The NY Post somehow got their hands on these text messages which were exchanged by Tiger Woods and Jaimee Grubbs. Reading them almost feels like an invasion of privacy, but at the same time I can't stop thinking that Tiger sounds like a fourteen year old boy who finally found a girl who won't slap him for being a bit cheeky on occasion. Basically, he sounds like many of us do in text message conversations with a lover.

He gets lusty:

Tiger: I need you
Jaimee: then get your tight ass over here and visit me! I need u
Tiger: I will wear you out soon

He ignores the dangers of sexting:

Tiger: send me something very naughty
Jaimee: some things are worth waiting for lol ... besides im at work
Tiger: go to the bathroom and take it
Jaimee: haha ur too much

He gets jealous:

Jaimee: I drove out for the night to surprise a friend with a present for there birthday
Tiger: what kind of present your naked body
Jaimee: haha no a watch I slept alone
Tiger: alone with him that is
Jaimee: haha I wish
Jaimee: miss u
Tiger: now that's hot so who is your new boy toy

He gets tortured:

Jaimee: if we hang out on a Sundway we can watch desperate houswives again haha
Tiger: oh god
Jaimee: take a break from watching boring old golf
Jaimee: I mean the amazing sport of golf ;)
Jaimee: [more than an hour later] babe I was kidding

And he fails to give the sweet and tender response that's expected:

Jaimee: I have fun with u, you always make me smile and I am not afraid to be myself or say anything to u ... the day I met u I thought u were going to kick me out a few times but for someone reason you didn't and u have told me numerous times I talk to much but slowly as I get to know u iI think your absolutely amazing
Tiger: you are wrong I'm bone thugs in harmon

You can check out the rest of the text messages over at the NY Post, but come back after you do and tell me if I'm just imaging the normality or if maybe Tiger really is just like any other texter, all ridiculous and prone to lousy grammar. [NY Post]

All joking aside, there really is a lesson to take away from the clip. Those silly oh-I'm-feeling-a-bit-naughty-this-morning pictures can come back to haunt you. Because once they're sent through MMS, emails, or instant messages, those snapshots are out of your hands and you're left wondering who might wind up seeing those pictures of you in nothing but lacy stockings.

So to sleep better at night, just watch who you send pervy pictures to, keep your face or particularly identifying characteristics out of the snapshots, and don't forget about clearing the EXIF data. That's all there is to it, so be safe, kiddies.

Ping is designed to look like the SMS app, and behaves much the same way. The messages you send arrive at the recipient's screen instantly—similar to IMs—but also pop up with a Push Notification if you're not actively using the phone.

It's basically free SMS for you to everyone who has an iPhone or iPod Touch (over Wi-Fi) as long as you can convince them to sign up for Ping. Even if you can't, the ones you do switch over might be enough for you to downgrade your SMS plan one notch to save some money.

In the end, this may either be a really useful SMS alternative for iPhones, or a service that's not different enough from SMS or IM that people will use it. It's too early to say. [Ping on iTunes via Gear Live]

Update: If you have questions, you can contact support@pingmessaging.com.

Click image to enlarge

It is pretty simple and absolutely brilliant: To launch a new deodorant in Uruguay, the Lowe Ginkgo agency in Montevideo created an incomplete ad. The ad showed a purrty neekeed girl in a suggestive pose. It didn't, however, show any of her naughty bits. Instead, it came with blank spaces and the following text:

To complete this ad send AXE to 2345 after 9 pm.

The message made a server to send a multimedia message to your cellphone with the rest of the ad, so you could admire the complete image. The Mad Men would be proud. [Direct Daily]

Yes. That definitely goes beyond the general area of stupidity straight into the I'm a Bloody Moron, Please Shoot Me Dimension. It had to be a dumb Spaniard, of course, for this Euro-African country—alongside Italy and France—produces the biggest driving—and regular—dumbasses in the planet (I know because I was born there).

