The NYT has a short note (Letting Our Fingers Do the Talking ) on a new Nielsen Mobile report on texting use in the US.

“In the fourth quarter of 2007, American cellphone subscribers for the first time sent text messages more than they phoned, according to Nielsen Mobile. Since then, the average subscriber’s volume of text messages has shot upward by 64 percent, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly.”

The article also points out that “Teenagers ages 13 to 17 are by far the most prolific texters, sending or receiving 1,742 messages a month”. The Nielsen data shows that this age group sends two orders of magnitude more data than people over 65.

Note that texting is more popular than calling for all but the last three age groups.

The US congress is asking the four major mobile phone providers why their charges for text messages have gone up by 100% over the past few years. As Chris Gaylord notes in his blog on the Christian Science Monitor, “text messages cost about $1,310 per megabyte. That seems a tad high.”

“With text-messaging rates doubling over the past three years, Sen. Herb Kohl has started asking questions. The Wisconsin Democrat and head of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee sent a letter to the four major cellular companies on Tuesday with some interesting points.

In 2005, the industry charged about 10 cents per text. Now it’s 20 cents. All four carriers upped their rates at about the same time. The number of nationwide competitors slipped from six to four. And the remaining big-timers are gobbling up regional carriers.”

US Senator Herb Kohl’s press release includes the letter to the telecos.

“Today, US Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, asked the presidents and chief executive officers of the four largest wireless telephone companies to justify sharply rising rates for its customers to send and receive text messages. In a letter, Senator Kohl requested an explanation from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, which collectively serve more than 90 percent of the nation’s cellular phone users. The text of Senator Kohl’s letter follows below.”

The September 2008 Scientific American is a special issue on The Future of Privacy. The issue has a good range or articles that all look like they are well worth reading and touch on all of the theme in our new MURI project on assured information sharing.

• Privacy in an Age of Terabytes and Terror. Peter Brown. Introduction to SciAm’s issue on Privacy. Our jittery state since 9/11, coupled with the Internet revolution, is shifting the boundaries between public interest and “the right to be let alone.”
• Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles. Simson L. Garfinkel. Mashing everyone’s personal data, from credit card bills to cell phone logs, into one all-encompassing digital dossier is the stuff of an Orwellian nightmare. But it is not as easy as most people assume.
• Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?. Daniel J. Solove. Young people share the most intimate details of personal life on social-networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, portending a realignment of the public and the private.
• How Loss of Privacy May Mean Loss of Security. Esther Dyson. Many issues posing as questions of privacy can turn out to be matters of security, health policy, insurance or self-presentation. It is useful to clarify those issues before focusing on privacy itself.
• Cryptography: How to Keep Your Secrets Safe. Anna Lysyanskaya. A versatile assortment of computational techniques can protect the privacy of your information and online activities to essentially any degree and nuance you desire.
• Internet Eavesdropping: A Brave New World of Wiretapping. Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. As telephone conversations have moved to the Internet, so have those who want to listen in. But the technology needed to do so would entail a dangerous expansion of the government’s surveillance powers.
• How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People. Katherine Albrecht. A privacy activist argues that the devices pose new security risks to those who carry them, often unwittingly.
• Beyond Fingerprinting: Is Biometrics the Best Bet for Fighting Identity Theft?. Anil K. Jain and Sharath Pankanti. Security systems based on anatomical and behavioral characteristics may offer the best defense against identity theft.
• Digital Surveillance: Tools of the Spy Trade. Steven Ashley. Night-vision cameras, biometric sensors and other gadgets already give snoops access to private spaces. Coming soon: palm-size “bug-bots”.
• Tougher Laws Needed to Protect Your Genetic Privacy. Mark A. Rothstein. In spite of recent legislation, tougher laws are needed to prevent insurers and employers from discriminating on the basis of genetic tests.
• Industry Roundtable: Experts Discuss Improving Online Security. Experts from Sun, Adobe, Microsoft and MacAfee discuss how to protect against more numerous and sophisticated attacks by hackers; security professionals call for upgraded technology, along with more attention to human and legal factors.

Today’s New York Times has an article, With Wireless Network, City Agencies Have More Eyes in More Places, that describes a city wide wireless network that is operational and is expected to largely completed by the end of the summer.

“Locating vehicles is one of ways the Department of Sanitation and other city agencies are using the city’s new $500 million high-speed wireless secure data network, one of the largest of its kind in the world. The network, known as NYCWiN, was built by Northrop Grumman and by summer’s end will include about 400 cellular antennas covering 95 percent of the city.

