos...

Some mobile operators don't give a damn to their client’s good. In fact, they prove to think only how to attract more customers and how to make them use the phone a lot. This erciless politics has a negative effect especially on teenagers, who can be easily tempted to use the phone more and more. And that's not only expensive, but also causes health problems, especially when it comes to mobile texting. This is the case of an Australian girl, aged 13. Medical Journal of Australia published a report from south Australian general practitioner Robert Menz, who describes the case of this girl who walked into his surgery with a swollen right forearm. He said that further enquiry revealed that she had this incident because of the mobile phone. The mobile operator she used had an offer of $100 credit that had to be used in a month, equaling to nearly 300 SMS messages. That's 10 messages a day! She was also permitted to use 760 characters per message, instead of the usual 160. Menz's patient had been using only her right thumb to press the keypad and wrote message after message. She was diagnosed with “texting tendonitis”, the first case of this kind in Australia.
The operators should include health warning when they launch such “generous” offers, especially that this case is not the only one: in Italy, a young girl who used to sent 100 text messages per day (!!!) had serious problems with her thumb...

SMS Saving Lives in South Africa

A bottle can't ring. This is one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs...untill South African company Tellumat thought to make me realise that technology is fast forwarding at amazing speeds. An SMS sending pill bottle? Yes. The thing was developed by Cape Town doctor David Green and local communications company Tellumat. The bottle houses a microchip which sends an SMS to a hospital or doctor each time the cap is removed. If no SMS is received when the patient is supposed to take a pill, the bottle rings to remind them. At the moment, price is an issue, with the chip costing no cheaper then $40 a bottle.
After all the gadget inventions I couldn't picture, this one comes to tell me my prediction genes weren't there since the beginning. I only can imagine a nurse sending me an SMS. I have a dream though: a sexy ringing nurse :)

Terror texting: SMS bomb threat

An SMS was enough to... send an Australian in front of the judges. Well, not just any SMS, but a "terrorist" one: the guy sent a bomb threat to a Cairns mobile phone number on Friday, around 5.15pm. Queensland Police said a hoax text message wrote that there was a bomb on board the Air New Zealand plane departing airns for Auckland. The "terrorist" was charged with using a carriage service for a hoax threat and making threats and false statements.

Cell-novels conquered Japan

There's a new phenonmenon appearing in Japan. It's called cell-phone lecture mania. Apparently, the japanese teens and post teens enjoy that microcosmos created by someone's imagination. People, action, situations, thoughts ,feelings. All that at micro scale of course...a mobile screen. It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card. I can't imagine how does it feels to read an entire book on a mobile screen.

You can read whenever you have a spare moment, and you don't even need to use both hands,

says Taro Matsumura, a 24-year-old graduate student who sometimes reads essays and serial novels on his phone.
There are several mobile Web sites who offer hundreds of novels -- classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium. Users can search by author, title and genre, and readers can write reviews, send fan mail to authors and request what they want to read, all from their phones.
Surprisingly, people are using cell-phone books to catch up on classics they never finished reading. And people are perusing sex manuals and other books they're too embarrassed to be caught reading or buying. More common is keeping an electronic dictionary in your phone in case a need arises.
A writer who goes by the single name Yoshi published Deep Love, a series of stories about a Tokyo teenage prostitute. He began by posting them on an obscure cell-phone site he started and made reader payment voluntary. The story became so popular that it went on to become a movie, TV show and "manga" or Japanese-style comic book. It's even been turned into a real book, with some 2.6 million copies sold.
P.s. Don't they have enough trouble reading normal books with those little alien eyes? Perhaps it's their evolutional path. It might transform them into beings with even smaller eyes. Not to mention that the europeans also will evolve to have thin fingers and large ears both great for cell phone use.

Sms brakes new gorund in the US

A recent study found that americans are starting to use more the short message service (sms). Now, let's look of some numbers. 63 percent of cell phone users ages 18-27 have used text messaging compared with 31 percent for ages 28-39 and 7 percent for those over 60. Totaly, 25% of of American adults who have cell phones have used the devices' text-messaging features within February 2005. Compared with past studies, the number of sms users has exploded. the Pew Internet and American Life Project, also found that 28 percent of people who text message have received unsolicited commercial messages that way. I remember, this hapenned in Europe once. Oh, Europe is still spaming? Neee. The sms service might be ideally suited to bringing american teen the spam . I only hope american operators hold tightly to their tariffs. Growing sms usage is in fact a great leap for them ...when it comes to counting customers' money of course.

