Not that we haven't seen victories over SMS spammers before, but this one is sure catching a lot of attention due to the names attached. GSI Commerce and Timberland have reportedly agreed to "establish a fund of up to $7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought against them for allegedly sending unsolicited text messages to wireless telephone users in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act." The settlement has already received preliminary approval from a judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, and while the aforementioned firms vehemently deny any wrongdoing, they concede that taking this to court would be "burdensome, protracted and expensive." More expensive than $7 million? Is that guilt we smell, or what?

[Via mocoNews]

It's not that texting from planes is currently impossible, it's just not terribly reliable. Thanks to Avidyne's Q4-bound MLX770, however, all that is about to change. The two-way datalink receiver will not only enable pilots to have access to the radar mosaic for most of the world along with weather conditions, but it will add support for text messaging right from the MFD. And we're not talking about CPLDC -- we're talking bona fide SMS. To keep pilots from chatting away too much unnecessarily, the system will limit messages to 32 characters, and beyond that, each message sent will run between $1 and $2. And to think, we actually have the nerve to gripe about $0.20 texts...

[Via FlightGlobal]

Oh sure, Americans are adamantly against texting while driving (in theory), but that's not stopping those mischievous Gen Y-ers from getting their SMS on while behind the wheel. According to a new survey of 1,200 people conducted by Nationwide Mutual Insurance (we know, we know), a third of the Gen Y-ers admitted to "always multitasking while driving," and while the "always" bit does indeed frighten us a tad, the real juice was in the next statistic: 37-percent said they sent text messages while driving. Before you start belaboring the imprudent youth, think long and hard about your own in-car cellphone usage -- remember that time you just had to reply "y w pep plz" in order to salvage your friend's pizza order? Tsk tsk.

[Via About]

It's bad enough when exams have to cater to horrific spellers due to their SMS-based vocabulary, but we're doing everything we can to make ourselves believe this latest report simply isn't true. Reportedly, a social analyst in Australia somehow believes that the wide range in spellings in a few popular names is due in large part to the fact that we spend way too much time as a whole conjugating and hyphenating in order to get text-based messages across. Said analyst was even quoted as saying that "the use of a 'y' instead of an 'i' has hit epidemic proportions, as has the use of 'k' over 'c'." Realistically, we're not about to believe the SMS craze is actually affecting children's names en masse, but please, do your next born a favor and give him / her the vowels they deserve.

[Via textually]

While those in London can use SMS to actually find a lavatory, folks passing through Western Finland will be required to bust out their handset in order to relieve themselves in select public restrooms. In an attempt to curb vandalism, the Finnish Road Administration has implemented a system along Highway 1 which requires restroom visitors to text "Open" (in Finnish, of course) in order to let themselves in. The idea is that folks will be less likely to lose their mind and graffiti up the place knowing that their mobile number is (at least temporarily) on file, but it remains to be seen if uprooters will simply take their defacing ways elsewhere or actually excrete in peace.

[Via Switched]

If you've been paying attention to mobile carriers' SMS pricing lately (and something tells us you haven't) you'd be surprised to discover a fairly disturbing trend amongst providers: price hikes. Over the past year or so, nearly every major carrier in the US has raised their per-price cost of SMS messages, with Verizon and Sprint jacking up the fee from $0.15 to $0.20 a message, and AT&T and T-Mobile adding another nickel to their $0.10 charge. Of course, this trend of rising prices accompanies a major spike in the use of text messages amongst customers, with some surveys marking a 130-percent jump over SMS use since June 2006 -- and telcos are taking it to the bank. What's most insidious about the inflated costs is the fact that SMS data is particularly low-bandwidth, and analysts say that the price increases aren't related to higher operating costs -- these companies are simply gouging customers for a service which they have embraced. Companies say the hikes are meant to encourage customers to go for more expensive "bundles," though we're confident they won't mention it when your Mom uses more messages than her plan allows and unwittingly pays a few extra bucks on her bill -- that stuff adds up, you know?

Ever wondered what it'd be like to have two birthdays in a single year? If so, just phone up, er, text SMS -- it's living the dream, baby! Apparently, the first "recorded text message" was sent from software engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis, a director at Vodafone, on December 3, 1992, which is arguably the birthday of SMS as we know it. Granted, the Short Message Service Center has been around just a hair longer, but without an official birth certificate tied to either, who are we to argue? So, here's to you (yet again), dear text messaging, but if you really try to sneak a third shindig in before the year's up, don't look to us to provide another round of hors d'oeuvres.

