iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service

An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google's free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google's SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google's own GTalk client."

Comments

Well,

[Jurily]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

Re:Well,

[imasu]

How is this abuse, exactly?

Re:Well,

[vux984]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.

Re:Well,

[Ostracus]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.

Hmmm, yes let's all remember that the next time OSS is discussed.

Re:Well,

[pembo13]

Charging for a service another entity subsidizes without their approval.

Re:Well,

[Aranykai]

Ive been sending sms messages to sprint users for free for years now. Just add @messaging.sprintpcs.com to then end of their phone number and send it as an email.

Im sure most other providers do something similar.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

You go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and eat 500 pounds of food, then you cry about it after they stop refilling the troughs and kick your fat ass out before closing time.

Then the restaraunt gets rid of the all-you-can-eat buffet because a few greedy bastards like you ruined it for everybody else. In other words, trendy dumbfucks like you who are willing to pay for an overpriced iPhone aren't willing to pay the extra 20 bucks for unlimited texting. 1600 text messages per month will run you $10, but even that's not good enough for your banal "LOL OMG he did NOT do THAT!!1!!" 's every 5 seconds.

It's like when niggers buy a brand new Cadillac Escalade but don't pay insurance on it.

Re:Well,

[RichardJenkins]

OSS stands for Open Source Software, not services. Why would you want to remember Google shutting down a free service when discussing open/free software?

Re:Well,

[djjockey]

I don't think they charged for a service that Google provided. They were charging for a piece of software to access the service. It's not like they were taking a fee per SMS.

Re:Well,

[thetoadwarrior]

Making money off of a free service by vastly increasing the cost of running the free service without offering compensation especially when the economy is going to shit.

Re:Well,

[Krneki]

Like you couldn't see this happening.

Free SMS can't exist ATM, too many people will abuse it for whatever reason they can think.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because every /. discussion of how to make a living from creating open source software involves the magic fairy of selling services associated with the software. What people forget to mention is that the magic services fairy is at least as likely to die via gang rape while on its way to your house as it is to successfully deliver the kind of money you'd have gotten from making a closed source piece of software.

(This is not to say there aren't occasions to work on OSS, but most business models revolving around making OSS are dubious.)

Re:Well,

[Super Jamie]

I cannot BELIEVE you are getting modded down for this. Best post on Slashdot, evar.

Re:Well,

[A1rmanCha1rman]

A "Proper Business Model" in your view obviously means one that calculates for society's philistinism, self-centredness and lack of a group ethic.

Re:Well,

[dark_knight_ita]

Sir, you are my new idol. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're not allowed all you can eat, then it's a lie to call it an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

This is Text Messages were talking about here.
Providing a free SMS service and then blocking outside access is like supergluing your asshole shut the day after you bent over the pick up the soap in prison.

Re:Well,

[Richard_at_work]

Whatever happened to politefulness and manners in this world?

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

It's like when niggers buy a brand new Cadillac Escalade but don't pay insurance on it.

If you knew there's a good chance that you'ld be assumed to be the one at fault, lose your license, and probably be thrown in jail until they figured out you didn't steal the Escalade to begin with if you were involved in an accident, would you waste money on insurance ?

Re:Well,

[digitalchinky]

In all, it probably only actually had a total infrastructure cost of about $15 USD to support every scrap of traffic across every involved SS7 link. (I pulled $15 bucks from my backside, it was likely even less than that) Millions of messages? Billions? Doesn't really matter, these links are up 24/7 anyway, and if they aren't being used then they just idle. Now the phone companies will have you think that every bit is encapsulated in 24 carrot gold, sent through diamond encrusted tubes, and polished brighter than the sun before being given the privilege of hitting the recipients dirty message queue. It very likely cost google a fair chunk of change though, but the phone companies, virtually nothing. SMS is a very tiny and largely insignificant bit of allocated payload riding on the back of the out of band signalling system. What you have here is a cash cow for the telco, nothing more, nothing less. It's pure genius driven by greed.

Free SMS can actually exist, just so long as the basic fee they charge for the service covers the infrastructure cost to run it each month, then end of story. This is likely not going to happen any time soon, remember, greed, uninformed customer base, cash cow.

Re:Well,

[mlts]

Not just people, criminal organizations. SMS spam is already a problem, and if the same people sending the same unwanted junk mail manage to get ahold of a free SMS service, then they have the ability to not just hit millions of phones, but attack people they don't like with big phone bills. For example (obligatory car mention), sending someone 30,000 text messages likely will make most people's monthly phone bills cost more than the MSRP of a decent vehicle.

In some ways, SMS spam is worse than E-mail spam. Unless the recipiant has unlimited text messaging, they pay up to a buck just to read about someone's new pharmacy.

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

A tyranasaurus rex stepped on manners when it leaned over to bite politefulnesses' head off.

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

Lots of carriers have SMS gateways. :)

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Who on Earth PAYS to RECIEVE an SMS?

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Best post on Slashdot, evar.

Slashdot would have been so much better, if that had been the worst post ever.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, sadly it appears that politefulnessosity is a thing of the past :(

Re:Well,

[AmiMoJo]

Does Apple have some way to get refunds from the iPhone store?

What happens if you do a chargeback, do they ban you/your phone like PayPal sometimes do?

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but if you bring tupperware to the buffet, you're cheating.

Re:Well,

[Sophira]

Most people in the US do.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

" Unless the recipiant has unlimited text messaging, they pay up to a buck just to read about someone's new pharmacy."... ... in the US.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is laughing their asses off at the thought of paying to receive phone calls and SMSes.

Re:Well,

[HateBreeder]

I'm assuming the GP was implying that the business model for most OSS projects is broken, as they spend time working yet give their results for free.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

He said "on Earth."

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because every /. discussion of how to make a living from creating open source software involves the magic fairy of selling services associated with the software.

Emphasis mine. Why then would giving away a free service come to play in the discussion? If google charged each user a flat monthly fee (or a one time fee, or a per message fee), I'm sure they would be happy as clams if you 'abused' their service as described.

Re:Well,

[Lumpy]

Problem is this is AT&T cellular. they charge for every outgoing and INCOMING sms message. So honestly they are not losing any money.

This is the problem with SMS messages. they are overpriced drastically so people are looking for ways to subvert them.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if your definition of "past" contains the word "fiction".

Re:Well,

[fractoid]

Your obsession with unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee contracts in America is quite frankly puzzling. It's like you have to make every part of your capitalistic society and make it into pseudo-communism.

It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service. This holds for values of X such as bandwidth, pasta, text messaging, icecream, whatever.

Re:Well,

[danwesnor]

If they tell us we're paying for unlimited, and we don't get unlimited, we get PO'd. It's no different from paying for 3 and only getting 2.

Re:Well,

[aderuwe]

This. Fuck.

Talk about retarded...