Texting for sex in an evil way

Yesterday a love story started by SMS made it to the headlines, asa a true evidence of the fact that more and more adults have started to use mobile texting as a tool for arranging sex meetings. The ideea seemed trendy, funny or weird at worse, but this impression is wrong: some adults use texting for child corruption! The local police in Warren County’s Hamilton Township arrested Winfred Walden, aged 26, who tried to attract teenagers for sex using SMSes. Policemen found in his cell phone text messages he sent to a 13 year old girl. According this, Walden and the girl exchanged messages for more than two months, and the SMSes coming from him were full of porn sh.... errr, graphic sexual language. He also arranged a meeting for sex, but the girl's parents found out about it and called in for help.

Thumb Wrestling Championship (TWC)

Virgin Mobile' PR's team shows crazzy creativity opening the very first official Thumb Wrestling Championship (TWC). The show is set to take place in Miami between March 22-25. Now that's what I call texting force promotion. Or not?

Thumb wrestling is hands-down the best way to condition your thumbs for text messaging

, said Peter Boyd, vice president of promotions and partnerships for Virgin Mobile USA.

More than 70 percent of our customers used text messaging in 2004 and we care about their well-being. We hope that this competition will help raise awareness about the importance of training your thumbs before taking on something as intense as Text Fest when all of our users get free texting for a month.

Winners receive a Virgin Mobile phone plus $200 in airtime. The final championship match will take place March 25, where the last thumb standing will win a flyaway trip worth over $3,000.
Now what about the doctors telling customers to rest the green thumbs after heavy texting? Isn't Virgin thinking about customer protection? Perhaps the fight's winner could get also a nice trial compensation as a price. That could be a nice hair-raising experience for Virgin! But, let's think positive! Nobody is going to get hurt by texting his message to a girl or a boy? Except the case when her boyfriend or gorlfriend comes out to thumb fight the texter.

XMS, death of SMS hackers

A new service that prevents SMS of being hacked has just been launched in India. It is called Xecure Message Service (XMS) and it runs as an background application on the mobile handset encrypting and decrypting messages. There are three versions of this service, and the first of all, the one which we are talking about, runs on 31 models with Symbian operating system. XMS is supposed to block any hacker's attempt to read one's messages, and it may be good at it. Even too good for the threats existing now on the market.

SMS flirt ends in marriage!

A relationship started through SMS can change into an everlasting love and may end with a marriage. This was proved by two nice old people in South Africa: Frikkie Jacobs from Johannesburg and Irene Malherbe from Eastern Cape town of Patensie. Frikkie said that one day he received on his phone an ad for Flirtnet. He decided that it was time to meet new women, as he had been an widower for more than four years. This way he knew Malherbe and they started to correspond through SMS. The SMS made them fall in love and sealed their relationship with a ring. They are now happily married. Or shall we say “Just married!”?

NO more sms spam from my telco? Yeah, right!

Finally, somebody has turned an eye on SMS Spam. No, it's not the mobile companies, but Trend Micro (remember PC-Cilin, the PC anti-biotic?) who has launched Trend Micro Mobile Security 2.0, which provides, among virus-detecting abilities, a so called Anti-spam for SMS feature.
Levels of usage and succes will yet to be reavealed after beta testing. I am SOOO curious where is this heading. I have enough trouble with email spam filters, that sometimes keeps my wanted email in the dogpound, and slips an occasional "free ipod inside". We'll investigate this and tell you all the details (if it's based on whitelisting, blacklisting and all..) Frankly, I'd like to receive SMS only from the people in my phone's address book.

But we're missing the whole point here, again. The problem with sms spam isn't like email, with list buyers/spammers, the problem with sms spam is deep within the mobile companies. These are the ones sending spam SMSes...

However, you can download for free Trend Micro Mobile Security 1.0. It will expire on June 30, 2005. So, don't hurry.