[Via TGDaily, image courtesy of The Sydney Morning Herald]

If you've ever found yourself stuck in London with the insatiable urge to urinate in an alleyway, help is on the way. Believe it or not, a new SMS-based toilet finding service actually has the aforementioned predicament as a top priority to solve, and the Westminster City Council is hoping that people utilize the system to keep streets a bit cleaner. Cleverly dubbed SatLav, the technology enables individuals passing through London's West End to text the word "toilet" to 80097 in order to receive a (hopefully hasty) reply with details to get to the nearest public restroom. Unfortunately, the service will cost users £0.25 ($0.52) each time they use it, so we're a bit skeptical that alleyway urinators will happily cough up some coin rather than just sticking to old ways.

[Image courtesy of BBC]

For the folks out there looking to seriously take advantage of those unlimited text messages, Acme Systems has designed the SMS FoxBox in order to give you "a compact and low cost solution to send and receive SMS messages using a commercial SIM card." The Linux-powered device includes a GSM quad-band modem, a SD / MMC memory card slot to store the messages, and a web-based interface to manage the mayhem. Acme claims that its unit can receive up to 30 incoming texts per minute, and it also touts an SQLite embedded SQL server, expandable set of gateway functions, fully customizable software, and even a pair of USB ports to store excess messages on thumb drives or external HDDs. So if you've been looking for some serious horsepower in the SMS to TCP/IP realm, you can plunk down your €750 ($1,012) and give that HTC keyboard a rest.

[Via LinuxDevices]

Any Brits reading this will probably already be aware of the occasionally questionable exploits of the "red top" tabloids, but for those that prefer not to take their tea with crumpets, the news that Clive Goodman, a journalist for the UK Sunday tabloid the News of the World, was found guilty and sentenced to four months jail time for intercepting over 600 phone messages left for three senior officials in the royal household will probably come as a mild shock. To British readers, the fact that a tabloid hack was willing to go to such lengths in order to provide such thrilling exclusives as the "news" that Prince William casually asked an ITV reporter to borrow a video editing suite won't be a surprise at all. Perhaps the most depressing fact in this case is the complete incompetence of the assailants: Mr. Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire -- the freelance investigator who was sentenced to six months prison time for his role in this plot, and for independently tapping several other notable figure's phones -- illegally and recklessly accessed voicemails before the rightful owners had retrieved them. If there's any good to come out of this case, it'll be a tightening of the security at the network operators that provided the royal official's mobile phones: apparently Mulcaire somehow managed to obtain the passwords "issued by the mobile phone companies to their own security staff. This allowed him, having obtained the mobile phone numbers of his targets, to call customer services and to obtain the voicemail retrieval numbers." We don't know whether to be flattered by the fact that royal staff slum it with the rest of us by using the same mobile phone networks that us "commoners" do, or to freak out at the lax security exercise by the unnamed network operators.

[Via Boing Boing]

Sure, there's a bevy of ways to effectively conceal the real you while out and about in public places, but Alice Wang's new lineup of Peer Pressure conquerors let you utilize surrounding technologies to boost your self-esteem (and your image). If you're not already rockin' the iPod suit to work, and don't want your cubicle buddies to overhear faint whispers of "Everybody Hurts" in the background, the two-sided headphones are for you. They play that sad, sad song into your ears, but emit a (presumably positive) song of your choice outwardly, giving everyone around you good vibes while you're down on your luck. Next up, the Popular Mobile software sporadically and continuously sends you fake text messages in order to show off just how popular you are whilst in a group of higher-ups, and while we're not sure if each message come pre-programmed with fortune cookie taglines, it's a surefire way to flaunt your appeal. Additionally, Alice has designed the Fast Typing Keyboard in order to make your office mates think you can crank out 120 words per minute, and the Positive Printer helps printer snoopers discover awfully amazing things about you that the upbeat software spits out. Of course, we're not expecting these admittedly handy creations to make their way into Office Depot anytime soon, but we'd love to be proven wrong.

[Via NOTCOT]

It looks like Verizon Wireless is following in Sprint's SMS footsteps, announcing a planned hike in text messaging rates for those not currently subscribed to a messaging package. The hike, which will take effect March 1st, will bump the cost of sending a text message to the U.S., Puerto Rico, Canada and Mexico from $0.10 to $0.15 per message, with the price for international text messages remaining at $0.25 per message. The cost of receiving a message from customers of foreign wireless carriers, however, will increase to $0.15 whether you subscribe to a messaging package or not. If this all sounds a little familiar, it's because when Sprint did the same thing late last year, it didn't take long for people to figure out that the rate hikes amounted to a so-called "material change" to their contracts, meaning they could bail on it without paying an Early Termination Fee (EFT). So if you've been sticking to Verizon but secretly fancying another carrier, this looks like it may be your only chance to take the plunge without also taking a hit. In related news, Sprint looks to be planning a price hike of another sort, with a pair of tipsters relaying the news to us that the cost for Sprint's directory assistance service will be going up from $1.49 to $1.79 on February 1st, although whether that's enough to constitute a material change to the contract or not remains to be seen.

[Thanks, Max, Tina, and Jonathan]