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The text message may be celebrating its 20th birthday today, but as far as we know, only one SMS has been sent by a fox in all those years. (And by fox, of course, we mean the mammal belonging to the Canidae family, not the mammal belonging to the hot-humans-with-phones family).

The text reads like so: "jlv l øi\a0ab 34348tu åaugjoi zølbmosdji jsøg ijio sjiw," which, as the multilingual among you may have already ascertained, is Norwegian fox speak. … Read more

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other wireless providers would be required to record and store information about Americans' private text messages for at least two years, according to a proposal that police have submitted to the U.S. Congress.

CNET has learned a constellation of law enforcement groups has asked the U.S. Senate to require that wireless companies retain that information, warning that the lack of a current federal requirement "can hinder law enforcement investigations."

They want an SMS retention requirement to be "considered" during congressional discussions over updating a 1986 privacy law … Read more

TxtN trns 20 2day. Hw willya celebr8?

The so-called father of SMS commemorated the occasion via a rare interview that appropriately enough was conducted via text messages.

Chatting with the BBC yesterday, Matti Makkonen took credit for conceiving and fleshing out SMS, or short message service. But he lived up to his title as its "reluctant father" by making it clear that others actually developed the technology.

"I did not consider sms as personal achievement but as result of joint effort to collect ideas and write the specifications of the services based on them," he told the BBC.… Read more

The OS X character palette is a convenient option for accessing multiple unicode symbols that are part of modern font collections. Not only can you use fun items like emoticons, but you can also enhance writing with scientific and mathematical symbols, foreign script characters, symbols, and even Braille.

Having these characters in the character palette makes managing them far easier than prior approaches in which unique symbol and dingbat fonts had to be used.

If you would like to use the OS X character viewer, it can be accessed in a few different ways:

Academia and Silicon Valley are in a race to see who can solve life's most important problems first.

Currently, the Valley is ahead, having shown you how to make pictures that look like they were taken 40 years ago.

However, academia is catching up, by bringing conclusions to life's most pressing questions.

I am, therefore, moved beyond safe levels of self-expression on hearing of a piece of research from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.… Read more

What looked like an easy shortcut to earn some extra cash could now ending up costing Papa John's millions. The pizza chain is being targeted in a $250 million class-action lawsuit in which customers allege that Papa John's sent out hundreds of thousands of illegal text messages.

"After I ordered from Papa John's, my telephone started beeping with text messages advertising pizza specials," one of the plaintiffs in the case Erin Chutich said in a statement. "Papa John's never asked permission to send me text message advertisements."

Apparently, in 2010, Papa John'… Read more

Sometimes, the little bars on your cell phone just aren't there.

It could be because you're somewhere remote and it doesn't pay for phone companies to put a tower there. It could be because you're somewhere remote and the locals believe a cell tower would blight their aesthetic pleasures.

Or you could be in the middle of San Francisco and have AT&T.

My guess is 16-year-old Vera Oliphant was probably in category one when she reportedly wandered around, trying to find a cell signal. She wanted to call her mom and text her boyfriend. … Read more

If ever a story called for the use of an emoticon, this would be the one: text messaging volume in the U.S. has declined for the first time ever, according to a new research report.

Regardless of whether the emoticon you'd assign to the story is a smiley or a sad face, it's worth noting that after years as a growing communications medium, texting may be starting to fall victim to new market trends, at least insofar as it generates revenues for wireless carriers.

In a report looking at the U.S. mobile data market in the third quarter, Chetan Sharma wrote that although other western countries have already started to see falling revenue in the messaging segment, this was the first time that American carriers have both mirrored that revenue pattern and seen a drop in the total volume of SMS messages sent. … Read more

Alerts on our connected Android devices can sometimes pick the worst moment to sound off. For instance, when you're in the middle of working with raw meat in the kitchen or carrying in 10 bags of groceries at once -- these are prime opportunities to get alerts... right? Yeah, not really. So why not just have your device read the alert to you? That's exactly what SpeakMe does.

The capability to read notifications out loud is available on most versions of Android. However, that option also reads each menu item, each action -- and everything in … Read more