The 18-year-old driver—identified as J.C.R—was caught by the Spanish police while racing through the streets of the Northwest city of Vigo. The police noticed the speeding car at 2:50am. According to them, the guy was fishtailing, and running red lights while taking photos of himself using a cellphone.

When the police tried to stop him, the moron accelerated and tried to escape, only to be intercepted in another street. Then he tried to escape running and, when he realized he couldn't make it, he returned to his car, and crashed against one of the police vehicles that was chasing him.

Adding to this list of idiotic things, when the police tested his alcohol levels, he was off of the scale. In Spanish law, that means that you will get your driver's license automatically revoked. But then again—as the police discovered later—this guy doesn't even have a driver's license, so it's not that he's going to care about that. Not that he will need one in jail, anyway. [Yahoo! Noticias (in Spanish)—Thanks Mariló]

So is half the world absolutely insane or is this survey—done with just a 2,881 driver sample—inaccurate? It seems to me like an awfully high number, but knowing that everybody has a phone now, I'm not surprised. If true, this is something a bill won't fix. It seems more like an education matter. And with education I mean "if you text while driving you may end up dead, you idiot." [PR Newswire]

Henan province promises a lockup of "up to five days" for one message, or ten days for 3 messages. If you're going to send three, you might as well do it in a chunk to get the discount rate.

"I'm totally for the rules. It's uncomfortable to get dirty text messages from male friends and even more gross when they are from strangers," Zhang Kai, 26, told the daily.

What's even better is that the normal people are questioning why so much government effort is being spent in this area.

Since July 10, Shenze party officials have held 480 meetings to discuss the harmful effects of obscene messages, a degree of dedication that has been questioned by the public, the People's Daily said.

"It's not necessary to hold 480 meetings on this. This is an enormous waste of administrative resources," an Internet user named Han Haoyue was quoted as saying.

[Google via Mobile Crunch]

You see, only subscribers to i wireless, a local T-Mobile affiliate, can text message 911. And it only works within Black Hawk County since just one call center has received the upgrade.

But it gets even worse. Because a text message lacks location information, your 911 text is greeted by an automated text request for your zipcode. If your zip is within Black Hawk County, your message will find a recipient. If not, you'll receive a text message advising you to call 911.

I can imagine a scenario in which, crouched in an alley to avoid an angry batch of Apple fanboys following a negative iPhone review, I might want to silently summon a few SWAT teams. But until text messaging rolls out to every carrier in every location, it's pretty much useless. [USA Today Thanks Sharnaff!]

Here's a statement from Apple on the software update:

We appreciate the information provided to us about SMS vulnerabilities which affect several mobile phone platforms. This morning, less than 24 hours after a demonstration of this exploit, we've issued a free software update that eliminates the vulnerability from the iPhone. Contrary to what's been reported, no one has been able to take control of the iPhone to gain access to personal information using this exploit.

The flaw involves invisible SMS bursts that allow hackers to gain total control over your phone. The two dudes who discovered it plan on unveiling it at the Black Hat conference on Thursday. They say they told Apple about it a month ago, but nothing's been done.

So how do you prevent your phone from being hijacked? Well, if you get a text containing only a single square character, turn your phone off. Fast.

Hey Apple, wanna fix this please? That'd be great. Thanks. [Forbes]

Image: timcaynes/Flickr

[Image via Flickr]

You have ridiculous cases like the Trolley driver rear ending another train because he was texting his girlfriend, and train conductors causing a 25-fatality crash because he was texting teenage boys telling them that they're "gonna run the locomotive."

There's two commonalities to these accidents. First is that texting while you're supposed to be paying attention and in charge of other people's lives is a bad idea. Second, guys seem to be intent on texting people, no matter how inappropriate the time, if it's going to get them laid.

But there's nothing better than an anecdotal account of how bad texting while driving is, courtesy of reader Trevor, who has been rear ended three times this year by people texting on their phones.

