Texting Then Sexting And Now There’s Chexting

You might like texting, frown upon sexting, but now comes “chexting” — and it can lead to big trouble. Just ask Tiger Woods and Jesse James.

Golf superstar Woods and TV celebrity James, who is married to Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock, have seen their lives unravel amid revelations of cheating on their spouses, in part by arranging liaisons via text messages.

Their affairs have spawned a new word in pop culture, chexting, and raised the question of whether it really is cheating on a spouse. The experts say, you bet it is.

“It’s lipstick on the cellular — digital proof that becomes evidence you’ve been unfaithful,” says Peter Dedman of Predicto Mobile, the largest paid mobile community in America.

In today’s digital age, where cell phones come equipped with their own typing keyboards separate from the number pads, texting has become more popular than e-mailing for some, and sending a text from a small phone can be done almost anywhere.

It is instant gratification and contact, but for those who have a hard time staying faithful, texting has become medium to facilitate their cheating.

Porsche Introduces Line Of Cell Phones

As if a Porsche isn’t enough of a status symbol, the German luxury sports car company’s subsidiary, Porsche Design, is marketing a mobile phone that’s exclusive to Porsche owners.

The Porsche Design P’9522 BLACK, the latest in the company’s series of mobile phones, held its global launch in Singapore, where, for now, only the 1,600 or so drivers of Porsche cars in the affluent city state can buy it from the car dealership, Stuttgart Auto.

The phone is made by Sagem Wireless and combines matt black anodised aluminum and black mineral glass. Features include a fingerprint sensor to authenticate users.

Retailing for 2,280 Singapore dollars ($1,636), the phone is about three times the price of a Blackberry or an Iphone in Singapore.

But its agent expects demand to be strong in the country and from the Asia Pacific, a region that Forbes magazine recently said witnessed an 80 percent increase in the number of billionaires in 2009.

WordPress Outage Takes Down Over 10 Million Blogs

As you may have noticed, The Daily Andy was down for an extended period of time Thursday afternoon.

In case you haven’t read about why yet, it’s because WordPress suffered through some 110 minutes of downtime, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has explainedon the company’s blog.

The Daily Andy is one of the millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com (not to be confused with sites that run the WordPress software but are hosted elsewhere). All told, some 10.2 million blogs went down — wiping out some 5.5 million pageviews, WordPress estimates. This was their worst outage in 4 years.

So what happened?

Give Up Your iPod For Lent

British church leaders are encouraging people to give up their iPods for Lent, instead of more traditional vices such as chocolate, to help save the planet.

The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, are among those calling for a carbon fast for Lent — a period ahead of Easter which Christians traditionally consider a time of penance and reflection — which began on Wednesday.

As well as spending a day without using technology such as mobile phones or iPods, the 46 daily suggestions also include eating by candlelight, cutting meat and vegetables thinner so they cook faster and flushing the toilet less often.

“Instead of giving up chocolate for Lent, why not fast for justice … to help those suffering from the effects of climate change,” said Jones.

Dutch To Use Full Body Scanners For US Flights

The Dutch government says it will immediately begin using full body scanners on flights to the United States to prevent future terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day attempt allegedly by a young Nigerian.

Authorities say Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to board a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport carrying explosives but failed to successfully detonate them.

In a preliminary report, the Dutch government says his plan to blow up the Detroit-bound aircraft was professional but its execution was “amateurish.”

An earlier Dutch investigation said all security checks were correctly carried out in Amsterdam and American authorities had cleared the passenger list.

Users Deal With More Blackberry Problems

Research In Motion Ltd. said late Tuesday its technicians are working to resolve e-mail messaging delays on its Blackberry smart phones in North and South America.

Phone calling and texting services appeared to be functional, but users in the Americas have been unable to send or receive e-mail messages. Would-be users tweeted their frustration on social networking site Twitter. Some said they also could not connect to the Internet.

Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion Ltd. said in a statement it apologizes for any inconvenience experienced by customers.

It marks the second time in less than a week that BlackBerry users in North America have had to deal with e-mail outages on their Blackberry devices. Research In Motion said last Thursday that technicians had isolated and resolved the issue and were investigating the cause. RIM didn’t say how many users were affected or how long that outage lasted.

Japanese Man Marries Video Game Character

A Japanese man has married a character in a popular video game, taking her — and his handheld game console — on an overseas honeymoon.

The man, who prefers to use his online moniker SAL9000, met character Nene Anegasaki while playing dating simulation game “Love Plus.”