Re:Well,

[Runaway1956]

Wrong analogy. At your local shopping mall, Restaurant A has an all you can eat. You pay for their buffet, and notice that Restaurant B has some enticing deserts. You snitch a couple deserts after gorging on Restaurant A's buffet. The owner of B notices you taking his desserts, and puts up a wall to prevent future abuse. Now, people are whining about the wall, they want those yummy deserts, for which they did NOT PAY.

Re:Well,

[Runaway1956]

taanstafl, stupid. taanstafl. Everything costs, pull your head out of your butt and think about it. There is no such thing as unlimited anything, unless it is the vacuum of space, or maybe the vacuum between some people's ears.

Re:Well,

[Runaway1956]

So, don't buy the freaking service. Dump AT&T, and TELL THEM WHY! Don't try to free ride on Google, or some other service profider. You pay AT&T, so make your money talk for you. Tell them that you want unlimited SMS, or you are taking your business elsewhere. If that doesn't work out for you, then stop sending so damned many stupid assed SMS messages. (would someone please tell me why in the HELL any individual needs to send and recieve hundreds of messages per day - it simply defies reason)

Re:Well,

[fractoid]

If you told me I could have unlimited *anything* (unless it was actually limited by the other terms of the contract, like "unlimited downloads 56k dialup" which can't download more than a few hundred MB a week) I'd think they needed their head examined. If you tell me I can have an unlimited number of pies for $10, I don't expect to be able to back up a truck and take 10,000 of them.

Re:Well,

[commodore64_love]

>>>If they tell us we're paying for unlimited, and we don't get unlimited,

The fine print clearly stated unlimited TIME. And that's what you get. You can stay connected to the net all day long, as opposed to some other providers like AOL Circa 1995 which charged $1 an hour, or Netzero which currently limits users to 10 hours per session. The fact that you failed to read the fine print or contract is your OWN dumb fault. It clearly stated unlimited TIME, not bytes.

Oh and I agree with the European - gasoline is metered, phone calls are metered (by the minute or call), and electricity is metered. It makes sense to meter the internet too. It's not fair for grandma who reads a few emails per day to pay the exact-same rate as me who downloads 1000 gig per month.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

brilliant! who says there is not free lunch!

Re:Well,

[emmjayell]

Actually, it's the corporations here in the USA that have conditioned the consumers into buying unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee per billing period contracts. Corporations are addicted to committed revenue - and fixed fee pricing is a great way to get it. The usual 80/20 rule applies where they wouldn't offer the fixed fee at a particular pricing point unless they make added profit on the under utilization by 80% of the subscribers.

Re:Well,

[pohl]

that depends on what the definition of "is" is.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

We aren't obsessed with all-you-can-eat services. We are obsessed with truth in advertisement.

Unfortunately, our government doesn't regulate the truthfulness in ads.

Re:Well,

[bill_kress]

remember that a lot of people are developing iPhone apps now.

I'd complain if it were some large company that based their business model on this, but chances are it's just some guy or small company that figured out a cute, easy trick and tried to charge for it rather than give it away for free.

I'm not condoning it, just pointing out that as the number of people grows, morals and consideration always go out the window unless forced.

Re:Well,

[houghi]

In Europe it is not that bad. You could subscribe to an expensive 'service' that send syou a message each day or even several ones, but that is (becoming) highly regulated. Just sending spam will cost only the sender, not the reciever. (Unless you are in a different country)

So if you send me 30.000 messages, that will cost you money. I won't pay anyting and most likely a simple telephone t my provider will block those other 29.900 and you will loose your account with your provider.

I never understood how you can take a service where you have no control over the cost in any way.

Re:Well,

[filthpickle]

I have a hard time seeing this comment as insightful. It's actually just as ignorant as the post quoted.

Re:Well,

[foniksonik]

True but insurance covers this scenario. SO yes, I'd 'waste' my money on insurance - because when they did figure out that I hadn't stolen the vehicle and I got to have my day in court - I'd sue everyone involved and make out like a bandit.

In fact getting insurance in that scenario is the key to a huge pay day.. ie: stickin it to the man. Without insurance I'm just another statistic and a patsy as well (what better "proof" is there that someone is responsible for an accident than their lack of insurance - it's almost like they were "planning" to get into an accident).

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not American, but I call bullshit on your statement.

It's not the obsession with unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee contracts... it's an obsession with truth in advertising. No one would have any problem with limited service if the service were not advertised as "UNLIMITED!!!"

Don't fuck the consumers. Simple, right?

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

it's almost like they were "planning" to get into an accident

Isn't that the entire reason people get insurance to begin with ?

What kind of idiot would spend money on something they never have any intention of needing ?

Re:Well,

[st0rmshad0w]

Oh and I agree with the European - gasoline is metered, phone calls are metered (by the minute or call), and electricity is metered. It makes sense to meter the internet too. It's not fair for grandma who reads a few emails per day to pay the exact-same rate as me who downloads 1000 gig per month.

While I completely agree that anyone who doesn't read the fine print is a fool, I have issue with your "everything is metered" assumption.

I used to live in an apartment where heat and electric were included in the rent.

I payed the same total rate as the guy next door even tho I was barely home and liked it on the cool side while he kept all sorts of lights and electrical gizmos on 24/7 and kept it at about 80 degrees.

Is that somehow wrong? We each made an agreement with the party providing the service.

Also, for the record, until I eventually got rid of my landline my calls weren't metered, I had completely unlimited (local) service, and I didn't have a long distance carrier since I didn't need one.

Maybe if the US would get off its technologically backwards ass and build a decent infrastructure we wouldn't even be having these discussions. WE pretty much invented this stuff and now I'm hard pressed to find a decently inexpensive 5MB connection while many Europeans could have 10MB or even 100MB connections for comparable rates.

Following your logic, we should be prepared to pay for clothing based on how many square inches/cms of fabric it uses. I hope they don't want to start taxing our O2 use.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

"they are overpriced drastically"

This I don't understand. Surely it is much cheaper to send a few kB of text over the network than to compress and stream a person's voice?

I heard somewhere that in Japan people use texting more than voice. I wonder how the infrastructure would hold up if everyone switched to voice?

Re:Well,

[hplus]

The fact that it's illegal to drive without it?

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

Everywhere ?

Re:Well,

[mdwh2]

Yes, because OSS developers are always whining, and shutting down their software, everytime someone makes money from their product.

Oh wait, they don't. In fact, Open Source explicitly allows, by definition, other people to make money from it.

Re:Well,

[billcopc]

EPIC!

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X

That assumes that the cost of providing a large amount of service is significantly above that of the average.
Consider SMS: does it cost much more to provide 10000 messages per month to a customer than 100? You sill have to have the same amount of towers/basic infrastructure. The marginal cost of the 1MB/month of extra traffic is probably negligeable.

Re:Well,

[mdwh2]

Would it have been different if they weren't making money from it?

