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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

Technology

Who Reads Your Text Messages?

While this isn’t the least bit surprising, the Kobe Bryant case has brought to light the fact that the major cell phone carriers keep copies of text messages sent via their networks. In this case, the judge has ordered AT&T to hand over the transcripts of text messages sent by the alleged victim shortly after she had sex with Bryant. Engadget has a short write-up of the issue: AT&T Wireless keeps all your Text Messages.

Update

According to this post at Engadget, Sprint and Cingular do not retain copies of yoru text message:
>[T]he guy who designed and implemented the SMS text messaging systems for Sprint and a large part of what is now Cingular gave us the scoop on how both carriers offer considerably more privacy than AT&T Wireless:

>>While the Sprint system is MUCH more sophisticated and does retain some data for a long time (billing and usage info, and similar) neither of these systems retain the actual content of SMS messages. Sprint’s system lets the user have a web based SMS mailbox (like an web mail but for SMS messages) and messages can be kept, at the user’s choice, in their mailbox but once a message is deleted, it’s gone. In Cingular’s case there is no retention at all. So, while the piece is true as relates to AT&T, it definately isn’t for Cingular and Sprint.

INDUCE Act

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently broke the story about the latest rights-constricting work of Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah): the INDUCE Act. As the EFF put it:

It’s the Hollings Bill by other means — an over-reaching new form of indirect liability that will force technology companies of all kinds to “ask permission” before innovating for fear of ruinous litigation if they don’t.

And so another front in the copyright wars opens, with the aggressors waving the bloody flag of file sharing, but really aiming at a much bigger target.

INDUCE stands for “Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act of 2004”. Go ahead, read that again. Yeah, that’s right, copyright laws, and ultimately your rights to make use of media that you have legally purchased will be directly affected by a law meant to protect children from exploitation. By hiding the new restrictions in a child exploitation law, he can try to crush the opposition by painting anyone against the proposed changes as not wanting to protect children. Utterly despicable, though not surprising coming from a politician who has received substantial contributions from the TV/Movies/Music industry, and advocated the idea that media companies should have the right to destroy the computers of people downloading copyrighted media – while his very own Web site was using unlicensed software. Brilliant.

Professor Susan Crawford has posted the draft text of the bill (PDF) and provides additional insight into the matter:

The Act (to be proposed tomorrow by songwriter Sen. Hatch and others) amends the copyright law to say that anyone who “induces” copyright infringement is himself/itself an infringer.

“Induce” means intentionally aids, abets, counsels, or procures. So you can’t even hire a lawyer if you’re doing something risky.

If we don’t put a stop to this now, your VCR may well be illegal in the near future. I am going to follow this issue and post more news as I find it. For now here are some other sites discussing the matter:

Smart Aggregation, Electronic Agents, Online Secretaries

Mike Davidson’s article Newsmap as a Model for Smart Aggregation provides an insightful view of the future of information retrieval, presentation and use. I readily admit to being an information junkie – I’m subscribed to several lists (evolt, WebDesign-L, FreeCycle etc.), forums (eZ publish, KnifeForums (work), UsualSuspects (work) etc.), 72 RSS feeds (actually 73, now that I am aware of Mike’s site), several sites that are not currently RSS-enabled, a couple of IRC channels, and a select group of IM contacts. As noted in the article, it isn’t easy to keep up with the steady flow of information, and at times I am required to shut down some of the sources to ensure I can work without distraction.

Most days I rely on a few configuration controls to keep from being overwhelmed by information. Beyond the standard spam controls (SpamAssassin with Thunderbird‘s junk filtering), I use message filtering and labeling to sort incoming mail to folders, delineated by subject or sender, allowing me to focus on important e-mail first. I have set up my RSS aggregator (SharpReader) to refresh a few select feeds every two hours, while the vast majority are refreshed every four or eight hours. Some days I find that the information provided in the less-often refreshed feeds is much more interesting/important than in those feeds I have deemed worth refreshing every two hours. While I can mark myself away or shut off my IM client (Trillian) if I need to focus for a while, there are those occasional periods where I need brief moments of intense concentration in an otherwise relaxed day, only to receive a pop-up message window, distracting me from the task at hand. Pretty damned frustrating to say the least.

Obviously, I am a prime customer for a personal contact/information agent. If I had a tool to control the flow of all of these streams I would be much more efficient, without losing the valuable connections required by my job in a fast-moving industry. I would actually add a couple more features to Mike’s idea.

Product Rankings/Interest

I have willingly ranked 250+ items on Amazon, in the expectation that I, as a customer will receive better recommendations when viewing their site. I expect Amazon to try to sell me items, they might as well be items that I find interesting, right? Right. Why not tie this type of information/preference into the system as well. If I have assigned a high rank to a book, CD, or DVD on a retail Web site, it would make sense that I might be interested in a notification of a new album by the same artist, book by the same author, or the sequel to the movie. Conversely, if I have given low ranks to an artist or author, then the system could imply that I really don’t want to see news items about them.

Cross-Media Connections

If I am discussing Margarita recipes with Leesa via IM, it would be great to have the electronic agent run a search for Margarita recipes and notify me of their results. This would be a very complicated task, as it asks a lot of the agent: which words/phrases should trigger a search, and when is it appropriate to notify me of the search results. For that matter, how it chooses to notify me is as important. Perhaps it would be best to just make an entry for me to view when it is convenient for me.

There are more attributes that I would want to see in an application of this form, but I will save those thoughts for a future post.