A House Committee has heard testimony on a bill that would clear the way for cell phone companies to provide cell phone location information to law enforcement in certain missing persons cases. Misourinet reports.
The language of House Bill 1108 has been introduced three previous times in Missouri, and has been passed out of the House but never out of the Senate. It would require companies to locate, or “ping” a cell phone, when law enforcement requests that information in emergencies in which a missing person is in danger of serious physical injury or death. It also protects cell phone companies from being sued for providing that information under the guidelines of the bill.
Missey and her husband, Greg Smith, are proponents of the bill commonly named for their daughter Kelsey, who was kidnapped from Overland Park, Kansas and found murdered in southern Jackson County in 2007.
Greg, now a legislator in Kansas, says if such language had been law then Kelsey might have been saved. “June 2, 2007 was the night she went missing and she was found four days later … Once that information was released by the cell phone company it only took forty-five minutes to recover her body.” A former police officer, he adds, “If you can get that kind of response in a missing person case, that’s just absolutely light years ahead of what we’re doing right now.”
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) released a draft of a cellphone privacy bill Monday that would require providers to tell subscribers if tracking software was installed on their mobile device.
Consumers have the right to know and to say no to the presence of software on their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information,” said Rep. Markey, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and former chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
“While consumers rely on their phones, their phones relay all sorts of information about them, often without their knowledge or consent. I am concerned about the threat to consumers’ privacy posed by electronic monitoring software on mobile phones, such as the software developed by Carrier IQ. Today I am releasing draft legislation to provide greater transparency into the transmission of consumers’ personal information and empower consumers to say no to such transmission. This is especially important for parents of children and teens. I look forward to working with stakeholders on my legislation and collaborating with my colleagues prior to the formal introduction of the final legislation.
Proposed legislation by Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) would require carriers and phone makers to inform consumers about monitoring software and gain their "express consent" before collecting information from phones.
-- 38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making.
-- 24% of cell owners used their phone to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store.
-- 25% of adult cell owners used their phones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store, to see if they could get a better price somewhere else.
According to Bloomberg, Mobile carriers such as AT&T Inc. and makers of wireless devices including HTC Corp. would be required to disclose when phones contain monitoring software under draft legislation in the U.S. House.
The proposed measure released today responds to concerns of lawmakers who learned last year that mobile-phone software provider Carrier IQ Inc. gathered data on wireless phone users.
“Consumers have the right to know and to say no to the presence of software on their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information,” Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who wrote the bill, said in a statement.
North Korea has warned that any of its citizens caught trying to defect to China or using mobile phones during the 100-day mourning period for Kim Jong-il will be branded as "war criminals" and punished accordingly.
I don't fully understand this article or how the title relates to the content. Seems overly complicated but it's related to "text messaging corrosion" and published by Forbes no less. See for yourself.
In the first partnership of its kind, mobile telecommunications operator Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation will provide more than 70 million Orange customers in Africa and the Middle East (AMEA) with mobile access to Wikipedia – without incurring data usage charges.
The latest phone stacking game craze is simple enough. If you’re at, say, a restaurant with your friends, or at a dinner party and so on, participants simply stack their cell phones at the center of the table. The Inquistr reports.
The idea is that it will be difficult for mobile-addicted participants to resist picking up their cell phone for fear of missing out on tweets, the latest in adorable kitten videos and, well, you get the idea. Should you lose at the “phone stacking” game by picking it back up, you’ll be faced with having to pay the bill for the entire party.
The phone stacking craze all started with Brian Perez, a Tumblr blogger who goes by the name “Lil b”. The blogger says he came up with the game as a ” fun concept in this new age high tech life of ours,” rightfully adding that “Conversation is the spice of life.”
The new service from China Telecom will run on the network of Britain’s market leader and is aimed at Chinese living in Britain and visitors to the country. The New York Times reports.
Bythe end of March, the company said, it plans to sell prepaid calling, text and data service to 600,000 Chinese living in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as the 600,000 who visit Britain each year.
Hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping to curb medical error, have invested heavily to put computers, smartphones and other devices into the hands of medical staff for instant access to patient data, drug information and case studies. The New York Times reported in December.
But like many cures, this solution has come with an unintended side effect: doctors and nurses can be focused on the screen and not the patient, even during moments of critical care.
And they are not always doing work; examples include a neurosurgeon making personal calls during an operation, a nurse checking airfares during surgery and a poll showing that half of technicians running bypass machines had admitted texting during a procedure.
According to a peer-reviewed survey of 439 medical technicians published this year in Perfusion, 55 percent of technicians who monitor bypass machines acknowledged they had talked on cellphones during heart surgery.
While addiction to apps or texting is not a recognized medical condition, there have been numerous studies produced on whether the technology causes more harm than good. The Vancouver Sun reports.
A study by Case Western Reserve School of Medicine found that teens who spend a lot of time on texting or on social media are also more like to use drugs or alcohol and get into fights.
.. Smartphones also can be habit-forming, according to a study by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Intel Labs. Researchers found that smartphone users in the U.S. and in Finland checked their phone repeatedly throughout the day, usually for less than 30 seconds.
This is a new turn for cell phones. According to CBS Chicago, some restaurants are now refusing to deliver to cell phone customers following a rash of robberies of their drivers.
Police say lots of food delivery drivers in Chicago are getting robbed by people using cell phones to target them.
Chicago police has just issued a business alert. It warns business owners in the Chinatown and Hyde Park areas not to take any cell phone orders.
A lot of people don’t have landlines anymore, so the businesses could stand to lose a lot of money by refusing orders called in on a cell.
Officers and civilian staff in Sussex have been told not to power up their personal phones, iPods and other electrical items at work in the hope of slashing electricity bills. The Telegraph reports.
The force must find £50 million ($77 million) worth of savings from its overall budget by 2015 and has already cut energy bills by 10 per cent.
But the latest money-saver has angered some officers who have warned it risks morale for the sake of a “few pennies”.
In a six-month investigation into the Fukushima disaster, a 507-page report published yesterday, points a finger at Japan's atomic power regulator, the Nuclear Industrial and Safety Agency, known as NISA. Business Week reports.
While the utility supplied the electricity that kept homes, factories and offices running in metropolitan Tokyo, the world's biggest city, lack of preparation for power failure in the Fukushima station left workers reduced to flashlights at the 864-acre plant site, the size of about 490 soccer fields.
Batteries in cell phones at the Fukushima plant started running out on March 11 and with the failure of mains power couldn't be recharged, preventing communication with the on-site emergency headquarters, according to the report.
Because the utility known as Tepco hadn't considered a tsunami overwhelming the Fukushima plant, no preparation was made for “simultaneous and multiple losses of power” causing station blackout, the document says. The blackout caused the failure of all personal handyphone system units in the plant, seriously disrupting communications among staff.
U.S. companies might soon be required to publish where they get their rare metals for all those electronics consumers buy. And activists hope that it will be one small step toward resolving long running conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. npr reports.
These minerals are coming from the most conflicted area in the world, where women are raped by the thousands, where men are held in slavery and humiliated by having their wives raped in front of them," says Rep. Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington state. "All of this mayhem is the basis for the mining of tin, tungsten and tantalum, which are elements that are essential for the creation of a Blackberry.
Apple's new commercial shows Santa asking Siri for directions to children’s houses, checking the weather in various U.S cities and mining his messages for his ‘Naughty and Nice List’. [via thenextweb]
The Taliban on Sunday seized and set on fire around 300 cellular phones and over a dozen computers from tribesmen in Wana, headquarters of South Waziristan.
Tribal sources said the Taliban had earlier issued leaflets in Wana in which they termed cellphones with camera as the source of promoting obscenity and vulgarity and banned the use of such mobile phone sets.
India’s Indian cell phone subscribers, of which there are 900 million accounts, have a monthly average revenue per user of $3. So to avoid paying for a call or a text message, they practice the “missed call” ecosystem, using the “ring once, hang up” to signal to someone on the receiving end that they want to communicate with them.