It didn't increase the cost, it was only due to more people using it (which could have happened through all sorts of means). A free application would be even more popular, making it even more likely that Google would decide to shut it down. Same result, even though they weren't "abusing" it.

I'm not sure why the economy going to shit makes a difference. Google are more likely to suspend a free service anyway in these economic conditions, all things being equal. And it works both ways - all the while free services are available, people are more likely to take advantage of them in these conditions.

Re:Well,

[billcopc]

The only reason insurance is necessary today, is because it has artificially inflated the cost of operating a vehicle. That's how a benign fender-bender came to cost $2000. Mechanics routinely inflate their estimates when it's an insurance job, because it's free money.

I'm pretty sure suing everyone is also not a constructive activity, but hey, "god bless the American way", right ? :P

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's TANSSTAFL, not TAANSTAFL. Legendary acronym fail. Would have only been epic acronym fail except that you did it on an earlier post too. :-)

Re:Well,

[BlatOdea]

You Sir, Win. Too bad you've been modded troll.

Re:Well,

[emag]

Following your logic, we should be prepared to pay for clothing based on how many square inches/cms of fabric it uses.

Um, well, actually, most places charge more for XXL and XXXL shirts, "plus" sizes, etc. Check thinkgeek.com for just one example.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

I PAID FOR MY FUCKING CHINESE BUFFET.

And they didn't hold up their end of the bargain. Yeah, TNSTAFL. Tell the restaurant owners that, instead of the customers.

Re:Well,

[orasio]

Of course. The magic of capitalism is that it is supposed to work even when people are self-centered and lack group ethics.

I don't believe such a system exists, but most people do.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you sure are a stupid bigoted piece of shit aren't you? Too dumb to see the logical inconsistency in your diahreatic excretion. The "unlimited" usage of each of your examples introduces inherent friction. There is only so much pasta you can eat before a store closes or you die. Period. Same for icecream. There are only 720 hours in the typical month and you can only download so many megabits per second. Thus, there is always a cap. Some people are going to use more, most much less. It's called a business model. Price accordingly.

You eurotrash fucks are what are ruining Slashdot. Why don't you dumbass Europeans go fuck off to slashdot.eu or some stupid ass shit so you can all plan your circle-jerk America hating pride get-togethers and leave intelligent people alone?

Re:Well,

[inasity_rules]

Damn! I really thought I could get away with using a free service!

Re:Well,

[CecilPL]

No, it's TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

I think that qualifies as epic.

Re:Well,

[illegalcortex]

It's seriously hard to get too bent out of shape about this. Sure, the app seller should have thought this through and realized Google would probably cut it off and they would be shafting a bunch of people who paid for it. Maybe they did and didn't really care. But I can't say it was obvious that Google would shut off the free SMS. How does Google make money on gmail? Ads, right? Then why are they fully supportive of using IMAP to access your gmail? I almost never actually use the web browser version. Now giving me gmail without me seeing the ads isn't exactly an obvious money maker for them. It costs them money to offer gmail just like it does to offer free SMS.

I'm happy with how Google handled it. No recriminations or blaming someone else for using a service they provide. Just a polite "we're not really interested in this" and disabling it.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

"Making money off of a free service by vastly increasing the cost of running the free service without offering compensation especially when the economy is going to shit."

Good point. I think we should shut down all the companies that have improved the web browser and force everyone to go back to Mosaic. The return to suck will be so devastating for most people that they will cease to use the free internet.

How dare all those browser developers make money off the free http services available out there?

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
TANSTAAFL
Your fail, sir! Goodbye!

Re:Well,

[larry bagina]

It's also kind of necessary when a car is totaled or someone is sent to the hospital or if there's property damage.

Re:Well,

[The Cisco Kid]

I think the point being made was that if a company isn't really offering 'unlimited', they shouldn't be allowed to *say* it is 'unlimited'.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service."

X = TV (regular broadcast especially, I hear some sat TV is free too)
X = local phone service

And you don't understand economics or progress. Many things become cheaper and cheaper due to competition, so much so that's it's more costly to maintain the billing equipment for the corporation (energy, equipment, manpower) than it is to not monitor it. Even the progress of other industries can impact unrelated industries and their economies such that things become cheaper and cheaper so the above scenario takes place.

Take phone service. I value my time. I want an unlimited plan. That doesn't mean I am, in turn, going to talk hours upon hours more on the phone in a month. It's to cover overages. With an unlimited plan, I wouldn't worry about talking, but I certainly would not spend *more* time on the phone at all.

There are other limits in our lives, such as family and time, that limit our usage of unlimited resources, because there are other things in our lives that we prefer to do than what might be offered.

Even bandwidth, in about 2 more equipment generations, will start to settle the maximum 2-dimensional limitations people will use the equipment for (video, audio), and probably 3 more generations after that to settle 3d and creative usage. Any other functional limitations will come about because of natural limitations (in the case of bandwidth, two things--response/latency times and the speed of light).

No wonder you non-American types are so fubar'd, and why we are becoming fubar'd in turn given the number of Americans who agreed with you here or tried to explain our ways. You just think that you are right, when there are many examples in your life where there is unlimited amounts of something that you readily pass by because there is better availability, quality, or preferences.

Re:Well,

[SpectraLeper]

Mmmmmm...carrot gold.

Re:Well,

[poopdeville]

Good point.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/be

Re:Well,

[Mana Mana]

> all-you-can-use X

This is a misnomer. What is meant is un-metered!

Difference? One implies *infinite* usage. The other does not.

[ snip needless examples ]

End of myth. Move on apologists, suffer fiery deaths marketroids. Nothing goes on forever (sleep, boredom anyone) except a perpetual motion machine. I'll sell you mine.

Re:Well,

[poopdeville]

Google explicitly allowed third-party software to use their service. That included commercial 3rd party software.

Re:Well,

[Runaway1956]

Alright. We can be sticklers for semantics. Let us shut down every company that advertises "free" anything. My wife often takes advantage of "buy two, get one free" deals. And, it's a lie. They overcharged her for the first two, then gave her the third one to make her feel good about being overcharged. It WAS NOT FREE. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, it's really quite simple.

Re:Well,

[Firehed]

It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service. This holds for values of X such as bandwidth, pasta, text messaging, icecream, whatever.

That's true, but it doesn't make it a flawed business model. It may not be fair to all parties, but alternative options exist and nobody was forced into signing up for a one-size-fits-most plan.

The bigger issue with this kind of thing is that the long tail users who make up 10% of the subscriber base yet use 90% of the resources are now taking shit for "overusing" the service which was advertised as unlimited but had some sort of implied but never spelled out in writing fair use attachment. Skype for example is "unlimited", but says that there's a fair use limit of 6hrs/day|10k hrs/mo|50#/day - but this is spelled out clearly before you sign up, unlike the ISPs that are starting to trying to modify the usage rights spelled out in the contracts after they've already been signed.

