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Archive: SMS

Phones vulnerable to SMS and caller ID spoofing

9 April 2007 22:08

Categories: Current affairs, Internet, Technology

Here is a post that demonstrates how somebody can “hack” your Twitter account as long as they know your phone number.

Basically, you can use some dodgy site called FakeMyText to pretend that you are texting Twitter from somebody else’s number.

But wait a minute. This is a website that lets you spend your whole time pretending to be using someone else’s phone. Why bother hacking somebody’s Twitter account when you can just go around texting everyone? That way your entire phone life is hijacked!

I mean, if I was given a choice between telling jokes about dead babies on somebody else’s Twitter account on the one hand, and texting an enemy’s girlfriend posing as said enemy saying she has a face like a baboon on the other, I know which I would go for.

This FakeMyText business isn’t a problem with Twitter. This is a problem with phones.

Via Hell Yeah Bitch!

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Phone help needed

25 March 2007 00:30

Categories: Blogging, Commuting, Current affairs, General, Internet, Personal, Technology, University

Despite my frightening net addiction and general interest in techy stuff, I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I got my first phone only three years ago, which probably made me among the last ½% in the country. I have only owned two phones, including the one I currently use. I have never bought a phone — my first was a gift, and the second is a hand-me-down.

By and large, I’ve been fairly happy with the situation though. I can’t believe the way most people go through phones. Seemingly many people go through them at the rate of about two a year, or sometimes even every other weekend when they forgetfully drop their phone down the drain in a mad binge drinking-fuelled bum-bum performance.

In a way, I’m like one of those insufferable people who go, “OH, I just can’t set my VCR!” People who boast that they can’t set their VCR are stupid posers who really need to find something better to be proud about.

Me? I just go around saying, “Look! My phone doesn’t have a camera on it! It takes me half an hour to send a text! I don’t phone anyone cos I can’t be bothered to top it up!” Yes, I’m one of those terrible people who almost takes pride in how rubbish their phone is. I mean, this is probably three years old, which in mobile phone terms makes it a proper dinosaur. I mean, no camera!

But a certain website has come along and changed my phone habits for the better / worse [delete as applicable]. Yes, that Twitter nonsense means that I now receive about a dozen (probably more — believe it or not, I don’t count!) texts a day. This can be a bit embarrassing. I now receive such a large amount of texts that it suggests that people want to talk to me, when in reality I’m am just getting loads of tweets complaining about hangovers.

Also — I don’t know whether this is down to O2 or Twitter, or just the way that phones work — but often my messages come in clumps of about a dozen or even more. When I’m sitting there in a dull lecture, my pocket is sporadically buzzing away like a short circuiting dildo. All I can say is, thank goodness I don’t have a really annoying ringtone.

Actually having to use my phone has made me realise how clunky and slow it is. For instance, I can’t believe the fact that I run out of memory after about 50 texts. I assume today’s phones can hold a few more messages on them. Also, because of Twitter, I have come to appreciate how handy a mobile phone can come in. And I have occasionally felt out of the loop.

Counter-intuitively, Twitter might be making me less of a geek. (Well, it might be fostering a new era of net addiction for me. But I just like to see it as “engaging with society”. Of course.) Because of my busy modern hectic 24 hour lifestyle, on many days I might not find my way onto a computer all day until well after 9pm. Beforehand, I don’t think I really noticed. It didn’t bother me too much — besides, it’s probably good to stay away from the computer for most of the day.

But now with Twitter, I am being constantly reminded that stuff is happening, and I am missing out on it. What if there was a vaguely important email sent to me this morning? I might not see it until late on in the evening. An interesting blog post? I might miss it entirely. Important news event? My face will be nuked off before I know about it.

As somebody who, over the past few years, has been a bit of a “news junkie” and pale blogger, the realisation that I am actually not informed has unsettled me. And the sporadic stream of texts that I receive via Twitter has made me appreciate that this stupid thing in my pocket could actually come in useful.

Also, I didn’t really get anything interesting for my birthday, apart from money. It feels wrong to have turned 21 and only have the Borat DVD (thanks Gordon!) as a memento. I could get an iPod (and believe me, this is a particularly good opportunity for me to get an iPod), but since I just wrote the other day about why I’m not getting an iPod that would be silly. I mean, my iRiver still works…

So, a phone it (probably) is. But, as you might have guessed from what I have written above, I do not have the first clue about phones. So what’s what? Are there any particular good phones that I should go for? Any dodgy things I should know about?

I don’t want anything too swish — after all, that would make me look like a poserish iPod owner / Porsche driver. But I am looking for something that will allow me to check my email, Google Reader, maybe Facebook mobile and the odd news story. And I suppose I should join that mob of happy slappers and get a camera as well (although I don’t imagine you can actually buy a phone without a camera these days).

