Amazing Technology

It is often said that today’s children are more computer and technology literate than their parents and this has been borne out by the case of a 12-year-old schoolboy, Kristen Richardson, who managed to track down his mother’s stolen mobile phone.

The mobile phone was not a cheap one, it cost £230 and it disappeared when she placed it on a Felixstowe nightclub bar when she bought a drink and a light-fingered thief took the opportunity to pocket it.

What the lady didn’t know was that her savvy son had installed something called a Lookout Mobile Security application on her phone, enabling him to track its location if lost. Using his mother’s laptop, Kristen logged on to the free Lookout account he had installed and was able to show a map showing exactly where the phone was, a detached house ten miles way. Looking up the address on Google Street View, Kristen was able to display a picture of the house near Woodbridge. The whole process took but just a few minutes.

Mrs Richardson passed the information on to the police who later called at the house and interviewed a 21-year-old man who admitted he had taken the phone when he was in the nightclub. The case was settled amicably by ‘community resolution’ when Mrs Richardson agreed to accept a letter of apology from the man who had never been in trouble with the police before.

Kristen is to be congratulated for his commonsense and for his technological knowledge. It’s a case also when you are almost breathless at learning what technology can do for you.

At the same time, it was staggering to learn that the thief had deleted 173 of Mrs Richardson’s contacts from her phone. But even then, Kristen came up trumps. He just pressed a button and all the contacts were restored.

Mrs Richardson must be a very popular lady. I don’t have 173 contacts around the whole world and only a dozen on my own mobile!
.

There’s No ‘Off’ Button?

The mobile phone belonging to a woman from Bolton was bombarded for seven weeks with over seventy calls a day after her phone company mistakenly redirected customer complaint calls to it.

The women concerned reported that the experience was exhausting and that it also affected her partner’s health.

Cripes! I’d have just switched the wretched thing off!
.

A New Definition Needed

.
The OED tells us that the term ‘the chattering classes’, first coined by journalist Frank Johnson in 1980, is a derogatory one directed at ‘a politically active, socially concerned and highly educated section of the ‘metropolitan middle class,’ especially those with political, media, and academic connections.

I’m not sure that this definition is true any more. You only have to see the number of emailers, bloggers, texters, Twitters, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other social-networking fanatics chattering and burbling away online to give credence to the need for a new definition to be drawn up for the term.

As I had the misfortune to travel up to London yesterday, I’d add to any new definition, the people who seem always to be chattering away on their mobile phones. There is no escape from them - you see and hear them on the train (even in the ‘Quiet Zone’), on the Tube, walking the streets ... just about everywhere. What marks them out is not the fact that their conversations are usually banal, but that they all seem to be shouting into their phones as if the people on the other end are deaf. They are often also not looking where they are going.

If all that doesn’t demonstrate the need for a redefinition of the term’ the chattering classes’, I don’t know what will!
.

Cheap And Functional

.
Vodafone has launched a mobile phone which they say is the ‘lowest-cost mobile phone on Earth’. It is aimed at the developing world, initially India, Turkey and eight African countries, and will sell for below £10.

The phone seems to do pretty much what most mobiles do except take photos and act as an MP3 player.

Since I use my mobile for just making and receiving phone calls, I wonder why this model couldn’t also be rolled out in Europe where I would guess many folk of my age group do the same.

But I guess also that there isn’t much profit in a mobile phone which sells for less than £10.
.

Spoilsports!

.
The advent of mobile phones that can take photographs and videos can sometimes be a perishing nuisance since they record things that are trivial as well as those that are important.

Take, for example, the man who filmed a couple of police officers having a bit of harmless fun by sledging down a snow-covered hill in Oxford on their riot shields. This fellow then posted his video on YouTube with the result that over 20,000 people viewed this inoffensive diversion [over 160,000 as at 17 January].

Then, inevitably, the officers were identified and spoken to by their area commander who ‘reminded them in no uncertain terms that tobogganing on duty, on police equipment and at taxpayers' expense is a very bad idea should they wish to progress under my command.’

Do us a favour! I’d rather see coppers using their riot shields as sledges than applying them in riots!
.

'Hi Ya, Sharon!'

.
German computer scientists have spent the last five months cracking the algorithm used to encrypt the calls of four billion mobile phone users. Their published work allows anyone to eavesdrop on private mobile phone conversations.

There is, of course, a worry that criminals might be able to use this work, though it appears that only government agencies and ‘well funded’ criminals have access to the necessary technology.

I can’t say that I can get too worked up about this news. Imagine the number of banal and utterly worthless conversations that a crook might have to listen to before he found one of any interest.
.

Dangerous Drivers

.
The Transport Research Laboratory has found that more drivers are using hand-held mobile phones than before tougher penalties were bought in two years ago and that phone-using drivers are four times more likely to crash.

This is more news that didn’t come as a surprise, for I guess most of us have seen drivers of cars and trucks negotiating their way through heavy traffic or round corners with a phone clamped to their ear in one hand. Not only is this highly dangerous, but it is very irritating to see drivers getting away with it.

I believe that the police now automatically check the use of mobile phones when investigating traffic accidents and I’m all for that. One assumes also that drivers caught using their mobiles lose their insurance cover when they cause accidents.

The thing that I find very curious is that, while hand-held mobiles and DVD players are forbidden to drivers, the use of GPS receivers is not. So many cars these days seem to be fitted with one and you often see drivers fiddling with their glowing screens.

Are not these as distracting to drivers as mobile phones and other gadgets?
.

Disable The Mobiles!

.
We live in an age where peace and quiet often seems hard to find. Wherever we go there seem to be people chattering on mobile telephones, and nowhere seems sacrosanct any more from these often overpowering conversations.

Train journeys up to town used to be times when I read a book, but this is usually not possible these days due to folk answering or making phone calls which are almost always banal and non-urgent. And I reacted with horror to the idea that some airlines now permit folk to use their own mobiles in flight though, fortunately, it is a rare thing for me to fly these days.

Perhaps we live in an age when the use of fixed telephones are being replaced by the mobiles, and there is much good in that particularly when people can be contacted when they are out and about. But I do believe there are limits and trains, museums, churches and other places that should be quiet ought to be off-limits.

But at least one group of people have risen to stop mobile phones from disturbing them during what should be quiet times. It is a mosque in Kenya which installed a device to block the mobile phone signals that so often disrupted services there.

There should be more of these devices around in my view. Restoring a little bit of peace and quiet in the day.
.