Whether these contracts make sense or not is up for debate. The fact is that if you advertise one thing and then provide something else, you're now liable for false advertising.

Re:Well,

[Ashriel]

If you tell me I can have an unlimited number of pies for $10, I don't expect to be able to back up a truck and take 10,000 of them.

I would. If someone tells me I can get unlimited [whatever], then that means unlimited. If they just meant it as an advertising gimmick, some freeloaders are going to come along and make them rethink their advertising policies.

I'm not opposed to metering internet connections, as long as prices are reasonable (about $.05-$.07 per GB seems fair). But if my ISP offers me 7 Mb/s for a flat $40 rate, then I'll assume that means I'm free to download about 1820 GB a month (running the connection full-tilt 24/7), or about $.02 a GB. If they didn't plan for people like me, they certainly should have.

Re:Well,

[smalltimecrime]

Ive been sending sms messages to sprint users for free for years now. Just add @messaging.sprintpcs.com to then end of their phone number and send it as an email.

Im sure most other providers do something similar.

thanks for this I had no idea. works great

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.

Oh you must have bought Infinite SMS eh?

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, wow, go jack off to your free telecommunications services. Because, I mean, only the great EU can get free incoming calls and text messages included in their plan right? Right?

You EU pukes make me sick. You actually believe your own bullshit. Whenever you get your head out of the sand, do a little research, you'll see there are quite a few providers, mine included, in the US that offer unlimited text messages and unlimited incoming and outgoing calls. If that isn't "free" incoming texts and calls, I'm not sure what your definition of it is. By the way, dummy, there is no such thing as free when you are actually, you know, paying money like on your phone bill every month. I know from your narrow, limited, socialistic perspective, you may think it is, but it isn't.

Re:Well,

[despisethesun]

No, the third is free because regardless of whether she got it free, the first two would have cost the same. They may have overcharged for those two, but they would still be overcharging if you didn't get the third one for no additional cost. That makes the third one free.

Here's some simple math for you in case you don't get it.
If 5 + 5 = 5 + 5 + x = 10, solve for x.

Re:Well,

[Runaway1956]

Nonsense. You can't see the forest for the trees. It is NOT a simple mathematical equation, as you suggest. You are being ripped off with every purchase of the overpriced stuff, to the tune of hundreds of dollars annually. They toss you a few cents every few months, and you feel good about it, because you don't realize that you are being ripped off. Figures don't lie, but liars figure. You need to look a little harder for the truth.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service.

Yes and no. In the real world, there is a cost to the itemizing and billing. If you need to track and bill for every single local phone call and SMS, that adds a lot of overhead.

In fact, itemizing and billing is the most expensive part of phone service. What's the easiest way to minimize that cost? Flat-rate unlimited. Yes, some people will hog the service, but most won't and you reduce your costs and overhead.

I can make long distance phone calls to anywhere in my country for 4 cents/minute. But some providers are offering unlimited, because it's cheaper to do so.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

A tyranasaurus rex stepped on manners when it leaned over to bite politefulnesses' head off.

If your T-Rex had been a Velociraptor instead it would have played better to this audience. Never underestimate the power of xkcd.

Re:Well,

[mysidia]

BTISTAAAYCEPL - But there is such thing as an 'All You Can Eat' Paid Lunch.

For example, you can buy unlimited text message plans on a monthly basis from your service provider. And there is essentially no cost to them (pure profit).

It's just that $1 was too low, non-recurring, and none of it actually went to Google, so of course, there's little incentive for them to provide the service, which is probably costing money.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the entire reason people get insurance to begin with ?

What kind of idiot would spend money on something they never have any intention of needing ?

Because the consequences of needing it when you don't have it are VERY VERY BAD. And you can't get insurance after the fact.

Re:Well,

[Dragonslicer]

What kind of idiot would spend money on something they never have any intention of needing ?

Because life doesn't always work out the way you intended?

Re:Well,

[lord sibn]

Personally, I would have loved to have an app like this simply to be able to copy and paste emails that i get, and send them via SMS to myself, to forward to other people who (believe it or not, do exist and do not have an email account).

The other killer use for this app I can think right off the top of my head, is being able to sit down at a computer, and actually *type* the message I want to send or forward to somebody with an actual keyboard, which you may or may not be aware, would get the job done with a much higher level of comfort, and unparalleled speed.

It's not about unlimited texting, it's a matter of comfort and efficiency. just because a service is offered for free right now on an unlimited basis does not mean that it will always be free forever and ever, no matter how much it is used (or in this case, abused -- Google did not implement this feature to foot the bill for people trying to weasel their way out of saving a few bucks per month). I suspect we will see this service come back as a paid add-on, which will prevent this "abuse" that took advantage of Google's good will in this relatively new frontier of communication.

And when they do, I will *definitely* sign up, unless the cost is not justifiable (I pay for limited texts per month, 400, and don't quite break the 300 mark, so an unlimited texting plan does not make any kind of sense at this point). I have actually calculated the number of texts I would have to send per month to make it worth switching to an unlimited plan. It is comfortably over the 400 limit.

Re:Well,

[RichardJenkins]

Giving your time and resources for free isn't a broken business model - it flat out *isn't* a business model.

Much open source software gets started because it's a neat thing for a guy to work on, or solves a need for him. If he's not in a position (or the software isn't complete enough) to make any money selling it, then opening it it up and hoping you can get the benefit of other people improving it is just a smart option.

Then, once there are reasonably mature Open Source projects out there, others still can often get a competitive advantage using them theirselves - and thus perpetuating them further. It's a vicious cycle of goodness.

I'm not saying people don't build (good and bad) business models relying on open source software, just that it'll probably always exist, and become more prevalent 'cause of a typical developer mentality meeting economics.

Re:Well,

[Chris Pimlott]

Yes, most providers do have email to SMS gateways, but unfortunately there's no way to tell what provider a given phone number is on.

Re:Well,

[ucblockhead]

Well, that's exactly what happened. Google thought they had a business model to support the service. When they realized that people could take advantage of it, making the model unsupportable, they turned it off.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

What you have here is a cash cow for the telco, nothing more, nothing less. It's pure genius driven by greed.

Don't you mean pure genius driven by capitalism? Isn't the ability to make money any way you can dream up as long as it's legal and people are willing to pay... one of the founding values of our country?

Re:Well,

[LateArthurDent]

Yes, most providers do have email to SMS gateways, but unfortunately there's no way to tell what provider a given phone number is on.

So send an e-mail to each person you plan to send text messages to and get the reply later. Or talk to them online and ask. Or call them up from a landline and ask. Or ask them the next time you see them. If you want to be able to send a text to people you just got their phone number from, use Apple's default app: you can't get an iPhone plan that doesn't include hundreds of sms's per month anyway. It's really fascinating that people were paying money for that app, considering I just checked and there are multiple free apps on the store that do the same thing using the email gateway method, except that first they ask you to choose the provider.

