Mobile-phone users in Iran are complaining that text messages with the word "dollar" are being blocked, amid a dramatic drop in the value of the Iranian currency, the rial. Cellular News reports.
Iranian media, including the "Shargh" daily, reported this week that all text messages containing the word "dollar" in Persian were being blocked.
AFP reported on January 10 that foreign journalists in Tehran, its own correspondent included, verified the block -- but added that the word "euro" was being transmitted without problems.
Coming to a cellphone near you in 2012: campaign contributions on the fly, at a moment's notice. NBC Los Angeles reports.
California is the first state in the nation to adopt new rules which allow a phone user to simply text a campaign donation. It's the same idea as texting a donation to a favored charity or a disaster relief organization. The amount pledged goes into the phone bill, then is pass on to the campaign.
The new texting rules were approved by California's Fair Political Practices Commission earlier this year. Commission Chair Ann Ravel thinks the move will engage more people in the political process. And she believes other states will eventually get behind the idea.
The UK riots of 2011 were notable partly because of the way they were organised. Here, rioters reveal how they used technology, spreading news of the disturbances via social media. More influential than websites such as Facebook or Twitter was the BlackBerry Messenger system, built into BlackBerry handsets and free to use.
Africa Review reports that Congo has blocked text messages on mobile phone networks as the country awaits the announcement of the election results.
The government justified the suspension of SMS messages on grounds of security and as a precaution against political disturbances at a particularly volatile period.
“The government noticed that some political parties are using the SMS messages to refuse to accept the results,” declared Mr Adolphe Lumanu, the vice-prime minister in charge of Internal Affairs.
According to a French article in mediatic-redc.net sent to me by Christy Mobley on Facebook, the Congolese are finding ways to circumvent the SMS blockage by their operators, by switching their SIM cards with SIM cards from MTN-Rwanda.
Contacting the Secretary of State's Office on election day is now easier with a texting program implemented by the agency. Voters on Tuesday may text "MSVote" to 57711 to receive assistance on election day. [via Hattiesburgamerican.com]
"Nowadays, people text more than they talk," Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said. "We want to make contacting our agency as easy as possible to those who may need to reach us on election day. Through a simple text message, our agency's contact information will be sent to a voter's cellphone."
This is an e-mail I received from one of my readers, under the cover of anonymity, reporting first hand on how text messaging was successfully used in the Tunisian elections.
Am contacting you hoping you will kindly accept to write a short post about the fact that SMS texting has been very massively used in the Tunisian elections, the elections has finished today (23 October) and it lasted 4 days, from 20 to 23 October).
The SMS texting was used by the citizens to consult where shall they vote, the service (made available with a cooperation between the governement and a private local company) was really a big success, here's some numbers:
-- More than 3 million SMS has been served on the 23rd of October, totalling around 6 million SMS in one day (assuming every SMS-MO has its response: SMS-MT)
-- 1 million SMS has been server on the 22nd of October
-- 700k SMS has been served from 20 to 21st of October
The service is very basic, people have to send SMS with this syntax:
bv ID_CODE LANGUAGE
Example: To know where one should vote, mobile users sent out an ID like this one: 'bv 67521266 F' to short code 1423, A reply was returned by SMS indicating the correct voting office (in french, if "F" was added at the end of the text).
The service was a real success, and tunisians estimate that there's a historical record of the participation percentage, we're talking about more than 87% of participation ..
Anyway, i thought it is interesting to write something on textually (am your reader since early 2006) to spread the word about SMS usage in elections and its success in the tunisian post-revolution and first 100% democratic elections.
The ability to contribute to your favorite California political candidates will soon be just a text message away, after the state’s ethics agency took a step Thursday to bring campaigning into the 21st century. The LA Times Blog reports.
The state Fair Political Practices Commission voted to allow contributions by text message as long as the candidates report the identity and address of those giving more than $100. The new regulation will take effect in about 30 days, and then campaigns and phone-plan carriers will have to take action to set up the contributing-by-texting systems.
Cuba accused on Monday the United States of "preparing a spam SMS cyberwar" with the Caribbean island nation to disrupt SMS service to over 1 million Cuban mobile phone users, said the country's official website Cubadebate in an article. Xinhuanet reports.
It said Washington Software Company, Inc. plans to design a text messaging system that can't be blocked by the Cuban telecommunication company even if it contains "messages against the country."
Cubadebate also said the operation is "in clear violation of Cuban laws and international agreements."