They got married a few weeks ago, broadcasting their ceremony live on Japan’s version of video-sharing website Youtube.

SAL9000, who did not want to reveal his real name for fear of being misunderstood, admits to be an “otaku,” a breed of Japanese youth obsessed with video games, computers and fantasy worlds.

“In the Japanese otaku or nerd culture, there’s a tradition of calling characters my wife, and I sort of thought of Nene as my wife. Since I was calling her that, I thought we’d just have to get married then,” he told Reuters Television.

“If more people were to find ways of expressing themselves like this, I think it would make society a bit more interesting.”

The newlyweds, who went on a honeymoon to Guam, now go on dates around Tokyo, with SAL9000 taking pictures of Nene, installed in his Nintendo DS, in front of famous landmarks and then posting them on social networking sites.

As the game “Love Plus” has voice recognition software, SAL9000 says it’s possible to have a sort of conversation with Nene or even play simple games such as rock, paper, scissors.

He also has vowed to have and to hold, for better and for worse, even if another, updated version of the game is released.

“I think I’ll probably continue playing Love Plus. I won’t cheat,” SAL9000 said.

Hebrew, Hindi, Other Scripts Get Web Address Approval

The nonprofit body that oversees Internet addresses approved Friday the use of Hebrew, Hindi, Korean and other scripts not based on Latin characters in a decision that could make the Web dramatically more inclusive.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — or ICANN — voted to allow such scripts in so-called domain names at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Seoul, South Korea’s capital.

The decision by the board’s 15 voting members was unopposed and welcomed by applause and a standing ovation. It followed years of debate and testing.

The result clears the way for governments or their designees to submit requests for specific names, likely beginning Nov. 16. Internet users could start seeing them in use early next year, particularly in Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and other scripts in which demand has been among the highest, ICANN officials say.

“This represents one small step for ICANN, but one big step for half of mankind who use non-Latin scripts, such as those in Korea, China, Israel and the Arabic speaking world as well as across Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s CEO, said ahead of the vote.

Domain names — the Internet addresses that end in “.com” and other suffixes — are the key monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English — A-Z — as well as 10 numerals and the hyphen. Technical tricks have been used to allow portions of the Internet address to use other scripts, but until now, the suffix had to use those 37 characters.

Happy 40th Birthday Internet!

Now, even the Internet is too old to Twitter.

The technology that transformed the world in which we live just turned 40.

It was on Sept. 2, 1969, that scientists working in a lab at UCLA (or was it Al Gore) got two computers to talk to each other.

“What we were thinking about was machine-to-machine communication. We were not thinking about my 99-year-old mother being on the Internet,” said Len Kleinrock, who ran the lab.

New iPhone To Be Previewed?

Apple has sent out invitations for a special media event on March 17.  As per Ars Technica, Apple will give a sneak preview of the new iPhone OS 3.0 to select members of the media.

Speculations abound on the web that Apple will introduce much-requested features in the iPhone 3.0 OS.  However, it looks like a development build preview version, which might be publicly shown off to developers at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2009.

Last year, at WWDC 2008, Apple had introduced MobileMe with the push notification feature, which was later recalled. However, Apple brought back the push notification feature for MobileMe users.

What’s going to be new in the iPhone OS 3.0?

Here’s a quick checklist Techtree prepared from the feature requests and rants that customers have, and the stuff for which Apple has been in the news for.

Adobe Flash

The hide and seek game between Adobe and Apple to bring Flash support to the iPhone is being played since long. Let’s hope that Apple finally manages to bring the support with due help and development assistance from Adobe.

MMS Support

Another much-requested feature is the Multimedia Message Service support, since the iPhone is already capable of sending multimedia.

Cut – Paste

Haven’t many of you cribbed and ranted about having no cut-paste support on the iPhone ever since the first-generation iPhone was launched? It’s about time that Apple provided iPhone and iPod Touch owners with this feature. Otherwise, they might always be on the look out for an option through jailbreak.

Bluetooth

Despite the fact that the new iPhone 3G has Bluetooth working on a limited number of headsets, let them open up the Bluetooth profile to developers and allow the hooking of the iPhone and iPod Touch to Bluetooth car kits.

Background Process

Support for running more than one application at a time. Basically, a multitasking feature that will, however, stress out the CPU of the iPhone, which is capable of running up to 620MHz. On iPod Touch, game developers would be able to make more graphics-heavy games to put the current CPUs clocked at 532MHz to good use.

Bring out the feature requests you’d like to see on the iPhone OS 3.0, apart from better sync with Mac and Windows based machines.