Hell, I dont't know why you'd need an app if you know about this. Why not just add the e-mail addresses to your iphone's address list? This way you can just open up mail and select the person, almost exactly the same as using the iphone's default sms app.

Re:Well,

[BikeHelmet]

SMS dropped network usage by replacing many phonecalls. Offering it is saving them money. They charge for it and make more money.

To them, it certainly is 24 carrot gold.

Re:Well,

[st0rmshad0w]

But why not less for S or XS?

Re:Well,

[Lars T.]

While I completely agree that anyone who doesn't read the fine print is a fool, I have issue with your "everything is metered" assumption.

I used to live in an apartment where heat and electric were included in the rent.

I payed the same total rate as the guy next door even tho I was barely home and liked it on the cool side while he kept all sorts of lights and electrical gizmos on 24/7 and kept it at about 80 degrees.

Is that somehow wrong? We each made an agreement with the party providing the service.

Well, apart from you basically paying for what your neighbor does - you both pay $x a month to the landlord, he calculated x by dividing the max he ever paid in a month divided by number of apartments + some extra in case another guy like your neighbor moves in + a nice profit on top. And on top of that he has less cost because he not only doesn't need to read all those meters and put it on the bill, he doesn't even need the meters.

Re:Well,

[novakyu]

Your obsession with unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee contracts in America is quite frankly puzzling. It's like you have to make every part of your capitalistic society and make it into pseudo-communism.

I heartily agree!

That's why I use pay-for-only-what-you-use services like NearlyFreeSpeech.net, Usenet-News.net, and a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan.

I don't use any of these (webhosting resources, usenet bandwidth, or cell phone) heavily (I doubt any significant fraction ever does), and I'd have to get a lobotomy before I become stupid enough to pay for someone else's usage.

Re:Well,

[pmarini]

sounds like the "fair use" of the unlimited Internet plans...

Re:Well,

[novakyu]

How dare all those browser developers make money off the free http services available out there?

What "free" HTTP service? Most people pay for their net connections (which happen to work with HTTP protocol), and where they don't pay directly, they usually end up paying for it indirectly (like by buying coffee at a coffee shop, or paying tuition at school).

If you are talking about websites, not ISPs, well, show me a website that doesn't want more eyeballs (for ads, if it's commercial, for potential customers if they are selling something, for vanity or propaganda if it's a personal website or some kind of political website; most websites, however, do not want bandwidth usage without associated eyeball, which is why webmasters hated some Internet security software which pre-fetched every link in a page before the user ever clicked on it, and which is why hotlinking (such as images) is considered impolite).

When you browse web, usually somebody gets compensated in some way for every aspect of it. In this case, it doesn't sound like Google was compensated in any way (monetary or non-monetary), since as far as I know Google doesn't have a political agenda relating to free SMS.

Re:Well,

[st0rmshad0w]

I still fail to see anything unjust about it, we all had the option of signing the lease or walking away. I was getting a roughly equivalent deal on a living space as I would have elsewhere but with the added convenience of not having separate utility bills. And the fact remains I could have used as much electricity as I wanted to without altering my costs. Net result for me was a budget that never fluctuated. Fixed rent costs, utilities included. Fixed phone cost, unlimited calls. And even back then I had internet access without bandwidth caps.

Why can't the US get off its ass and upgrade its infrastructure?

Verizon has lately been having the gall to sell FiOS to customers like my parents who don't even live within an area serviced by FiOS. And it won't be there for years, if ever. But Verizon happily will make promises it can't deliver on and take people's money.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

buried in the fine print?

Kind of scummy, deceitful, and sleazy. Why couldn't they see "unlimited time" in the ad?

Re:Well,

[commodore64_love]

>>>I used to live in an apartment where heat and electric were included in the rent.

Yes good, but the electricity your landlord was paying was still metered. The company-to-customer relationship was still based on kilowatt-hours used, and the landlord's bill varied month-to-month as demand rose or fell.

>>>I had completely unlimited (local) service

Ditto, although it would actually be cheaper if I switched to per-call metered billing.

>>>Maybe if the US would get off its technologically backwards ass

The U.S. is no more "backwards" than the EU. Both average around 7 megabit/s speeds so that we Americans are on part with our European cousins. Here, check out the statistics for yourself.

Sweden (11 Mbit/s)
Delaware (10)
Washington (9)
Netherlands,RI,NJ,MA (8)
VA,NY,CO,CT,AZ,Germany (7)

Re:Well,

[BitZtream]

Considering that consumers already over pay for these services AND we get metered, your point fails completely in this case.

When your providers make enough money in the course of a single year to roll out an entire copy of their network, yet they don't do anything to upgrade, then we can expect unlimited service.

When your providers make enough money in a single month to pay for operational expensives for the entire year, again, we can expect unlimited service.

You are correct, some will pay more than they should, and some will pay less. The problem is that even the cheapest rate plans we can get STILL cost FAR more than the cost of providing a reasonable 'unlimited' service. Keep in mind, in America we've redefined 'unlimited' when it comes to service providers. Here unlimited means 'some amount that we deem to be acceptable but won't tell you what that is until you go over it, on and we're going to prioritize your traffic anyway we see fit to benefit us, without telling you, and if you figure it out, we're going to deny it anyway.'

If we were paying $18,000 USD for an ice cream cone, then we'd damn sure expect unlimited god damn ice cream for life. That seems ridiculous, but when you consider the actual COST of providing cellular service versus the fees it doesn't seem so far fetched. Couple into that the fact that my tax dollars were given to many of these companies YEARS ago because they said they would build out their networks so everyone would get access, then they did nothing but sit on the money AND raise their rates while not actually making any infrastructure upgrades ... well, we have a little to bitch about.

Re:Well,

[BitZtream]

Whooooooooooosh, way to miss the point there Beaver. Yes, OSS is software not service, you still need a business model that works which no one in OSS seems to get.

Re:Well,

[commodore64_love]

Because sizes S M L and XL are the standard "normal" sizes. Anything less than S or bigger than XL is typically moved to different departments (children sizes or plus sizes). So yes clothing is metered by size, from children to adult to fat adult, with corresponding price differences.

Re:Well,

[Achromatic1978]

The other killer use for this app I can think right off the top of my head, is being able to sit down at a computer, and actually *type* the message I want to send or forward to somebody with an actual keyboard, which you may or may not be aware, would get the job done with a much higher level of comfort, and unparalleled speed.

Bingo. Reason why I love my Nokia N series. This is a full-blown, Python-powered web server for my cellphone. I can log into it via web browser, I can set profiles. I can view contacts and the in phone gallery. I can send and receive text and multimedia messages, from my web browser, via my phone - it even ties into the contact list on the phone to make it easier. You can set up AN RSS FEED(!) of all log events (placed, missed, received calls, texts, etc!)

