Given the terrible battery life I’m experiencing on the new 3G phone, it’s all the more critical that I be able to charge my phone at every opportunity. But I’ve come to find that the three most important places in which I would normally recharge my phone will not do it: the dock I use for my phone and iPod at my desk, the iPhone adapter in my car (which both BMW and Apple promoted as a great new feature of that model year), and the great (and expensive) Bose speakers/docking station on my bedside table.

Folks posting to various message boards have said the snafu is a hardware problem, having to do with the rearrangement of some wiring in the connector port as a consequence of shifting from Firewire to USB 2.0.

Rumor has it that Apple is working on some kind of adapter, but that’s going to be impractical for some devices, and just downright awkward for others. (Oh, and you can be sure that Apple will charge through the nose for it too.) In any event, this is something that should have been spotted during QA at Apple, if not much earlier.

And whichever twit at Apple didn’t spot this as a potential issue, or decided that it wasn’t such a big deal, needs to be horsewhipped with all the charging cables that are now useless.

His television series, “Get Smart”, debuted in September 1965. A spoof on the wildly popular James Bond films of the same era, the show won two Emmys for best comedy series and three Emmys for Adams as comedy actor.

As the inept Agent 86 of the super-secret federal agency CONTROL, Adams captured TV viewers with his antics in combatting the evil agents of KAOS. When his explanations failed to convince the villains or his boss, he tried another tack: “Would you believe … ?”

In doing a little searching, I found that his famous Shoe Phone is in the CIA’s museum along with this priceless bit of dialogue:

Operator: “What number are you calling?”
Smart: “I’m calling Control, Operator!”
Operator: “You have dialed incorrectly. Give me your name and address and your dime will be refunded.”
Smart: “Operator, I’m calling from my shoe!”
Operator: “What is the number of your shoe?”
Smart: “It’s an unlisted shoe, Operator!”

And for a privacy guy like me, who can forget the Cone of Silence… where you could hear everything on the outside perfectly, but couldn’t hear each other. :)

The Washington Post also had a wonderful appreciation of Maxwell Smart’s impact on American language… including “Would you believe…?”, “Sorry about that,chief!”, and “… and loving it!”

RIP, Agent 86!

On September 20, an Arizona appeals court upheld a lower court decision which found that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 does indeed apply to Short Message Service (SMS) spam sent to mobile phones.

The case, Joffe v. Acacia Mortgage Corp., is another victory for Rodney Joffe, my friend and a fellow co-conspirator in Whitehat.com.

According to the AP:

Acacia argued that it had only sent a message and did not “call” Joffe, but the Court of Appeals said that was an incomplete description of what the company did when it used e-mail to indirectly connect to Joffe’s cell phone and place a text message.

“Even though Acacia used an attenuated method to dial a cell phone telephone number, it nevertheless did so,” Judge Patricia K. Norris wrote for the panel.

Then, on September 22, we learned in late word from Oklahoma that one of today’s most prolific spammers, Robert Soloway, was ordered by a federal judge to pay more than $10 Million in statutory damages and has been permanently ordered to stop his spamming ways. Failure to heed the judge’s order can result in arrest, extradition to Oklahoma, and jail for contempt of court.

Careful readers of PrivacyClue will remember that Robert Soloway recently got on my bad side by sending out the text of a column I wrote, making it appear as if I had sent the spam. As a result of the court’s injunction, if Soloway sends any more spam in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, he’s looking at jail time.

I’m sure his Mom is so proud!

The concept is simple: Google plans to offer a free wireless Internet service in numerous major cities. They call it “secure” because you must first download a Virtual Private Network application which encrypts your signal guarding against having your data packets sniffed out of mid-air by hackers, the NSA, and other ne’er-do-wells. Your secured data then travels to and from the sites you visit, whizzing right past the gaping maw of Google’s massive data-mining infrastructure.. which stands by slack-jawed, leaving your private information alone.

In their privacy statement, they promise that your privacy is completely protected, unless they think you’re a bad guy — or were told you were a bad guy by law enforcement — whereupon they’ll capture everything. In this way Google is no different than any ISP who can, if needs be, capture every packet that comes to and from your computer.

But the real difference here is that Google’s model, thus far, has been to provide free services supported by targeted advertising. During this ‘beta’ phase, where the Google service is being tested in a number of major market cities around the globe, the service is free. Ask any analyst and, unless they’re too deeply pickled in Google’s Kool-Aid, they’ll tell you that Google is desperately seeking alternative revenue sources. Not that they’re hurting for cash… but they just don’t want to be a one-trick pony.

The bottom line remains the Bottom Line: Google will have to pay for Google Secure Access somehow. And that will be through charging a fee, or by doing what Google does best — shove data into the gaping maw and serve advertisements.

And just when you thought I was the lone nut in the wilderness, somebody else expresses reservations:

“[I want to] ask an uncomfortable question: How much of your life do you want to put at Google’s disposal? I’ve already noted several times that Google primarily offers all this really cool free stuff in order to mine your hard drive for information and use it to sell ads. That’s why Google’s ‘Secure Access’ program — the first bit of the WiFi strategy to hit the street — is such a spooky irony. It encrypts your WiFi data streams and filters your net experience through Google’s “secure” servers. Basically, Google is saying, ‘Use our encryption servers so no one will snoop on your data — except us.’”

Just another reason to look closely at the fine print in Google’s Privacy Policy, and to make a choice about how comfortable you are with the vague promises therein, especially as revenue pressures mount.

[Note: If you find the title of this posting odd, click here.]

