Jason Kitcat

The other night my wife's mobile beeped and vibrated as two SMS text messages barged into her phone at 4am. We were both delighted seeing as the phone was on the bedside table, waking us both. The next morning she checked and saw two lovely spam messages.

Hence the past hour or so spent trying to stop it from happening again. We're both with T-Mobile and they're call centre staff are usually quite helpful so I gave them ring. After faffing through the menus (joy) I got through to a human who told me one thing several times “There's nothing we can do about spam.” Right, thanks buddy.

He was nice and friendly as he said it. But still he could have said “Have you tried registering with x” or “If the spam persists report it to our unsolicited messages team” or “Your phone has a feature to block certain numbers” or even “If you pay us we can block it.” But no, nothing, zip, nada. Not interested.

So, as always, I went online and started by searching all of the barely usable T-Mobile UK site for 'spam' or 'unsolicited' which resulted in… nothing. With lots of fiddling, opening the site in Firefox and Safari eventually I found “Unfortunately, it's not yet possible to bar incoming text messages.” Great.

So after lots of Googling the best I can do, it would seem, is register our numbers with the Telephone Preference Service which may do the job. Let's face it, the network operators profit from every SMS message sent, so why stop the little money makers?

The information I've found has been sketchy and contradictory but I believe there is EU legislation pending to try and cut down on SMS spam. It's dependent on how each country implements it though… I think we're yet to see the UK version. I hope in the future phones will offer filters for this kinds of thing while the spammers themselves get thwacked by the authorities. Hopefully, maybe?

I'll let you know if we get less SMS spam too…

The Others

In the interests of completeness I then had to go and check out the other phone networks. So in descending order of patheticness here's my findings:

Vodafone have a VSPAM service which seems fairly pro-active. Any message sent to the VSPAM service is going to be blocked, they imply. If an 090 number is in the spam they also pass the spam to the appropriate regulator.
http://online.vodafone.co.uk/dispatch/Portal/appmanager/vodafone/wrp?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=Page_BOS_MainContent&pageID=AV_0054

Orange aren't exactly spectacular in their help but they do offer useful tips and advice online. They also implicity do something about spam as they encourage users to forward spam messages to a special short code number. Still they don't do Blackberries so not much good for me.
http://www.orange.co.uk/about/contact/spam/

I finally cracked O2's dreadful site with an advanced Google search which showed one page just telling people to report messages to the premium number regulator ICSTIS. Not helpful or proactive at all. http://www.o2.co.uk/help/spam_advice/0,,500,00.html

I could find nothing at all about spam from 3.

SMS Spam Links

43% of text messages in the US are now spam according to Wireless Services Corporation.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60404039

Text spam complaints skyrocket in South Korea.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000520024878/

Children burned by SMS Spam on the CBBC Newsround site.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/chat/your_comments/newsid_2450000/2450311.stm

Legal moves to stop SMS spam around the world…
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61226,00.html

Excellent overall guide to SMS Spam.
http://www.wiredsafety.org/gb/law/spam/sms_spam.html

Across the communities we run at Swing Digital we've started tracking how often each field is changed in our members' profiles. It's proven to be an interesting exercise…

Across all our sites one field is the top or near the top of the most changed fields: email address.

Now I'm clearly not usual as I've had the same personal email address for around 10-11 years. I've got some other addresses in addition to that as time has passed, from my universities and work, but for most things I've registered with this one address. It's been a continuous thread for my online identity, but it would seem that this isn't the case for the membership of our clients' organisations.

People log on to the sites with their email address which perhaps helps them to be aware of when they need to change their address. Still members are actively changing their email addresses really often.

I wonder, is this due to the disposability of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses or just that people move jobs so often? Share your comments and experiences.

Comments from the previous version of this blog:

Spam
Need I say more?
15:42:18 GMT 28-10-2005 lee

Tinned Meat
Does spam *really* force people to change their email addresses so often? I always saw changing address as a short term fix only, seeing as so many spams just seem to try any and all addresses at every domain name they can lay their hands on.
Perhaps not. Before SpamSieve and SpamAssassin (yes it takes both) I was struggling with spam too…
19:16:09 GMT 28-10-2005 Jason Kitcat

not everyone is aware
My experience is that the average, who seem to compromise the majority, of internet users still don’t really know that much about spam and it’s prevention. I too have had the same personal (ISP provided) email for a several years, I haven’t changed it since I last changed ISPs and wont change it unless I change ISP again. I also have a ‘trash’ email which I do use if ever I need to enter details anywyhere that I think may be a bit risky (and yes I have ‘fun’ email addresses for when I feel like using them)- but it’s only ever needed to be changed once. So many internet users I come across though go around entering their email address willy nilly in any box that asks for it, posting it on public forums and handing it out to all and sundry – then they wonder why they need to change it.
00:33:54 GMT 01-11-2005 manny

It wasn't my intention but I ended up being an early adopter of the new Linksys Modem Router. So I thought perhaps a review would be of benefit to others.

In the past few years I've been through ADSL modems from BT, Binatone, D-Link, Hermstedt and Netgear. The BT one was like a rock, but I couldn't reconfigure it when I moved. The Netgear one was okay but I asked a lot of it and I ran into some firmware issues which wouldn't bother most, same for the D-Link but it was a little less user-friendly than the Netgear. The others aren't worth discussing.

Through this modem orgy I stuck by my Apple Airport Extreme basestation (sans modem or aerial port) and it coped fairly well. The administration software is lovely, the USB printer sharing is fabulous and of course it looks nice. But range and performance is pretty uninspiring, especially if you allow for 802.11b and 802.11g clients.

With my recent move the Airport was just not reaching all corners of the house and garden, modest as they are. I also was tired of the occasional game of reset the routers when one began to diagree with the other, or something, I couldn't be bothered to diagnose the issue hence my fiendish use of an unbent paperclip on the reset buttons.

So I warmed up Google and set about finding an all-in-one ADSL modem and Wireless router which was going to be stable, fast, secure and easy to configure for my occassionally demanding needs. It was harder than I thought it might be – really high-end stuff like the Proxim ORiNOCO AP-700 (for Xmas please!) assumes a big corporate network so have no ADSL functionality. At the other end loads of no-name boxes have minimal reliability thanks to their absurdly low pricing.

To cut a long story short I found out about the WAG54GX2 which wasn't actually showing on the UK Linksys site but I tracked it down on the oddly named NickKnows.com for an excellent price and had the box in my hands in no time.

Let's manage expectations here – it's not like taking an iPod out of its box, but nevertheless the out-of-box experience was pretty darn good. I was up and running in no time, once I read the help to understand the different terminology Linksys use compared to other vendors. The configuration interface is sensible and filled with piles of useful and intelligent options. The two aerials for MIMO (basically more speed, more range) are not precisely attractive, but who cares – I've been using this baby a week or two and it's been rock-solid reliable and fierce fast.

Here's my signal-strength test data collected using a 15″ PowerBook with an built-in Airport Extreme card with iStumbler's signal readout…

	Apple Airport	Linksys WAG54GX2
Study	19-33	37-49
Lounge	39-42	46-55
Garden steps	21-28	19-27
Hammock at end of garden	0	8-23

Quite a difference… I can actually surf from the hammock – bliss.

The only problem I can report is that the router's DMZ option doesn't seem to be honoured, so that if you set an IP address to be in the DMZ it should be fully accessible to the outside world but it isn't. I got around this using the port-forwarding options, more fiddly but good enough. I really couldn't recommend this box enough, it's the best I've found anywhere