The idea is for city agencies to use network-connected hand-held devices and tablet computers to increase efficiency and flexibility: Soon, police officers will be able to view photographs of suspects from their cars, fire chiefs will be able to watch live video of fires taken from traffic helicopters above, and housing inspectors will be capable of looking up building plans while on location.”

The article notes that other cities, including Oklahoma City, Tucson and Washington, are implementing similar wireless networks. One motivation is to provide a secure network for municipal workers who can not rely on commercial cellular networks which can become quickly overloaded in emergencies.

The Gotham Gazette has some information on the NYCWiN system’s specification:

The original specifications for the network called for it to support multiple, simultaneous transmission of full-motion video or large files from and to anywhere in the city, real-time tracking of all city vehicles and control of traffic lights, continuous monitoring of air and water purity, transmission of patient vital signs from ambulances to receiving hospitals, and reliable voice communications to back up radio and cell phone signals. … NYCWiN is not technically Wi-Fi, since it will use licensed spectrum. Wi-Fi operates over a portion of the airwaves that the Federal Communications Commission has designated as unlicensed, or open to the public for use with any approved device. Nevertheless, in non-emergency conditions, NYCWiN will have a lot of unused capacity that could help civic projects keep their bandwidth costs down, as Dana Spiegel suggested.”

According to Paul Cosgrave, NYCWiN is not a WI-FI or a WIMAX system but uses Universal Mobile Telecommunications System technology on the 2.5 GHz band to provide a broadband data network and IP services. The similar Washington DC system uses EV-DO and different frequency band, 700 MHz.

Wireless Blog reports that NYC is “using IPWireless technology for their city-wide safety network with each cell site providing in-building coverage up to 3 to 5 miles from the cell site in an urban setting. It operates in a single channel of 5 or 10MHz of spectrum and supports voice over IP with full QOS based on SIP.”

I admit — I was following along on engadget’s liveblog of Jobs’ WWDC keynote, looking for iPhone news. Most of what he said, though, was fairly old news to those who had been reading the tech blogs for the last month or so — 3G and aGPS, besides of course the already announced software upgrades. The big thing was the $199 price, which was out of the blue it seemed. I figured I would go out and get one pretty much as soon as they were available without having to stand in a line. The teeny voice in my head however was expressing skepticism, which eventually was proven correct. The $199 cost factors in a subsidy from AT&T, and the phone now apparently needs to be activated when bought.  No more buying it without AT&T service and then getting it unlocked.

I wonder why that is, though. The big claim is that the revenue model has changed, and so Apple no longer gets an ongoing cut of the revenue from AT&T. If so, why not also sell unlocked versions of the phone sans subsidy, like every other manufacturer ? How will this work in other countries where handset subsidies are not common ? Apparently AirTel in India is the preferred partner and will launch this phone “soon”.  So will AirTel sell it for more than $199, but unlocked ?  Maybe I can get one from them ? Or wait for Xperia X1 ? Or for TouchPro ?

A UMBC led team recently won a MURI award from DoD to work on “Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle”. It is an interesting mix of work on  new security models, policy driven security systems, context awareness, privacy preserving data mining, and social networking. The award really brings together many different strains of research in eBiquity, as well as some related reserach in our department. We’re just starting off, and excited about it. UMBC’s web page had a story about this, and more recently, GCN covered it.

The UMBC team is lead by Tim Finin, and includes several of us. The other participants are UIUC (led by Jiawei Han), Purdue (led by Elisa Bertino),  UTSA (led by Ravi Sandhu), UTDallas (led by Bhavani Thurasingham), Michigan (Lada Adamic).

In this week’s UMBC ebiquity meeting (10am Tue may 6 in ITE 325), PhD student Wenjia Li will talk about his research on security and MANETs. Guests are always welcome — just drop in. Here’s the title and abstract.

Gossip-Based Outlier Detection for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Wenjia Li, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

It is well understood that Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are extremely susceptible to a variety of attacks. Many security schemes have been proposed that depend on identifying nodes that are exhibiting malicious behavior such as packet dropping, packet modification, and packet misrouting. We argue that in general, this problem can be viewed as an instance of detecting nodes whose behavior is an outlier when compared to others. In this work, we propose a gossip-based outlier detection algorithm for MANETs. The algorithm leads to a common outlier view amongst distributed nodes with a limited communication overhead. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and accurate.

Remember when finding information on the Web was done by navigation using Gopher or Yahoo’s directory? I worked and we thought it was pretty good, at least until the search engines came along. Then we realized that search was much better than navigation for most tasks, especially as the size of the Web grew.

