Apparently, serious questions like cell phone coverage gaps and suspiciously-named new wireless fees didn’t stand a chance at the recent CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2004 conference – because the showroom floor was dominated by what some might call the silly services, from prank voice mails to reporters mimicking high-profile officials to new game technologies that reportedly had people walking the floor staring at their handsets.
The executives gathered for the conference seemed far more interested in the newest bells and whistles – or, if you prefer, beeps and signals – which they seem to believe will be critical to wireless survival. Even if one of those critical survival strategies involves silly services, like cell phone games trading witty insults or Cingular Wireless using an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator leaving messages for reporters using its new Vblast, according to ZDNet.com. But not all was fun and frolic: there was talk about a new service e-mailing cell phones with Amber Alert bulletins by next June.
Beats the living bejesus out of getting slammed with popup videos on instant messaging programs, but a Virginia resident reportedly signed onto AOL Instant Messenger last week and got an image of vice presidential candidate John Edwards above his buddy list, triggering an anti-trial lawyers message (Edwards himself was one, before his election to the Senate) that played, reportedly, every time he logged onto AIM. November Fund, which produced the ad, told reporters the popup ad runs AOL because campaign finance reform laws ban advocacy groups accepting corporate contributions from mentioning candidates by name on television. AOL’s Andrew Weinstein said such political advertising has metastasized in the past month, targeting users by zip codes and demographics.
Another week, another Internet Explorer flaw: a report emerged that Windows XP Service Pack 2 and subsequent patches were supposed to fix the hole a new exploit – letting programs be planted and executed on completely patched systems – could hit. A researcher said to run malware.com found the local security zone weakness in IE that allows security restrictions in that zone to be bypassed.
Almost as, ahem, explosive could be several models of Kyocera Corp.’s cell phones, which the company announced had batteries that could go kaboom. The models are the 3200 series, the Blade, the Rave, the Slider, and the Phantom. (Sounds like a bill for a heavy metal concert.) The problem: the batteries shipped to the company for those phones may have been fakes, sent by a former supplier.
A survey by the daily Bulgarian newspaper Sega says over three quarters of the country’s citizens have never used the Internet and almost a quarter don’t even know what the word means. Bulgaria’s Telecommunications Minister Nikolai Vassilev had said in May that only 4 percent of Bulgarian companies used the Internet in their daily work and that Bulgarian schools had only one computer for every 200 students. But Internet use in the former Warsaw Pact countries is widely believed to have grown slowly enough since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe 15 years ago, largely because widespread poverty stops many from owning computers and paying Internet fees.
Internet use is widespread enough elsewhere that one of the world’s oldest international radio stations got edged off the air after 70 years because of the Net. Swiss Radio International signed off at midnight Greenwich Mean Time November 1 and yielded to a multilingual Web site building up for five years. “Radio is bowing out too early,” lamented director Nicholas Lombard. The good news? The site is said to be getting eight million hits a month. “A big number,” Lombard noted, “for a Website without sex, crime, and fun.”