Thinking quickly, she snapped a cellphone picture of the guy, which caused him to panic and flee. Turning the photo over to the authorities, and publishing it on Craigslist.org and in a Flickr photo album, the story — and the picture — were soon on the front page of the New York Daily News.

Not surprisingly, the flasher was recognized by one of his previous victims and he was subsequently identified and arrested by police.

These stories are becoming more frequent, and as one who is often annoyed by the cellphone antics of rude and unthinking people, it is interesting to see cellphones being used for more positive social change. But this comes with some privacy concerns too.

For example, in a Washington Post story a few weeks ago, Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet’s Power to Shame, a woman whose dog relieved itself on a subway train in South Korea, was asked by fellow subway passengers to clean up the mess. She refused.

When she became belligerent, one of her fellow passengers snapped some camera-phone pictures of her and published them on the web. Others identified her, posted personal information about her, and she became the target of anger and ridicule. The woman eventually had to quit her university due to the amount of harassment she was getting.

Certainly this kind of social pressure can be taken too far, and I’m not sure someone should be hounded out of school for failure to pick up dog poop. But perhaps this will be a lesson to some people that common courtesy sometimes isn’t the highest price you can pay.

“Why in the world would you think your [cell] phone would work in your house?” he said. “The customer has come to expect so much. …” [But] Seidenberg said it’s not Verizon’s responsibility to correct the misconception by giving out statistics on how often Verizon’s service works inside homes or by distributing more detailed coverage maps, showing all the possible dead zones.

It’s important to note, however, that they became the largest through acquisitions, not by providing quality services or customer support.

Of course, Seidenberg then goes on to explain how his company’s “[P]riority No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3,” is the preemption of state regulations. Especially regulations that might, oh let’s say, make them disclose more information about their crappy service reliability, byzantine fee structures, or draconian cancellation policies when you find that the misleading coverage area somehow doesn’t reach through the paper-thin walls of your home!

I wonder if his company’s phones get good reception when they’re shoved up his… nevermind.

First, let me state clearly that I don’t find O&A particularly funny, and after having listened to pieces of a few shows on the teaser channel when they first arrived on XM, I had pretty much heard all of them that I wanted to. But I have been loosely following their time on XM, primarily because I am a fan of satellite radio overall, and I want the market for both XM and Sirius to continue to grow.

At first blush, however, you might think that moving O&A to non-premium status means trouble in XM-land. I don’t agree. Having heard O&A, and been underwhelmed by their wit, I can understand why people might not be rushing in droves to pay an extra few bucks for their show. And granted, I was disappointed that XM lost the bidding war for Howard Stern. (I’m not a huge fan of Howard Stern either, but I do recognize his talent, and the success he could bring to either of the satellite networks.)

But in the end, I don’t begrudge Sirius… They have been having a harder time of things than XM, and so if Howard can buoy Sirius, I think it’s better for the future of the technology overall. I just hope that Sirius learns from watching how XM has been able to quickly adjust their approach with O&A based on the market and will do the same if the market responds similarly to Howard Stern.

By the way, for purposes of my blog, I’m considering satellite radio to be a mobile technology. It’s not a cell phone, but it’s clearly an important part of the growing wireless infrastructure. So in case you’re wondering why this is under “Mobile Tech,” now you know!

My general impression so far is that it’s a great little device. Lightweight, but with a substantial feel, I was worried that the keypad “flip” would be flimsy but it’s not at all. The screen is bright, and the overall navigation is pretty intuitive. I would have changed some of the menu and button names, but they’re still relatively intuitive. I’ve also enjoyed trying out the many interesting applications for Symbian Series 60 phones which are available at Handango.com. They even have a nifty widget that lets you browse, download, install, and uninstall software demos.

The first of the two challenges I’ve faced so far is using the handwriting recognition. The handwriting recognition seems to be pretty similar to the Graffiti-style that I’m used to with the Palm, but since there’s not a dedicated writing area, I’m having some difficulty getting it to recognize when I’m writing and when I’m navigating. But that’ll just take practice.

The second challenge has been configuring the WAP and MMS settings. The SonyEricsson website has a configurator that is supposed to send the settings to your phone as an SMS message, but for some reason that didn’t work over the weekend. I did, however, discover a Customer Service toll-free number, and I availed myself of it on Saturday. The nice gentleman on the phone seemed genuinely pleased that I’d bought a P910 and was eager to help. He quickly helped me navigate to the right places in the phone to enter in the settings, and ran through it all in a very assured manner.

Unfortunately, when I tried to make the WAP connection, the connection was rejected by Cingular’s WAP gateway. We double-checked that I’d entered everything in correctly, and when it wouldn’t work, he didn’t hesitate to call over a supervisor to review things. We determined that the configuration info, which had apparently been provided to SonyEricsson directly by Cingular, was bogus. Meanwhile, I tried something on my own while we chatted and was able to get a regular internet connection.

The MMS still wouldn’t work, however, so they apologized profusely and took my information so that they could have a second tier engineer troubleshoot this with Cingular and call me back. And sure enough, I got a call Monday morning. Ok, I do deduct a few points because the nice engineer called at 7:15 in the blessed a.m… but still, it’s quite remarkable that a customer support person promptly returned a service call!

Anyway, MMS isn’t working for me yet… the SonyEricsson engineer and Cingular are apparently playing phone-tag. But they actually recognize that there was a problem, and they’re actively and enthusiastically working on it. This is more than I can say I ever got out of Palm, those worthless so-and-sos…