Anyways, I live in Idaho. And everyone who lives in this state FUCKING SUCKS at driving. The last thing we need is people using their cell phones simultaneously, but of course I see everyone from the 15 year old girls to 50 year old guys typing out emails on their Blackberries. It sucks ass to have to deal with these fucking morons on a daily basis.

Anyways, on to the first incidence of getting hit:
I was driving through stop and go traffic outside of a high school moment after they got out of school, and I am completely stopped when I see a brand new Hummer H2 coming up on my ass at ferocious speed. I knew I was going to get hit, and right before he made contact, I was able to discern a fucking cell phone in his hands through my rear view mirror. The officer on the scene estimated he hit me going roughly 30mph, and had not even applied the brakes before hitting me. Completely totaled my beloved Toyota Tacoma, and gave me a wicked case of whiplash. By the way it was a roughly 17 year old guy driving his parents Hummer to school. Spoiled prick...

Second time was just 6 months later in the winter. It was a touch icy on the roads and I was stopped to make a left turn onto a side street and I look in my rear view mirror (after the Hummer incident I have been made paranoid about being hit), and see a little Dodge Neon moving way too fast towards me and start sliding sideways right into the back of my new truck. I jumped out and asked if she was ok, and the first thing she says to me is "Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I was texting and didn't even see you there until it was too late." This time the damage wasn't too bad, but I ended up being without my vehicle for 2 weeks, during which I had a shitty little rental car, so it still was quite the inconvenience.

Third time was about 3 weeks ago and I'm still feeling sore from it. I was sitting at a stop light and a big Ford F-350 with a huge trailer full of lawn mowing equipment plowed into me at about 25mph, once again totalling my vehicle, and absolutely wrecking my back. I felt like I got hit my a freight train this time. I had my foot on the brake, and he made my car skid forward so hard that I pushed the car in front of me into the car in front of him. An eyewitness to the accident said that the man in the truck was using a phone when he hit me, and it was just verified to me the other day that his phone record shows that he sent a text message seconds before the accident occured. At least this guy was able to apply a little bit of brakes before making contact, but still, I got hit really hard. I'm going to have to see a chiropractor, and I now am searching for another vehicle.

So yeah. That's my record for getting hit. It really sucks. I can't quite say I would mind the banning of texting while driving after all of this as I'm 100% sure at least somebody has lost their life in an accident caused by texting while driving. Hell, I used to do it before I got the iPhone which is fucking impossible to do without looking, but after seeing how poorly most others handle it, I can definitely understand why people are wanting this kind of a ban.

I don't know what we need to do about this, and encoding restrictions on devices themselves to not allow texting while moving is not the solution. I don't know what is.

Thanks Trevor!

Friedham Hillebrand was a communications researcher who was working with a group on developing a standard for cellphones to send and receive text messages. So he sat down on his typewriter and banged out a bunch of random sentences and questions, counted up the number of characters it took, and decided 160 was the magic number. I'm actually somewhat curious as to how an old German dude would've come up with messages that short in the days before ROFLcopters swarmed in the sky.

Anyways, as chairman of GSM's nonvoice services committee he came up with the idea of backdooring the messages in the radio channels phone already used to figure out reception stength—which initially limited them to 128 characters, not the 160 Hillebrand had decided was perfect. After some serious tweaking, they raised the limit 160 characters. Then he forced every carrier to support SMS, or die in a fiery fire of doomy doom. Friedham Hillebrand, modern-day hero. [LA Times via HardOCP]

Not only did all those sent and received messages (another 10,000 were received) cost the dad $4,756.25, it caused the girl's grades to drop down from A's and B's to F's. Verizon has offered to cut that down to non-absurd levels.