The Jakata Globe reports that Maluku Police sent thousands of text messages on Tuesday appealing for calm in the aftermath of sectarian violence in Ambon (the capital of Maluku province of Indonesia) that left at least five people dead and 89 injured over the weekend.
The SMS urged residents to calm down and not be easily provoked by inflammatory text messages.
Police are searching for the sender of a text message that allegedly provoked the clashes between Muslims and Christians.
The police message was sent from the number 3936 and asked the people of Maluku not to believe rumors aimed at creating division among people as well as disturb peace and order.
We congratulate the Libyan people on the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi, and we urge them to go out in the streets to preserve and protect the public belongings.
Cuban blogger in Spain, Ernesto Hernandez Busto, is sending uncensored news to about 1,000 Cuban cell phones daily — and exploring far more sharp-edged applications. The Miami Herald reports.
Eventually, said Ernesto Hernandez Busto, he should be able to send SMS messages to special groups: If dissidents are being jailed in Santiago province, he could text “Stop the repression” to all cell phones used there by the Ministry of Interior.
Cuban authorities cannot block the messages from the Cuba Sin Censura system, or Cuba Without Censorship, because each one is sent from a different telephone number, Hernandez told El Nuevo Herald.<(p>
The system is the latest evidence of how new technology, such as cell phones and the Internet, is helping to increase the flow of information into and out of Cuba, despite the government monopoly on the mass media and telecommunications.
A very interesting read from Asher Moses for The Sydney Morning Herald on how moves by Western governments to crack down on the use of technology by citizens are being compared to repressive policies of regimes such as China.
After British Prime Minister David Cameron floated the idea of restricting the use of services such as Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger to prevent riots, transit authorities in San Francisco late last week shut down mobile phone reception in several underground stations to block would-be demonstrators.
Politicians in Norway have discussed methods to limit online anonymity and combat web extremism in the wake of the recent massacre.
In Australia, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is still intent on implementing his heavily criticised mandatory ISP filtering net censorship scheme despite public and political opposition.
... Authoritarian states are monitoring these developments closely, eager to see what kind of precedents will be set by Western officials as they wrestle with these evolving technologies, argued Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, in The Wall Street Journal.
Chinese state media are already blaming the London riots on a lack of controls on the internet in Western countries, which is in stark contrast to China's security apparatus, which includes widespread blocking of websites and deep monitoring of online communications.
China even shut down the internet in the Xinjiang region for 10 months in 2009 after riots.
"Media in the US and Britain used to criticise developing countries for curbing freedom of speech. Britain's new attitude will help appease the quarrels between East and West over the future management of the internet," an editorial in China's Global Times read.
According to the Korea Times, President of South Korea Lee Myung-bal adopted a new way to increase communication with the people despite his busy schedule.
Over the past year or so, Lee has sent many text messages to “unsung heroes” that he cannot meet in person due to schedule conflicts but still feels the need to tell that his heart goes out to them.
Those who received the presidential text messages include civil servants involved in the burial of animals infected with foot-and-mouth disease and firefighters who saved lives while their own were on the line.
... Presidential staff said text messages are a one-on-one communication tool between the President and those who receive his message and therefore this has a real impact of improving the receiver’s perception of the head of state.
Ventura County Star on how the Tea Party Express on the right and the online political grass roots group the Courage Campaign on the left will lobby California State to accept campaign donations by SMS for small contributions.
While it is unlikely many people are going to become aware of or excited enough about a local campaign for the Legislature to text a contribution, the regulatory change could add a new dimension to ballot-measure campaigns, which could incorporate appeals for text-message contributions into their television advertising.
"Online money in politics comes from passion and it comes from immediacy," said Jacobs, who in 2004 was California director for presidential candidate Howard Dean, whose campaign pioneered the use of small contributions collected over the Internet.
Allowing people to make contributions by using their cellphones as they are watching a television ad, Jacobs said, would make it "much easier to get immediacy."
Founder Rick Jacobs said 90 percent of the Courage Campaign's funding comes from online contributions that average $40.
... The idea to allow such contributions in federal elections was rejected last year by the FEC, which has much more stringent regulations regarding small contributions than does the state California Fair Political Practices Commission.
How do you accurately poll voters in an age when increasing numbers of them own only a cell phone? The Chicago Sun-Times reports.
I worry about this more than anything else — you can have a California number and still be living in Iowa,” said Ann Selzer, the only pollster to predict Barack Obama would win the Iowa Caucuses by 7 percentage points. (He won by eight.)
