The Annoyances of Modern Life, part 493

[jducoeur]

SMS is a newish technology built into most current cell phones -- it allows you to send short text messages back and forth with friends, rather than having to actually call them on the phone. It's very big in Japan, especially among the teen market, although it hasn't caught on in quite such a big way in the US yet. For some time now, I've been meaning to try it out, knowing that my current phone has SMS capability. So I was intrigued when, last night at around 12:30am, my phone got an SMS message.

It's spam.

Great. The implication is that somewhere, there is a list specifically of Sprint cell subscribers (the email/SMS gateway is different for each service, so they have to not only know my number, but which service I'm with), and it's gotten into the hands of the spammers. This could get really irritating, really fast...

Comments

[tpau]

oh i thought it was jsut us. alex and i got our spam through sprint at aroudn 1:36 am

[cellio]

Oh joy. :-(

Does the phone make noise when a message comes in? That could get really annoying if so.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Does the phone make noise when a message comes in?

Yes, it does. I was already in bed with the cat, and we were both quite startled by his phone chirping.

[jducoeur]

Does the phone make noise when a message comes in?

Yep. Fortunately, we hadn't quite turned out the light yet; I was still preparing for bed. Startled the heck out of msmemory and the cat (who were already in bed), though...

[qedrakmar.livejournal.com]

Call sprint and tell them you'd like to press charges, and will do so against them, if they don't stop the spammers immediately. As your provider, they are legally responsible.

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

I got one SPAM message about a month after getting my SMS capable phone. Since then no more. I don't know why not, but I am happy to not get them. They take time to read [worse than email].

It won't be too long before SMS is a quaint artifact of days gone by. Sort of like turning the ringer and asking Mabel at the local phone station to connect you to the Thompsons on the other side of town. SMS is going nowhere without easier input devices. 3G should kill it outright.

[jducoeur]

It won't be too long before SMS is a quaint artifact of days gone by.

I'm not so sure -- I think it may find an ecological niche as an element of the larger messaging equation. All by itself it isn't very exciting, but I suspect that it will wind up working with other tools in some interesting ways. Some of that is just starting; I think that's a large area to explore yet...

3G?

[metageek.livejournal.com]

If the bottleneck is the input device, why would 3G do any better?

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

We only get spam from our provider, and there are ways to turn it off. I use regular text messaging with my sister and John a huge amount.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

No, I also get spam from others (via the email gateway) a couple of times a month.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

It hasn't hit Israel (yet). I get text messages from my phone company once in a while, usually telling me I'm about to run out of credit on the phone or the like.

[baron-elric.livejournal.com]

For me it happened Saturday night. I've never used the function, or wanted to, but I found my phone saying I had a text message. And it was mortgage spam. Fooey!