Then, of course, came the hammer. Because the guy's obviously rational and likes wasting even more money when he eventually has to buy his daughter another phone in the future. Good job sir! [Denver Post]

The problem is that the mat isn't hooked up to anything. It's not a gigantic calculator and it can't connect with your phone to send text messages. Still, I see potential here. Working computer keyboard mats, television remotes and the like could make for an amusing fitness routine that wouldn't grow old for at least a few hours...maybe even a few days. [Exergame Fitness via Shiny Shiny]

Designed as a promotional tool for Tryvann Winter Park, a ski resort just 15 minutes outside of Oslo, these snowing billboards alert commuters that conditions are optimal for hitting the slopes. Whenever it begins snowing on the mountain, an SMS message is sent to the billboards instructing them to start their thing. A second message is sent when the snow stops. Needless to say, the temptation to ditch work would be unbearable. [Toxel]

Google has claimed no grievance with Infinite SMS other than its success. Their given reason for the block isn't abuse or wrongdoing; it's that we brought too many users (and thus too much cost) to an experimental service.

Naturally, this means that the Infinite SMS app for the iPhone / iPod Touch has also been discontinued. The good news is that the proprietary SMS service are still available in Labs, so it's not a total loss. Still, users of the popular Infinite SMS app will undoubtedly be disappointed. [Innerfence via TechFlash via CNET]

After sending off your little envelope of chlamydia 'n' hope to a lab, you can opt to receive your potentially traumatic results via SMS, phone or letter (though Twitter, with its convenient-for-notifying-exes "@" system, might have been a better choice).

Despite how trivializing this sounds, it could actually be an attractive option for some. Phone calls involve direct interaction with another person about an extremely embarrassing subject, and a physical letter can take quite a while—again, not exactly appropriate for the, uhh, urgent nature of the situation. Here, technology might actually make the whole process a little less intimidating for young folk (philanderers and strumpets, every last one of them!), but it's not a totally shame-free—the NHS has assured that there are still actual humans sending out the texts. [Register]

According to the Smoking Gun, the unnamed girl apparently ignored the teacher's requests to stop using her Samsung phone, but she kept on SMSing as she pleased. When the school security officer was called in, the girl claimed she didn't have a phone. The school finally called in the police, who searched the girl, and found the phone under her pants "in the buttocks area." The police confiscated her phone and charged her with disorderly conduct. These are your tax dollars at work, Wisconsin. [The Smoking Gun Original Photo Courtesy of m_m_mnemonic]

Yes, this car will text your colleagues "b 15 m l8" next time you're running late.

Like Ford's Sync service, you can use Hughes' in-car tech platform, which is being pitched to car manufacturers on an OEM basis for inclusion in future vehicles, to do a lot of things with your voice, including respond to text messages (but only with canned SMS presets that are activated by spoken keywords). You can choose to respond in plain English, or with translations using a custom dictionary (here, apparently, set to illiterate 'tween). It can also translate any internet-isms it may find while it reads you your exchange email or calendars, too.

Hughes's demo vehicle was packed full of lots of other cool stuff, including an on-board 3G connection (with compatibility for WiMax down the road) that can be fed out via wi-fi to turn your car into a roaming hotspot. The only auto maker offering something like that right now is Chrysler with their UConnect service (not done by Hughes), but it's something we'd love to see more of.

Hughes is bringing some of its voice-activated telematics to Mercedes vehicles later this year (not including the mobile hotspot tech, sadly), but their demo jeep we saw today is a good example of what might come. [Hughes Telematics]

For example, Sprint has confirmed that a 14-year old Florida girl sent / received around 35,463 text messages in a month on two separate occasions. That works out to 1,182 a day. As sad and depressingly impressive as that is, those numbers don't come anywhere near the Guinness record. Apparently, that "honor" is held by a man...a GROWN man by the name of Deepak Sharma. He managed to send 182,689 messages in a single month—about 6100 messages a day (or 4.2 messages a minute). Yeah, that is insane. Good thing we have unlimited text plans—even though it is most likely a ripoff. [Herald Tribune via Fark Image via Flickr]

Obviously, this is a terrible, terrible idea. The company defended itself by saying that the texts were free and that people could easily opt-out by responding with "stop." But they shouldn't even be going there in the first place.