This will complicate tracking not only the horse-race among Republican presidential candidates trudging through Iowa county fairs this summer, but also will challenge politicians of both parties trying to navigate Illinois’ newly redrawn congressional districts.
... About 40 percent of Hispanic households have no landline — just a cell phone. About a quarter of white families have only a cell phone.
Polling only landlines means you get lots of older, white women. You disproportionately miss young voters and minorities.
According to The Irish Times, Minister for Finance Finance Michael Noonan has ruled out a “tax on teenagers”, saying he will not put an additional levy on text messages above the current VAT rate.
Mr Noonan warned any such charge could be passed on to customers if imposed on mobile telephone companies and argued it was impossible to estimate the potential yield of such a tax. He was responding to a suggestion from Labour Party backbencher Aodhán Ó Ríordáin.
In Labour’s April 2009 pre-budget submission, the party proposed a one cent tax on the 25 million text messages sent every day. Irish people are believed to be among the world’s most profilic texters.
A group of Istanbul Bilgi University students have launched a web project to allow “citizen journalists” to report on the 2011 election campaign across the country.
The website, is a Turkish version of the Ushahidi website which uses the concept of crowdsourcing via multiple channels, including SMS, email, Twitter and the Internet, to provide citizens with a platform to upload their own instant media independently of mainstream networks.
A group of nearly 20 Tamil Tiger soldiers and civilians were killed after following instructions from a text message that read: ''Just walk across to the troops, slowly! With a white flag and comply with instructions carefully. The soldiers are nervous about suicide bombers.''
The SMS was sent from Dr Palitha Kohona, a dual Sri Lankan-Australian citizen, former Australian diplomat and trade negotiator for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He is now an ambassador for Sri Lanka, the country's permanent representative to the United Nations.
A report to the UN Secretary-General last month named him as party to the failed surrender talks, and two Tamil groups have accused him of war crimes.
Dr Kohona denies the claims, telling The Saturday Age that while he sent the text message it was not a guarantee of safety. ''Absolutely not. This would be have been way beyond my authority to promise,'' he said.
In preparation for a third intifada, which it is hoped will be ignited on Friday, 13 May tens of thousands of short messages (sms) flooded the mobile phones of Palestinians in the West Bank, urging them to take part. The messages also urged participation in similar events on Sunday, a Christian holiday.
The Nation reports on text messages circulating in Pakistan following the killing of Bin Laden, conveying the sinking public trust in the armed forces. Specifically resentment over the performance of Pakistan Army and specifically its radar system.
A country that thrives on rumour and gossip, the messages all shared a common theme: radars for sale and last words of Osama Bin Laden. Messages read:
“ Radar For Sale, Model No. 438, Pakistan Army made, can’t detect USA helicopters but can receive Star Plus (an Indian entertainment TV channel), only for Rs999. Please contact General Ashfaq Kayani.”
and:
Pak Army’s latest air surveillance radar for sale, though it cant detect enemy’s choppers or aircrafts but it is good to get Star TV, Discovery and other TV channels.”
Actual violence may have declined substantially since the worst days of the war, but a culture of fear and intimidation still prevails. One of Irak's more peculiar menaces are death threats by text message. The New York Times reports.
Digital media have amplified the young voices of democracy ringing around the Middle East, but the flip side here is that the authorities and insurgents alike are also adept at using technology, particularly cellphones, largely unavailable here before the 2003 American invasion, as part of their arsenals of intimidation.
While politicians in some parts of the country embraced bombing of public places, killing innocent people to subvert the wish of the electorate, politicians in Lagos resorted to the use of text message missiles to rattle the opposition. ... Rather than making issues and ideology the central theme in the process, the concise SMS were tactfully designed to take some luster off the personalities so attacked.
Tajikistan's Council of Ulema is set to issue a fatwa banning a so-called SMS-divorce, the state religious committee announced today. Cellular News reports.
The move comes amid growing complaints that some Tajik men -- working as migrant laborers in Russia -- divorce their wives by sending a mobile-phone text message or just making a phone call.
According to Global Vision, more than half of Tajikistan's labor force works abroad. Men will often leave their wives and children for years at a time.
Migrant Tajiks are largely beyond the reach of their country's laws. Neither text messages nor "talaaq" are legal methods of divorce there (unlike in other countries like Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, where courts have sanctioned the combination), but courts can't enforce this or other divorce proceedings — like alimony payments — on an absent husband..