And it's free.

Check the screenshots here

I don't want to sound like a booster, but THIS = killer app.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that people here across the pond don't have a choice. They have one of three options:

A prepaid service which shuts off access once the balance is reached.
A service that has 100 or so "free" text messages, then charges by the message.
Unlimited texting, but one pays a steep fee for this.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Who fuckin' cares?!

Re:Well,

[aliquis]

They wasn't abusing, but it's interesting non the less why all small tools have to cost money on the mac platform.

If you use someone else service why the fuck do you need to earn money on your simple app? But all things which should had been free is shareware on mac it seems, and it suck. Thankfully there are things like serialbox and such out there helping us out ...

Re:Well,

[MightyYar]

Laughing their asses off as they have to memorize special country codes to know whether or not they will get charged extra to make a call.

Re:Well,

[Krneki]

And how would you deal with SPAM if SMS were free?

Re:Well,

[Simetrical]

Your obsession with unlimited-service-for-fixed-fee contracts in America is quite frankly puzzling. It's like you have to make every part of your capitalistic society and make it into pseudo-communism.

It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service. This holds for values of X such as bandwidth, pasta, text messaging, icecream, whatever.

Indeed, flat rates are a recipe for the tragedy of the commons. How much of a bandwidth problem would peer-to-peer protocols cause ISPs if home consumers paid by the bit? Not so much, I suspect.

But people don't like to have to fret about how much of a resource they're using. They'd prefer to pay more and not have to think about it than to pay less and continually think "Okay, now do I want to send one more message if that costs me five cents? I've already spent $X today . . ."

Re:Well,

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, because OSS developers are always whining, and shutting down their software, everytime someone makes money from their product.

Oh wait, they don't.

Do I need to go and dig out the most recent Theo de Raadt rant on how teh evil companies make money on his software without donating? Or will you Google it yourself?

Re:Well,

[youcantwin]

Let's remember that next time [insert OSS project] failed/was stopped because it didn't have a proper business model behind it.

That said, Google failed providing a decent authentication system to their free service. They should have used API keys and limit the number of calls each one can make if they can't support unlimited calls.
My guess is that's what they're going to do next...

Re:Well,

[RichardJenkins]

I'm implying (evidently not clearly enough) that likening the development of OS/Free software to a for-profit company offering a service is not a valid thing to do if you're implying that the lack of a sound business model will condemn the former to failure as it would the latter.

Your thoughts on OSS folks' shortcomings seem bizarre considering

  1. OSS is so diverse (it incorporates small snippets of code up to some incredibly ambitious, huge software products) that sweeping generalisations are difficult to swallow..
  2. OSS is everywhere. Java, Python, Perl, PHP, GCC, Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Postgres, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird. Sendmail, Postfix. Think about how much OSS code you've used directly and indirectly in the last month, then think about the implications of what you're saying again.

I would agree with you in a vaguely related situation: You need a business model that works to build a business around OSS. You certainly do not need a business model for OSS to support businesses, be developed in the first place, or maintained by interested people.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they don't want to start taxing our O2 use.

"Hmm... seems you have 10% greater lung capacity than average - you're going to have to pay extra for that."

Re:Well,

[Ashriel]

It doesn't cost the company anything for SMS messages. Literally, nothing. Everything they charge for it is pure profit.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Pretty much. Auto insurance has a great racket going for it - the state mandates that you have to have it, but it's not like they supply it. You're forced to pay a private company for something you hope you'll never need, and should you ever require it, it will just get more expensive so they can recollect their money.

On the flip side, there's people like me. In the days when I bothered to own a car, I'd experience a major collision every 8 months like clockwork. I got out of the whole business while I was still ahead - the insurance company was charging me $500/mo., but I had still managed to pay them less than they paid me.

Re:Well,

[mdwh2]

If he's releasing software under a licence that allows commercial usage, and then complains about people doing that, he's a fool. Now what has that got to do with the claim that OSS doesn't have a proper business model behind it?

One person isn't representative of the entirety of open source.

Re:Well,

[Kalriath]

True, but I imagine they expected you'd build "value added" products that utilise it. I don't think they expected someone to just outright write an SMS messaging client. That was just rude.

Re:Well,

[Kalriath]

I'm curious, what does your provider charge for your unlimited incoming calls and messages? I know historically, US providers have tended to charge quite a hefty amount for the priviledge, and I'm curious if that's still the case (for reference, I pay $45NZD for only about 150 minutes of calling, and $0.20NZD for text messages but we don't get charged for incoming anything).

Re:Well,

[Kalriath]

You know, I just noticed this yesterday myself. It's quite perplexing.

Re:Well,

[Joebert]

If your T-Rex had been a Velociraptor instead it would have played better to this audience. Never underestimate the power of xkcd.

What do you think happened to the t-rex ?

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

I use U.S. Cellular here in Klamath, California. 700 minutes per month are US$39.99 with unlimited incoming calls, texts, and picture messages for free. That's the same deal you get in all of their coverage area which is why I always find it curious when people talk about how U.S. cellular subscribers don't get incoming calls, etc. for free as that's obviously not the case.

Re:Well,

[Atario]

Politefulness was superceditized by politefulnessity.

Re:Well,

[aliquis]

Want iTunes keyboard shortcuts or buttons available at all times? Better pay.

Want an alarm clock? Better pay.

Want to use airtunes for any sound? Better pay.

Small hacks and what on Windows would be something like "my first VB-project" and they are asking for tens of dollars for them.

Of course there is their total right to do so but it's kinda sad then it's not an hobbyist platform for fun but something there even the user focus on the pro users and companies which would be able to pay for crap like that.

It removes plenty of the fun from trying new things out and fiddling with your tools (no, not that tool) just because you can =p

Oh, Aminet =P

Re:Well,

[Aranykai]

Anyone who can afford an iPhone and 3g data plan should have no problem adding unlimited text to their plan. IIRC its only $10 dollars monthly.

Re:Well,

[Lost Engineer]

$20/month for txting? LOL mactards.

Re:Well,

[Lost Engineer]

Actually on one of those free SMS sites I did see a tool to look up which carrier to use. Not sure how accurate it would be these days when you can take your number with you between carriers.

Re:Well,

[speedtux]

The business model is quite proper. It was "let's make this available and see what people do with it". That's why the service is in Google Labs. The usage data itself is the value Google was getting out of it.

Re:Well,

[Lost Engineer]

GP is an ass but... There's no special plan that I know of for "incoming" calls. The concept doesn't exist as far as I know. There are lots of cool plans like 5 best friends free (in both directions). Most carriers allow calling within their network free. Nights and weekends are mostly free. I think what GP was getting at are the unlimited plans, which are expensive... about $100 USD a month. At that level you can pretty much do wtf you want with your phone without incurring extra charges which I suppose qualifies as free incoming. Still, if you talk less than say 3500 non-night non-weekend (so-called "anytime") minutes a limited plan is going to be cheaper for you. While the per message rates for SMS are stupidly high, the only time anyone pays those is when parents discover for the first time how much their kids can text in a month. Unlimited SMS will tack on $5 a month to your bill.