Once they start doing it, the other carriers will, and then third parties. You think companies aren't willing to pay for text ads? I guarantee someone out there is trying to work up a deal where they pay in bulk for 10,000,000 texts so they can advertise their new movie. And yeah, it'll be legal because it won't cost the end-user anything and they'll be able to opt out of ads from that company, but then another company will do it. And another.

Spam is already the scourge of email. Don't ruin texting for us too, AT&T. Your customers won't stand for it. [NY Times]

Reina Hardesty's excuse for her a 440-page phone bill was, “I just like to talk.” Luckily, she had been signed onto a contract that allowed for unlimited texting—otherwise the bill would have been a whopping $2,811. Still, cruel wretches that they are, Reina's parents have now restricted her cellphone usage. TISNF!! [Daily Mail]

(Art credit: Rebecca Gunter)

The meters create magnetic fields capable of registering the metal mass of vehicles. They have a direct computer link to a police station.

Under a mechanism adopted by towns such as Issy-les-Moulineaux on the outskirts of Paris, cars are allowed 20 minutes of free parking. If they stay longer, the smart meter sends a message to a police control room, which alerts officers through their mobile telephones a quarter of an hour later.

To make matters worse, Claude Zandona, the man behind the manufacturer of these smart meters, envisions a system where users would pay using an identification number stored within their cellphone. The system would first send you a text message warning and then follow up with a notice that you have been fined. Tickets could be sent directly to your door—making the whole idea of meter maids obsolete. [Times Online via CNET]

The article goes into depth about how text messages are transmitted. In short, texts are unsurprisingly transmitted between towers over the main, wired network in the same way as cellular data, a portion of the journey that, considering the tiny amount of information in a 160-character text, costs very close to nothing.

Surely then, the carrier incurs costs to transmit the messages from towers to handsets. After all, this is the wireless part of the journey, and wireless costs lotsa $$$, right? No:

Text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

You read that right: for carriers, sending a text message from an extant wireless tower to your handset is more or less free. If it's any consolation, the article also mentions that the Senate Antitrust Committee is kind of looking into the matter, so we may see relief (or even retribution) within the next 10-40 years. [NYT via BB Gadgets]

This Sunday, the Dallas White Rock Marathon will implement a pretty cool feature for participants and their friends/families. While most modern marathons track runners with (RFID?) chips attached to their shoes, this marathon in Dallas will take that data and send it out, texting or emailing split times and finishing results to anyone who registers with a particular runner.

Neat stuff, though just writing this post has given me a nasty cramp. [Do It Sports via dallasnews]

Just go to the Labs area in preferences to turn it on—you can just enter any number in the Chat contacts bar, or add numbers to your existing contacts. Messages show up being sent from your own unique 406 area code number, and replies will be router back into the Gchat window. You've been able to do this with other IM services for a while, but if you're like me and everyone I know and rarely leave your Gmail pane, this is handy. [Gmail Blog via Lifehacker]

The surgeon, David Nott, texted his colleague back in the UK as he was far more knowledgeable about the procedures required for such a delicate operation. The colleague, Meirion Thomas, responded with ten steps he needed to follow in order to carry out the procedure properly. Then signed off with a simple "Easy! Good luck!"

Personally, I would have felt better having him on a regular cellphone call, but hey—the procedure went off without a hitch. Nott claimed it was as if he had a "guardian angel on my left shoulder showing me what to do." Indeed, a little cellphone-shaped angel. [CNN]

It's a clever idea. Avoid that $15 unlimited texting plan from AT&T by using your free email to send SMS messages. With SMS Touch, you can write an email (complete with the landscape-style keyboard and spellcheck functionality) and send it as an SMS to anyone in your phonebook. When they respond to your text message, instead of coming back to your phone as a chargeable SMS, the message actually arrives in your email.

In other words, you can send SMS messages while all the while communicating in email. Priced at $5, part of that fee goes to ongoing backend support for the program. And if you're interested, it'll pay for itself three times in one month anyway. [SMS Touch]