Sunni Islamic traditions allow men to divorce their wives by merely saying "talaq," -- an Islamic term for a declaration of divorce -- between one and three times.
Tajik religious leaders, however, insist that ending a marriage is not such a simple matter.
Monday April 4 was a big day for Haiti, as the country announced the results of elections which had dragged on, in one form or another, for almost seven months. Popular singer and somewhat risqué icon turned politico, Michel Martelly, was declared the winner after months of campaigning fraught with voting fraud, lack of transparency and irregularities. RCR Unplugged reports.
Even the opposition couldn?t argue with Mr. Martelly?s resounding 67% victory, a win which had been accurately predicted by an organization by the name of Fondation Espoir and its nationwide youth network, Jeune Ayiti. The movement had been using an SMS platform by the name of Mwen Konté (?I count?) to monitor the elections and report any foul play.
... Fondation Espoir started out by identifying youth organizations around the country, focusing in on the major cities like Port Au Prince, Jacmel, St Marc and Cap Haitian.
Focus groups were set up and people were asked to provide their phone number in order to become part of the network.
Jeune Ayiti also claims to have partnered with over 600 youth organizations around Haiti, and from that base, says it was able to recruits leaders and teach them to replicate the training they received inside their own associations.
Residents of the Gaza Strip have reported that they received a number of text messages from an Israeli number offering an award, in exchange for any information on Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured on 25 June 2006 by Hamas in a cross-border raid. ynet news reports.
According to the report, the message was sent from a mobile number and offered $10 million for credible information about the location of the captive soldier. Palestinians have made reports of similar messages in the past.
Lawmakers are increasingly conducting public business on their personal cell phones, through calls and text messages. Yet the numbers for those phones and the bills that show whom lawmakers called or texted and when are largely unavailable to the public for review, reports The Washington Post.
Legislatures don't pay those bills, which is among the reasons that records related to the phones aren't considered public under state law.
... According to Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst for the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, 31 states including Ohio ban or limit the use of electronic devices on the floors of House and Senate chambers.
Erickson said such policies are generally aimed at controlling disruptions, not preventing inappropriate communication between or among lawmakers - or limiting lobbyists' reach. Cell phone and texting restrictions are often not effective in committee hearings, the front line on any bill.
The practice means silent text messages can fly between a lawmaker and a lobbyist seeking to sway his or her vote without a public hint of the interaction. A list of cell communications that took place on the day of a hearing would not be a public record.
According to the AP, Muammar Gaddafi's government issued an SMS to Libyans today boasting that the insurrection in the country's east is on the verge of defeat, the latest salvo in a propaganda blitz by his regime.
... Early today, as Muslim worshippers prepared for weekly prayers, Libyans received a series of SMS claiming that forces loyal to Gaddafi would soon flood into Benghazi, Libya's second city and stronghold of the rebellion.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Kadhafi is exploiting technology in a bid to persuade both his own people and the world at large that Libya is the target of a media and Islamist plot.
Television and SMS text messaging are the main tools being used by the embattled Libyan leader's regime domestically, but abroad it has also resorted to diplomatic demarche to complain to the United Nations.
... The north African country's main mobile phone company, Libyana, has also been spreading reports of the conspiracy by text message.
"Infiltrated foreigners, Tunisians, Egyptians and Sudanese, hold passports from Gulf countries, foreign currency and very sophisticated communications devices and networks," said one message in Arabic.
Image left: A man in a cafe displays an automatic text message he received in Feburary that he says promises 500 Libyan dinars ($400) to anyone who "makes noise" in support of Gaddafi in the coming days. From Al Jazeera English via Movements.org
Mobile-phone users in Iran are complaining that text messages with the word "dollar" are being blocked, amid a dramatic drop in the value of the Iranian currency, the rial. 
Iranian media, including the "
Contacting the Secretary of State's Office on election day is now easier with a texting program implemented by the agency. Voters on Tuesday may text "MSVote" to 57711 to receive assistance on election day. [via 
Cuban blogger in Spain, Ernesto Hernandez Busto, is sending uncensored news to about 1,000 Cuban cell phones daily — and exploring far more sharp-edged applications. 
According to the 
A group of 
Monday April 4 was a big day for Haiti, as the country announced the results of elections which had dragged on, in one form or another, for almost seven months. Popular singer and somewhat risqué icon turned politico, 
Residents of the Gaza Strip have reported that they received a number of text messages from an Israeli number offering an award, in exchange for any information on 
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