Of course, I could do the research myself, but I have actually tried and I really don’t know what’s what. Most of it goes straight over my head. So I would be grateful for any suggestions, should anyone be so kind as to pop into the comments.

Update: (Working my way through all the blog posts that I missed during the week) Blood & Treasure: i am a lonely node

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Some ideas for Twitter

19 March 2007 12:40

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Formula 1, General, Internet, Technology

Over the weekend, with all the excitement of F1, I decided to have a go at liveblogging the grand prix weekend. Liveblogging the normal way can be a cumbersome task. It involves constantly refreshing the edit page and is generally pretty clunky and (for something that’s meant to be ‘live’) slow. It dawned on me, though, that Twitter is the perfect tool for liveblogging.

Of course, the debate as to whether or not Twitter is actually useful rages on. I think the complaints miss the point. Does everything have to be useful? People have been accusing blogging of being pointless for yonks as well. I mean, why can’t something just be good fun for once? Is that not enough?

Anyway, back to liveblogging. I soon thought of the potential pitfalls of using Twitter as a liveblogging tool. Firstly, there are no comments. Although Twitter has its own informal system of replying to messages, you still need to be a Twitter user to take part at all.

Also, Twitter friends who are not interested in F1 would be bombarded with tweets that they had no interest in (although, to be fair, this is a lot of what Twitter is anyway).

Thirdly, the tweets wouldn’t actually appear on my blog (although I’m sure decent plugins that can do this are not too far away — that would also solve the commenting problem as well).

Still, despite the little niggles, this is the sort of thing that Twitter is really great at. And that’s one in the eye for all of those who say that Twitter is simply too pointless to succeed. Yet, there are a few refinements I would like to see made to Twitter to make it a better liveblogging tool.

Firstly, tagging would be nice. Although part of Twitter’s appeal is its simplicity (with an interface that basically consists of a text field / IM window / SMS message and nothing else), I think tagging could really enhance Twitter. Of course, tagging tweets via SMS or IM would be particularly clunky and difficult. But I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do it on the web. And after all, Twitter already allows you to ‘star’ favourite tweets.

So why would tagging be useful? Tagging does often run the risk of being a feature that is included just because it sounds cool. Many websites have a tagging feature that is simply useless. But Twitter tags could work really well if you were to use Twitter for certain specific events.

Say some sad act is liveblogging Formula 1 coverage? I can tag these tweets as ‘formula-1′. This is useful because I am worried that most of my Twitter contacts are not in the least bit interested in my semi-informed interpretations of practice times.

One of the most common things people say about my blog is along the lines of, “I really like your blog — but I skip past all the F1 posts.” The same problem would probably apply on my Twitter account. If I tagged all of my tweets as ‘formula-1′, my contacts could opt to block any of these messages and I could Twitter away about Formula 1 without feeling guilty.

I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, part of Twitter’s appeal is its simple… well, simplicity. On the other hand, this is slightly reminiscent of the way daddy project Blogger never had categories for years after every single other blogging tool on the planet had introduced them.

My other idea is probably not quite so familiar. But I would like to see some kind of permalink that would contain all of the tweets within a certain time range. This could come in useful if, for instance, I wanted to link from my blog to my tweets about the qualifying session. This might not be so useful for most people though.

I don’t know how difficult it would be to implement, but I can’t imagine it would be that difficult. Maybe it would be better just to stick to daily / weekly / monthly archives though. That would probably appeal to many more people. Even this would be an improvement on the current vanilla archive.

I think that those who are ditching blogging completely in favour of Twitter are taking things to the extreme a bit. I mean, sometimes the 140 character limit is simply too restrictive, even for something that would never be a fully-formed blog post.

Still, Twitter has some great actual uses. Liveblogging is one. But I think it is also the death-knell for ‘asides’ or mini-posts. Usually asides are a bit too trivial to be given prominence on the blog itself. Twitter is the perfect place to put a pointless little post without feeling guilty about it.

As an aside, how shocking is it that SMS has been so popular in Europe for so long, and yet nobody here came up with a site like Twitter (at least one that worked as well as Twitter does)? Yet, as soon as SMS gains the slightest bit of traction in North America, their creative juices flow like crazy and they come up with all of this brilliant stuff!

By the way, check out Qwghlm’s idea of how liveblogging major events on Twitter would work.

6 comments

Handwriting — who needs it?

8 December 2006 15:03

Categories: Current affairs, General, Personal, Technology, University

Is handwriting really needed any more? Kids around the world are forgetting how to handwrite — because all of the writing we do is on the computer. It’s a familiar story. Every time we went back to school after the long summer break, my friends and I would all comment that the most difficult thing was getting used to writing again. “I haven’t had to write anything for about two months!” So every year our handwriting would get a little bit worse.

