This week sees much promotion of mobile phone internet technologies. A well known newspaper in the UK today sported an, admittedly heavy-handed, cover advert consisting of a full page (front and back) advertisement for Microsoft's Windows Mobile. Microsoft Windows Mobile is basically an operating system for your mobile. It allows you to edit and create Microsoft office documents, and send emails via Outlook, all on your mobile phone. This technology is excellent for modern day office workers that spend a lot of their time travelling to liaise with clients. It means that they can edit and make minor changes to documents and presentations that have been prepared for those important client meetings.
Also in the news this week, as covered by bigmouthmedia news (The .mobi land rush: a mobile web revolution?) has been the opening up of .mobi domains for registration by the public. .mobi domains have been around for a few months, but the domains were only available to businesses and resellers to register, but now anyone can register any .mobi domain that hasn't already been taken. The expected "land rush" has seen a lot of media attention, and so will undoubtedly attract unethical spammers in their droves.
Spammers in the past have caused problems for mobile phone users with text message spam, but will the new technologies open up a new world of spam where spam technicians will combine the power of internet spam with mobile phone spam to come up with an even more annoying and potentially harming mobile internet spam? This mobile spam has worrying potential - unethical companies have already used technology to steal credit off a person's mobile phone by having them reply to a text message, or just by agreeing to have messages sent to them. With ever more powerful software available on mobile phones, it seems certain that the internet spammer will divert his attention to making similar phone credit, or personal information theft via the mobile phone.
These considerations are already being posed by the spammer - it's now just a matter of whether the spam companies can come up with good preventative measures to combat this problem before it starts. Until the world of spam has been crushed be sure you know exactly what you are doing before you allow access of a foreign body to your computer or phone!