According to GigaOM, an indicator that the missed system has gone fully mainstream is that missed calls are increasingly being used as the basis of entrepreneurial ventures. Google India’s Managing Director Rajan Anandan called “India’s missed call culture” a “massive phenomenon”.
Missed calls are being incorporated into mobile apps and services as a standard type of messaging like a text or an answered call itself.
Indonesia’s telecoms regulatory agency, the BTRI, has told the Jakarta Post that they may have to shut down RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger and Internet services after the company declined to establish BBM servers within the country. RIM opted to put its servers in neighboring Singapore, for reasons not described in the article. BTRI says it must do this because “the data exchanged is not safe.”
Virginia Tech’s response in alerting the university community is much more swift than it was in April 2007, the day a student opened fire on his peers, killing 32 and then himself. In 2007, the university did not send out an alert until two hours after the first shots were fired. On Thursday, the response time was only seven minutes.
According to the FT via Slashgear, Nokia has hired Goldman Sachs to oversee the sale of Vertu, an independently run division of the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia, that designs and manufactures luxury mobile phones
Vertu is estimated to be generating in the area of $268 million to $402 million yearly and is sold in over 60 countries — with the biggest markets of the brand in the Middle East, Russia, and Asia.
According to Wikipedia, the most expensive model it has ever made is the Signature Cobra, at $333,000; the most expensive regular model is the Signature Diamond at $86,000. Prices start at £55,000 for the Constellation model
Since the Vertu brand lacks smartphones, the big draw is the devices that are made from precious metals and often have gemstones embedded. The phones also have a concierge service that the user can press a button for and the service will make reservations of all sorts. Vertu has been rumored to be working on a smartphone.
The versatility of smartphones is a challenge to gyms, who seek to block users who want to make a call, text or send e-mail.
...The whole issue has grown more complicated as phones themselves have grown more multifunctional. Many phones now double as a music player and have apps like Gym Buddy to track crunches and deadlifts. And iPhones can be docked into some cardiovascular machines made by Technogym and Cybex to enliven an otherwise boring five-miler by watching videos like Lady Gaga’s “Edge of Glory.”
... Outside their native Japan, emoji have been available to in-the-know smartphone owners for some time via add-on applications. But now they may be on the verge of going mainstream in the United States, thanks in part to Apple’s latest update to its iPhone software. The latest version, iOS 5, comes with an installed library of emoji that can be turned on as an “international keyboard” in the device’s settings.
Following the decision from city officials in San Francisco to kill cell phone service at a moment’s notice throughout the Bay Area, the FCC is examining how a proposal of their own could implement similar measures across the US. [via RT]
The legal and policy issues raised by the type of wireless service interruption at issue here are significant and complex,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski writes in a press leased from their Washington DC office. “I have asked Commission staff to review these critical issues and consider the constraints that the Communications Act, First Amendment and other laws and policies place upon potential service interruptions.” “We will soon announce an open, public process to provide guidance on these issues,” adds the chair.
The language of 
In the first partnership of its kind, mobile telecommunications operator Orange and the
The latest phone stacking game craze is simple enough. If you’re at, say, a restaurant with your friends, or at a dinner party and so on, participants simply stack their cell phones at the center of the table. 
How do we pay hommage to one of history's great innovators? And also inspire people to help fight the disease that took his life? 
Hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping to curb medical error, have invested heavily to put computers, smartphones and other devices into the hands of medical staff for instant access to patient data, drug information and case studies. 
This is a new turn for cell phones. According to 
U.S. companies might soon be required to publish where they get their rare metals for all those electronics consumers buy. And activists hope that it will be one small step toward resolving long running conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 
India’s Indian cell phone subscribers, of which there are 900 million accounts, have a monthly average revenue per user of $3. So to avoid paying for a call or a text message, they practice the “missed call” ecosystem, using the “ring once, hang up” to signal to someone on the receiving end that they want to communicate with them.
The Carrier IQ story just won’t go away.
According to the 
Whimsical texting icons get a shot at success.