That wasn’t just because we were using computers all the time. It was just that there really isn’t much need to write at all is there? The only thing I can think of is letter writing. But how often do you do that? Once a year, if that? Maybe, back in the day, people wrote letters to each other. Nowadays people keep in touch by IM or text message. Or, if you’re really old-fashioned, by email. No need to lift a pen.

It’s sensible for me just to avoid writing altogether because my handwriting is a complete mess, and it has been probably since I started secondary school. My lowercase letters are all over the place. If I’m not careful, my ‘b’ looks like an ‘S’, my ‘a’ and ‘o’ both look like an ‘e’, my ‘i’ looks like an ‘l’, my ‘g’ looks like a ‘y’, ‘m’ looks like an ‘n’. And ‘v’ and ‘u’ look exactly the same.

The article says, “Teenagers are still experimenting with their handwriting and trying out new things”. The shocking thing is, I’m not a teenager, and I’m still experimenting with my handwriting. I could cope with all of the other things because I could understand myself what I was writing. But when my ‘v’ and ‘u’ began to look the same I had to take action. In the past couple of months I’ve actually added on a tail to my ‘u’. I never used to add tails because I thought they were a waste of time. Now they are how I tell a ‘u’ (or a ‘U’) from a ‘v’ (or ‘V’).

It became necessary because a lot of the equations I have to use at university involve a u or a v — often in the same place, meaning subtly different things. But I can’t be confusing them or I will get myself… well, confused. At the same time I’m coping with how to write Greek letters. Before it was just π in maths and the occasional μ in physics.

Now, in economics, I have to grapple regularly with Σ, θ, δ, γ, α and the dreaded σ. When you’re struggling with the Latin alphabet, the last thing you want to do is work out how to write a σ (my ‘σ’ actually looks like ‘δ’!).

Whenever I have to handwrite a note or something, I always write it in all capitals. Not print, though, because I am such a lazy bastard that I can’t even be bothered to write neatly in block capitals. My capitals used to be neat — when I was in primary school. But when my lowercase letters became illegible and I moved on to using capitals instead — well, of course my capitals became illegible as well. Nevertheless, it is the least-worst option. Although I always have to apologise and explain that I’m not shouting!

I don’t have a signature either. Well I do, but it’s basically just a scrawl. I’ve tried practicing writing my name, but I think I am actually physically incapable of doing it. It looks kind of like “D____ Sl_____”. Distinctive, in a way, but it’s just a scrawl. Some people are genuinely shocked by my signature.

Despite my uneasy relationship with handwriting, I find it absolutely fascinating. It’s interesting to note how different people can take such radically different approaches to writing the same symbols. My friend and I had a discussion about somebody else. I just said, “I like her ‘a’s.” My friend thought I was using some kind of secret man-code euphemism. But no. I genuinely like her lowercase ‘a’.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have a girlfriend.

Via Digg.

4 comments

Procrastination?

7 December 2006 15:51

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Commuting, General, Internet, Personal, Technology

I thought I’d write about a couple of cool websites I’ve been visiting recently.

Back in the day I used MyBlogLog to keep track of what links visitors to this blog were clicking. But then I got bored of it and stopped using it. When I heard that Yahoo! was thinking of buying it, I thought I would check it out again. I actually said, “It would be interesting to see how it’s changed since I last saw it.” And boy has it changed!

It’s not like a social network for blogs. As if we needed another social network! But this is actually quite a good idea because it emphasises the community aspect of blogging. It also reveals connections between blogs that you might have thought didn’t exist. Here is my user profile for MyBlogLog, and here is this blog’s community (feel free to join it of course).

The other website that’s quite impressed me recently is Twitter. It’s another sort-of social network, but it’s more like a blogging tool. But not. It’s from the people who brought us Blogger and Odeo.

At first I had a struggle working out what it actually was. It’s such a basic idea, I needed to make sure I had it straight. You just type in the box what you’re doing. And that’s it! That’s it! At first I thought, “What’s the point in this? I could just write this on my blog.”

Theoretically, one of the best things about blogging is that there are no rules. It shouldn’t really matter if I just rattle out a one-line post. But in reality is does matter, because it looks quite stupid. That’s why I introduced asides to the blog. It’s true — the format of your blog determines your writing style.

Twitter is based entirely on messages that last no more than 149 characters. Like a text message then. And that’s where things start to get cool, because you can send an update from your phone. I can imagine doing this a fair bit on the train. But if you don’t fancy paying the “standard network rate” you can also update via IM or via the web. And you can also receive updates from your friends via IM or on your phone.

It might not amount to much in the long run, but at the moment I really like the idea. It gives me the space to put frivolous nonsense up there without dumping in on blog. Here is my page on Twitter.

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