TimesToCome Mobile

Slashdot has a story on O2, Sprint and Boost Mobile allowing search engine spiders to crawl your messages. Any MMS messages that send the photo to the phone website are findable:

Google inurl:pictures.sprintpcs.com/share.do?invite= to see Sprint’s list.

So if it is private - don’t mms it!

Check to be sure your phone provider is blocking search engine spiders from making your mms searchable.

ATT has said it would be opening bright and early at 8am to sell 3G iPhones. Now TUAW is reporting that Apple stores will also open at 8am Friday to begin selling the phones.

W00t! That means waiting inside an air conditioned mall instead of 100′ heat in Houston.

When I checked last weekend the Apple store had planned to close at 5pm and reopen at 6pm to sell phones. 8am seems like a much better option.

Apple’s website now lists 8 am as the selling time.

Way back when in the dark days of computing we all had dumb terminals that hooked into a mainframe computer.   Your smart phone ( Palm/Blackberry/WindowsMobile) acts like a desktop computer with its own processor and software.

But what if we also made it behave like a dumb terminal (iPhone)? You could access the fastest computers and unlimited storage and memory. This is the first of I’m sure many such applications to come.

Accenture’s “Pocket Supercomputer” is in fact a phone behaving like a thin client. It can be used to send images and video of objects in real time to a server where they can be identified and linked to relevant information, which can then be sent back to the user.

The camera on the phone is used to take a video of an object — such as a book. According to the Accenture, the server software is smart enough to recognize the cover of the book — it’s not yet able to read text — and can then, for example, return the price and history of the book, and details of where it can be bought. . . [read more Accenture demos the 'Pocket Supercomputer']

If Apple fixed the bandwidth problem with the iPhone by moving it to a 3G network we will likely see a whole lot more of this type of application.

Several reports are coming in on laptops and phones having data copied when you cross the border. Arriving in the US, people are reporting that security is insisting on looking through the data on your laptop and cell phone and often copying the data from your cell phone or laptop.

More information:

iPhone meets the 4th amendment
Civil liberties groups sue Homeland Security
US Confiscating data at the border
US courts consider legality of laptop inspections.
Examining Search and Seizure of Electronics at Airports

Another concern is having your cell phone stolen. Most cell phones now allow you to enter a password that will turn on after a set time. Since I almost lost a phone on a trip I’ve used passwords on my phones. Don’t wait until you lose the phone to decide you need a password.