So yeah there are horror stories and we do like to complain about our bills, but it's nothing compared to paying Ma Bell.

Re:Well,

[atraintocry]

That was a beautiful blanket statement, Mr. Malthus, but I'm left wondering who it is exactly that you are speaking about.

Have you really not seen people here complaining about not being able to buy a particular mobile phone without it affecting their carrier & contract?

Re:Well,

[foniksonik]

I've never been charged for an SMS on my iPhone plan.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the problem with SMS messages. they are overpriced drastically so people are looking for ways to subvert them.

Overpriced drastically?
SMS cost is $0 (dslreports.com)
Another informed slashdotter (gthing.net)

There's another article from a more reputable source (nytimes or something) that I don't have the time to dig up... but it says more of the same thing.

I ask you this:
Considering a single SMS is limited to 128 bytes and has been discussed as trivial to send, even by the cellular companies, why do I still have to pay $15 for the privilege of unlimited SMS? How is it that these companies can charge $0.10 to $0.20 per message for something that costs them nothing?

Closest analogy that comes to mind is the MAFIAA. The cost of production en masse is trivial compared to the price being charged for the production. Only difference is the MAFIAA invested millions/billions into the production and therefore need to recoup cost, while most texts are little more than brain garbage.

Re:Well,

[tritohc]

I've never been to the iPhone store to see if this exists, but it seems simple enough to just spam all possible gateways until you find the right one (which you might not know until you got your response.)

Re:Well,

[stdarg]

The internet is already metered, but the units are mbps rather than just mb. Grandma can pay $10/month for dialup and you can pay $50/month for cable.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. is no more "backwards" than the EU. Both average around 7 megabit/s speeds so that we Americans are on part with our European cousins. Here, check out the statistics for yourself.

Sweden (11 Mbit/s)
Delaware (10)
Washington (9)
Netherlands,RI,NJ,MA (8)
VA,NY,CO,CT,AZ,Germany (7)

[citation needed]

Seriously, I see you posting this shit all the time and it's blatantly false. Even if those averages were correct, it still doesn't speak to the infrastructural capacity. In the EU it is possible to get speeds up to and above 100Mbps for less than we pay for 5Mbps here in the US. With the exception of a few grant-funded ISPs serving small local areas, it is not possible to get 100Mbps in the US for an affordable price.

In any case, I do have a source for my assertion that your claim of averages is complete bullshit. Feel free to counter with your own source.

http://www.speedmatters.org/document-library/sourcematerials/cwa_report_on_internet_speeds_2008.pdf

Re:Well,

[WiiVault]

They do not charge for incoming. Didn't when they were Cingular or the old At&t. That is simply not true.

Re:Well,

[jo42]

that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?

No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.

You mean like Twitter, or Twatter, or whatever it's called.

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful eh? Jeez. Has no one read the unlimited postings here about cell phone service providers and how their unlimited texting plans in fact rip EVERYONE off, even if they were a tenth of the price they are now? Hence while it might be true of some things, the statement is not true of SMS texts, which everyone pays 'extra' for despite the bandiwdth used by a text being almost free.

Re:Well,

[poopdeville]

Disagree.

http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html

Re:Well,

[WiiVault]

How is this a troll? Go to their website. F-ing mods.

Re:Well,

[Kalriath]

You linked to a page of other chat applications. Your point?

Re:Well,

[poopdeville]

My point is that GTalk is just a Jabber client, and that Google has given third parties permission to use their servers. Moreover, there is a Blackberry client on that page.

You're not doing SMS if you're using Jabber. SMS is a different protocol. So what is your point?

Re:Well,

[poopdeville]

From http://www.google.com/talk/about.html

Other ways to connect through Google Talk

Google Talk uses open standards for instant messaging and voice calling. That means anyone can build applications for the Google Talk network.

(Emphasis mine)

Re:Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

For example (obligatory car mention), sending someone 30,000 text messages likely will make most people's monthly phone bills cost more than the MSRP of a decent vehicle.

Also it'll hose the person's phone. I read about someone that got an unlimited plan (or had free incoming maybe), sent themselves like 10000 texts... The phone will hold 50-256 usually, they had to keep clearing the SMS inbox over and over and basically couldn't use the phone getting that many texts.

kenneth

[timmarhy]

great story - free service has limits. who would have thunk it?

Re:kenneth

[somenickname]

That's not what TFA says (or the part that I read at least). It says, "Our experimental feature that we didn't widely publicize because we wanted to test it with limited numbers of users suddenly got slammed with traffic and we didn't feel like supporting it". That's a bit different than what you are implying.

Re:kenneth

[krunk4ever]

You just mashed together a bunch of unrelated statements and even made up some of your own.

rupesh (article author) stated, "Google's hardly publicized method for sending free text messages has been revoked ..."

Google stated, "SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs."

Nowhere did anyone state they wanted to "test it with limited numbers of users"

Do note that "hardly publicized method" still means a public API, which I would guess is intended for others to use.

What happened here is just that Google wasn't expecting such a huge surge in usage and had no other choice to disable for 3rd party clients for now. If they can figure out a way they can support it, they would most likely re-enable this service for 3rd parties.

Re:kenneth

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you simply failed to make a meaningful conclusion, while Somenickname did. SMS chat is in experimental stages, therefore SMS chat cannot support an application that significantly increases users, therefore SMS chat was being tested with a limited number of users.

Re:kenneth

[totally bogus dude]

Right, so it's "in the early testing stages" (i.e. in testing) and not widely publicized in order to keep the number of users down (limited number of users), and when suddenly a lot of people started using it they weren't able to support it so shut off access.

I can sort of see where you're coming from but it seems a very fine distinction to be making with little or no reason to make it. Is there some kind of pedantry festival going on that I wasn't informed about?

Re:kenneth

[krunk4ever]

I believe you read my post, but didn't understand I was trying to say.

The "hardly publicized" part is from the author of the article, not from Google. What does it even mean to be a hardly publicized method/API? If it's documented and on the web, it's publicized. Does Google have to spam it on their homepage to make it not "hardly publicized"?

If you remove the "hardly publicized" portion (since Google never stated that), calling it an experiment/early testing stage does NOT imply it wants to keep the number of users down. In fact, you'd might even want more testers to help you find issues with your service.

Also do note that Google could've easily controlled which users could use their SMS service. Using Google SMS required a Google account and just like any other Google service (i.e. GrandCentral, early days of GMail, etc.), access can be granted on a per user basis.

