You can now run a denial of service attack on someone's phone system via spam and you don't need to be particularly smart about it.

According to Sophos, "in April, the switchboard of Dublin Zoo was swamped after at least 5,000 people were spammed an SMS text message to their mobile phones telling them to ring a number urgently and ask for a fictitious person.  The number was that of the main phone line to Dublin Zoo and the fake names all animal-related (Rory Lion, Anna Conda, C Lion or G Raffe according to the news reports).  Curiously, zoos in Houston and Brownsville, Texas suffered from similar attacks in May."

The texts will have the number they're sent from; but how hard is it acquire a SIM with fake ID - or indeed, just steal a phone and use the SIM from that?

But really: Rory Lion?!

Last year I went to the Motorola analysts conference and got previews of just about everything they've announced since, like the new RAZRs, the professional version of the Q and follow-me TV. The most interesting discussion was around the services that make smartphones more than mobile phones with big colourful screens and I have a piece in IT Pro on the subject. Ed Zander practically runs Motorola from his Q...with services like enterprise Google search.

You'd be more unhappy if you left your phone at home than if you forget your wallet; I've really seen that answer in survey. Equally, you don't have your numbers stored anywhere else but you haven't backed your phone up. www.mobyko.com might come in handy here; I can't try it because none of my phones work with it (no smartphone support yet) but it claims to back up your numbers easily. The premium account costs of course, but the free account still backs up your address book.

EDIT: many apologies if you clicked the first version of that link without the b. It's a somewhat gratuitous German mdoern art site with a lot of lips and teeth in the background and I hope it doesn't haunt your dreams...

The EU's interest in mobile tariffs for roaming charges is pushing the industry along faster than competition. Telewest may have acknowledged that it's not that much more expensive to call somewhere 5,000 miles of fibre away than it is to call 500 miles of fibre away, but most phone operators would rather give you a confusing basket of text minutes and differential pricing than a flat rate. Picking  a mobile phone tariff is so confusing researchers use it as a test when they want to observe the brain dealing with confusing decisions (Source: Radio 4, All in the Mind, week of 3rd July 2006). And roaming charges are Prisoner's Dilemma in action; why should you care if travellers from my network get cheaper prices in your country when what you care about is looking good for your own customers? Enter the EU and some heavy-handed moves, and suddenly the dirty little secret of roaming charges (where 1MB of data can cost eight to 20 times more than at home) is getting publicity. Operators are at the mercy of what other operators charge them for roaming; you're at the mercy of the strongest signal if your phone isn't set up to prioritise partner networks when you travel. You can always pick the partner network by hand, as long as you know who it is, know how to do it and care enough to bother. Knowing what difference it makes to your bill is an incentive, and even if the EU doesn't force prices down, making people aware in advance that they need to think about the network they roam to and change it is necessary should save people some money. In the long run, if everyone roams to the cheaper networks, there's an incentive to the pricey operators to reduce their roaming charges. Despite what operators claim about responding to the market, this doesn't happen without the kind of kick in the pants the EU is delivering and the publicity it brings.

So if you're planning to travel and you think it's good to talk, http://www.roaming.gsmeurope.org/ shows prices by individual operator for a two-minute peak-time call to a fixed line in your home country, prices for receiving a two minute peak-time call from home (a handy reminder to turn the phone off if you don't fancy the extra charge) and the cost of sending and receiving text messages when travelling within Europe. No data charges yet, but that should be the next argument.

The Blueeye plugs into the audio jack of an MP3 player, sends the music to your mobile (by Bluetooth) and mutes the music when you get a call. Doesn't look like much, but it sounds nfty.