Sms service cuts short school absenteism

[via Herald Sun

Enough with the monkeys business! Ozzys decided to cut back school absenteism using a sms service. Not all the schools in Australia will be submited to this experience though. I'm talking about eleven Victorian schools, including 10 government and one private school. Those schools have reported falls in unexplained absences of 20 to 80 per cent.
Mark Fortunatow, managing director of MGM Wireless, the company that supplies the systems, said at some schools it meant an extra 50 kids were turning up each day.
The Auditor-General's report last year found more than 10,000 students got stuck in traffic while or got abducted by alien ships while classes were running.
Under the SMS system, parents are also sent text messages if their child is late or skips a class later in the day. "Where is your child? He skipped classes today!", now this short message could turn soon rebels into white sheaps. Kids may well say this in response:" Father, please forgive me cause i have seened! Please father give me my Laptop back".
What's pretty strange is that about 1 per cent of parents refuse to take part. At least somebody is a liberal outhere. A parent called it "the Nazi checking up of his child". Mum Gaye Sullivan didn't agreed though. She said the system gave her peace of mind.
The schools and Opposition education spokesman Victor Perton called for the State Government to give a hand by financing the project. But Education Minister Lynne Kosky said there are different ways chools were dealing with the problem, including campaigns and employing more welfare officers. She said overall budgets for government schools were already at record high levels and individual schools had a discretion as to how they spent that money.

Record fine for SMS spam

A Danish commercial court has recently fined the German mobile operator Debitel for spamming. The operator will pay a whopping 269,000 euro for 12,000 SMSes and 36,000 e-mails sent in april 2003. The spam messages contained offers to the customers of competitor operator Telmore, which was at the time being taken over by TDC.
The complaint against Debitel was filed by Hagen Joergensen, who said that other spam cases are pending, since he received up to 1,500 e-mails per day concerning this kind of problems.

SMS revolution in RED

Members of the communist party in Russia "should use telephones to send political jokes or rhymes, or attract attention to events — anything that motivates a person to send the message along to someone else,"... This is a brand new propaganda (a word that evokes images of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution) method, proposed by Ivan Malnikov, first deputy chairman of the russian communist party. It's surely a way of conquering masses which neither Lenin or Stalin could've dreamed of. The text messaging is part of a revolutionary branding campaign set to be launched in a try to regain public support. Currently, the russian communist party has the most supporters among old people and its youth targeted propaganda is blocked by Kremlin controled media.

A law against SMS spam- CAN-SMS-SPAM

US Senate began an inquiry into reforms in the multi-billion wireless industry. On top of the list there's the known practice of some telecommunication companies to randomly send (usually commercial) SMSes and MMSes to their clients without their consent and approval for these spamming actions. Hopefully, measures will be enacted in a law that would address this invasion of privacy and SPAM, and the problem it might cause in the efficient delivery and receipt of messages. Two committees were tasked to inquire into the necessity of affording consumer protection to cellular mobile phone service subscribers against unfair trade practices and “of adopting measures to promote their safety and security against criminal elements.”
Spam blocking is all about receiving only what one needs and wants to read,ahem, read, all ONE REQUESTS and when it comes to SMS, spamming is an issue. If 'one' believes this is not true, 'one' should try to use a mobile phone in Japan.

The Blackberry thumb disease

Have you noticed that you type more then you speak lately? Do your thumbs hurt? If you're sending lots of text messages, you may have the trendiest new malady: "BlackBerry thumb." Let me translate that for you: lesions of the ulnar collateral ligament of the metacarpophalangeal joint. Medical experts are concerned that repetitive use of the thumb to type out messages on BlackBerry handhelds and mobile phones will cause medical problems, including arthritis and tendonitis. Dr. Tom Lazoff, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician with Fort Wayne Orthopedics says that thumbing could have some “painful consequences for a digit that was hardly designed for such tasks.”
We have alreasy warned you when the first signs of "acute tendonitis" have been reported.
“The human body was not designed to do anything highly repetitive,” he says. Excepting ucachalaka activities...of course. That's good for your health. Don't abuse though. “We are kind of designed to do multiple jobs,” he says. “Anytime you spend too much time on one thing, absolutely the joints are going to see wear and tear.”
No pain no game. Remember: the pain will depend on the frequency, the duration and the intensity of their use, so the experts iterate. Lazoff says it’s possible people using sticky mobiles could develope wrist pain from holding it for long periods of time.
Andrew Chadwick, director of the British RSI Association, told this to the Mirror:

We're talking about people making hundreds of tiny repeated movements as they use the mobile keypad. Because the movements are small they do not cause the blood to circulate, and that means the fingers are acting like an engine without oil.

Medical advice follows:

Do more of your typing on a keyboard, rather than on the BlackBerry itself, and if you can, use text messaging short hand so you’re not spelling out as many words.

Time to bring your laptop with you to the next hotspot and text-a-lot instead of thumbing over and over on your T9...Don't say we didn't warn ya!:)