More On Camera Phones As Bar Scanners

Here’s more on a subject I looked at in December (and then promptly forgot about): Using your camera phone as a bar code scanner. Wired says there are at least four software companies that have released applications that let you take a photo of a bar code, which will then trigger the download of coupons, … Read more

Note for Wall Street Journal Europe Readers

For those readers of The Wall Street Journal Europe: I’m afraid the column is no longer running in the WSJE because of a policy of standardizing some pages so they mirror the U.S. edition. For those readers of the column there, I’m sorry. I enjoyed receiving emails from readers in Europe and had hoped to … Read more

Sending SMS From A Computer

Here’s a list of some of the available ‘PC to SMS’ services, courtesy of Russell Beattie. My own offerings: Both Yahoo and ICQ chat offer some kind of SMS service, but I’ve found them to be somewhat unreliable. This is less to do with them and more to do with the end provider, but in … Read more

The Fine Art of Phishing, Or Suckers In Love

Email scams seem to be getting more and more sophisticated. I got two this weekend that I hadn’t seen before: One nearly fooled me into trotting off to Paypal and giving up practically all my personal data, the other almost convinced me I was being pursued for love. The Paypal scam, according to Codefish, is … Read more

Is Online Gaming A Free For All, Or Orwellian Despotism?

More on the story about The Sims Online and the seedy goings on in Alphaville. The Independent’s Andrew Gumbel writes about the case, saying the expulsion of academic Peter Ludlow from the game “was only the beginning of a fascinating new phase”. Since then, he says, “Electronic Arts, through its online game controller, Maxis, has … Read more