Recall how we get information from a big organization by phone today — we call customer service and navigate a confusing phone menu over the phone and after 10 minutes, end up being told to dial a different department. Dealing with such IVR (Interactive voice response) systems is part of the cost of living in our modern society. But maybe w can do better…

Fonolo offers a service that uses a search engine on their site to find the right spot on a company’s phone menu and connect you to it by a callback to your phone. You can even bookmark the point on the phone menu.

How do they do this? Here’s an explanation from IVR search: a ‘Google’ for phone menus?, a post on Telco2.0:

“And Fonolo wrote a web spider that visits large companies’ public phone numbers, and iterates through all the options on all the IVR menus from all the numbers, logging everything it finds. Then it’s just a matter of plotting it all on a directed graph, and making the whole thing searchable and available on the Web. And then the bit we like. You click on the bit you want to get through to, and their system uses the map to dial and navigate the IVRs for you, thus “deep dialing” the user directly to the point in the IVR they need. Every time someone dials through Fonolo, they use the interaction to re-validate that path through the IVR. The search terms that users submit tell them which companies they need to go spider.”

Fonolo is in a private beta mode, but you can sign up to be added to it on thei web site. You can see a video presentation of the idea and some ppt slides

I was very impressed with the ASUS eee PC, which is a well designed and engineered product that delivers a lot at a modest cost. Forbes has a story, :Eee! A New Cellphone!, on ASUS’s plans to manufacture mobile smart phones. In fact, their latest phone, the P527, is already available for sale in the US (e.g., $590 at Amazon, unlocked).

“ASUS says the P527 has a raft of features, including a touch screen, wi-fi, a camera, Windows Mobile software and a number of practical-minded applications. To distinguish it from competitors like the Samsung BlackJack or Motorola (nyse: MOT – news – people ) Q, ASUS loaded the phone with GPS, an FM radio, a business-card scanning program and a “travel log” feature that lets users record their travels and peg photos to specific locations using Google Earth. Even more unique: a feature that acts as a remote control for PowerPoint presentations (via Bluetooth) and an “S.O.S.” service that can track a user’s location and send it, along with a text message, to up to five numbers. “We’re trying to get a unique edge by thinking what users would want on the road and how they could carry less gadgets,” says Huang.”

Reviews, such as this CNet review, are mixed with many complaining about the phone’s slowness.

Language models are widely used in processing both written and spoken language. They are used for part of speech tagging, sense tagging, disambiguation, text similarity metrics, and many other tasks, including predicting the words a person intends when typing on a telephone keypad. The last application has some interesting wrinkles, as this video we spotted on Language Log explains.

The most popular predictive text system in use today is T9, developed by Nuance Communications. You can check out the video’s examples using this T9 demo.

Technology Review has an interesting article on femtocells, which may be the next big thing in home networking and mobile computing.

“Similar in concept to the Wi-Fi routers that many people use to blanket their homes with wireless Internet access, these little boxes instead provide a network for carrying the voice and high-speed data services of mobile phones. They’re designed to give bandwidth-hungry cell-phone subscribers the strongest possible connections at home.” (link)

The idea is attractive and I’d buy one in a minute. I live in a hilly area where the hills do a good job of blocking all kinds of signals — cell phone, TV, and radio. So my mobile phone is almost useless at home, even though I’m in the middle of the Baltimore-DC metropolis.

Femtocell technology has its own industrial organization, the femtoforum, a “a not-for-profit membership organization founded in 2007 to promote femtocell deployment worldwide.”

Here’s a part of the TR article that excites me:

“Today, the equipment cost for femtocells runs in the range of $250 to $300. Sprint, one of the first companies to start commercial trials of the products, is offering them to consumers in Denver and Indianapolis for $50 apiece, along with an offer of lower-priced calling plans–altogether a substantial subsidy.”

Sprint’s press release descibes it’s AIRAVE femtocell, made by Samsung, and their pricing plan: $50 for the femtocell plus $15/$30 a month for the service (individual/family). While at home you talk for free.

Next Friday, UMBC alumnus Filip Perich (PhD 2004) will talk about his recent work using policies expressed in the Semantic Web language OWL to control how software radios manage access to the radio spectrum.

We present an overview of the policy-controlled dynamic spectrum access technology, which provides an order-of-magnitude improvement to wireless communications and spectrum management in terms of spectrum access, capacity, planning requirements, ease of use, reliability, and jam resistance. We describe the current radio systems developed by Shared Spectrum Company as part of the DARPA XG program and provide results from field testing and benefit studies.

The talk, SSC Dynamic Spectrum Access Technology, will be 1:00pm-2:30pm in ITE 229 on Friday 8 February 2008.