Verizon Sues SMS Marketer

Verizon Wireless has filed a lawsuit against a Florida business accused of sending thousands of spam SMS messages. Passport Holidays of Ormond Beach, FL purportedly sent more than 98,000 unsolicited messages concerning Bahama cruises to Verizon Wireless customers.The lawsuit alleges that Passport Holidays and others violated the Federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act by using auto-dialing equipment to send large bursts of text messages to sequential phone numbers within very short periods of time.Verizon also noted that Passport Holidays attempted to hide their identity and evade automated spam filters. The US wireless industry has aggressively fought spam because unlike email messages, each text message is paid for by the customer.

Rat Trap Sends SMS Message

UK pest control firm Rentokil has invented a rat trap that sends an SMS when one of the rodents gets caught. [via I4U.com]According to New Scientist. "Instead of someone having to make regular check of traps to see they if contain a dead rat or mouse, the novel trap sends out a text message to summon a pest controller. By ensuring the trap is emptied as soon as the animal is caught, it can be reset quickly, so ensuring more vermin are caught."

Muslim Women by SMS

Though in Malaysia, authorities overturned Islamic Syariah Court's ruling that allows Muslims to end marriages through mobile text messages since 2003, according to an article in Adnkronos International IOL "divorce among Muslims in India has never been easier thanks to new technology that has enabled men to end their marriages through an SMS or mobile phone text message.Now a group of Muslim women are up in arms against this method of articulating the "triple talaaq", the formal unilateral declaration, repeated three times, with which men declare their divorce from their wives.Sources among the Muslim community in Mumbai have said that representatives from "dozens of women’s associations", have decided to organise a three-day convention in Lucknow, the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, on the problems facing women in the world of Islam, including this new method of divorce. The conference is set to begin on Tuesday.

SMS Literary Classics

“Dot Mobile, a company offering mobile phones to students, has hired Professor John Sutherland of University College London to provide subscribers with text message summaries and quotes from literary classics…”We are confident that our version of ‘text’ books will genuinely help thousands of students remember key plots and quotes, and raise up educational standards rather than decrease levels of literacy,” Dot Mobile said in a press release.”