Re:kenneth

[kylef]

Google does stuff for free when it suits them. If it might get in the way of advertisers or business partners (as is certainly the case here), they back down. Despite the legion of Slashdot fans who don't want to believe otherwise, Google is a business and frequently makes business decisions. Which is fine, as long as people see it for what it is.

What happened here is just that Google wasn't expecting such a huge surge in usage and had no other choice to disable for 3rd party clients for now.

It's a bit ironic that you start your post by blasting someone for reading between the lines, and then you proceed to do the same thing yourself. Unless you work at Google, you have no way to know why this decision was made.

But it's funny that you make it sound like Google is a helpless victim. How much traffic exactly pushed their feeble servers over the capacity limit only 11 days after this software became "popular"? How many iPhone users broke the camel's back?

The reality here is that Google made a policy decision, not a capacity decision. Especially since Google is one of the best in the business at scaling. This message should silence any doubt: "SMS_ERROR_10: Sorry we don't support free SMS messaging through this client. Visit http://gmail.com/sms for more info."

Re:kenneth

[krunk4ever]

What happened here is just that Google wasn't expecting such a huge surge in usage and had no other choice to disable for 3rd party clients for now.

It's a bit ironic that you start your post by blasting someone for reading between the lines, and then you proceed to do the same thing yourself. Unless you work at Google, you have no way to know why this decision was made.

That's because Google did in fact state:

While Google is supportive of third party apps, we've decided we can't support this particular usage of our system at this time.

I'm of course taking Google's words at face value here. Like you said, the only people who know what the real reason is are those working at Google and making their decisions.

Re:kenneth

[jvkjvk]

I don't believe you understand how to put 2 + 2 together.

If a business actually wants a large number of beta testers, perhaps they would advertise in some fashion?

It is well within the bounds of logical deduction to conclude Google did not want large numbers of beta testers based on their behaviour.

What does it even mean to be a hardly publicized method/API? If it's documented and on the web, it's publicized. Does Google have to spam it on their homepage to make it not "hardly publicized"?

Well, perhaps you're being thick on purpose. I would expect that if google had wanted to publicize this we might have seen a something like what they did with gmail, buzz generating, invites, etc. So "hardly publicized" fits quite properly.

If you remove the "hardly publicized" portion (since Google never stated that), calling it an experiment/early testing stage does NOT imply it wants to keep the number of users down.

Lastly, factual information is there for synthesis, not for blindly repeating the information. Please try to do so instead of trying to pick apart someone who has done so correctly (IMO).

What implies that they wanted to keep the numbers down is the fact of the lack of massive blitz campaign shouting the service from the rooftops (you know, that "hardly publicized" quote actually does mean something). *That* is the way to get a LARGE number of beta testers.

Regards.

Re:kenneth

[somenickname]

rupesh (article author) stated, "Google's hardly publicized method for sending free text messages has been revoked ..."

Google stated, "SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs."

Nowhere did anyone state they wanted to "test it with limited numbers of users"

Not explicitly, no. I just implied it from the exact things you highlighted in bold. When I see "hardly publicized", "experiment" and "early testing stages" to describe something, I don't think it's unreasonable to infer, "test it with limited numbers of users". Regardless, I wasn't aiming for an exact summary of the TFA but a rough rebuttal as to why the GP was nonsense.

Re:kenneth

[krunk4ever]

What if one of the 2 is not true? Hardly publicized?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22google+sms%22&btnG=Search
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22google+sms%22&btnG=Search+Archives&ned=us&hl=en

Re:kenneth

[Runaway1956]

Obviously, very few Americans, and precious few /. members. ;)

Re:kenneth

[Runaway1956]

As anonymous already stated, you ARE incapable of reaching a meaningful conclusion. It costs someone to maintain Google's servers, pay the bandwidth, etc etc etc. Offering a service which is demonstrably open to abuse will have to be paid for, by someone. Since most customers don't believe that it is their responsibility to pay for the service, we'll just have to wait and see if AT&T and Sprint and the rest of the telcos are going to cut some kind of deal with Google on your behalf. I rather doubt it. Stop sniveling, and pay for the messaging service provided by your own telco, or stop messaging.

TANSTASFL

[MichaelSmith]

...except that inner fence have presumably sold a lot of now useless copies of their tool. So they are ahead a few bucks.

Re:TANSTASFL

[Inf0phreak]

There Ain't No Such Thing As SMS From... what? Latvia?

Re:TANSTASFL

[MichaelSmith]

There Ain't No Such Thing As SMS From... what? Latvia?

..A Free Lunch.

Re:TANSTASFL

[iamflimflam1]

So they were in the top 10 paid apps for 11 days. According to here if you are in the top 15 paid apps you'll be selling at least 2836 units a day. According to my maths, after Apple has taken their cut they'll have made about $20K Not bad...

Re:TANSTASFL

[The Outlander]

Exactly, What do the people do who have paid for the app just to find all it does is look pretty. I would be looking for a refund straight away but im sure that eventuality is covered in the ULA

Re:TANSTASFL

[iamflimflam1]

Makes my sales statistics look a bit rubbish.

Re:TANSTASFL

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the subject line again.

Re:TANSTASFL

[MichaelSmith]

Maybe I should have checked the book first.

Re:TANSTASFL

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be thinking of TANSTAAFL?

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

TANSTAAFL vs TANSTASFL - and for good measure TANSTAFL.

Re:TANSTASFL

[LordKronos]

after Apple has taken their cut they'll have made about $20K

Assuming they aren't forced to give refunds for making an app that only worked for a few days. If people complain, I'm sure apple won't look favorably on that.

Re:TANSTASFL

[NonUniqueNickname]

Apple always keeps their 30%. The developer puts up 100% of the money for a refund. Simplified math for a refund: Developer pays 30% of the app's price to Apple.
Users have 30 days to ask for a refund from the app store. And you'd think many will ask for a refund when the service goes offline or shortly after. Why not? the app is useless to them.
If everyone who can ask for a refund does, the developers doesn't profit, doesn't break even, the developer loses big.

Re:TANSTASFL

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple always keeps their 30%. The developer puts up 100% of the money for a refund. Simplified math for a refund: Developer pays 30% of the app's price to Apple.

Users have 30 days to ask for a refund from the app store. And you'd think many will ask for a refund when the service goes offline or shortly after. Why not? the app is useless to them.

If everyone who can ask for a refund does, the developers doesn't profit, doesn't break even, the developer loses big.

Yeah...Apple doesn't offer refunds once the money has changed hands to the developer. They can reverse the sale before this happens, and then it's not an issue for the developer.

Check it out.

Re:TANSTASFL

[AlexBirch]

Yeah, but there such a thing as:
TASTAFFL
There are such things as a free frontal lobotomy.
Just go around back and ask for Moe.

Re:TANSTASFL

[TheSpoom]

If they made a disclaimer that the app working was subject to the Google gateway working highly visible prior to each sale, I don't think they should owe a dime.

Re:TANSTASFL

[iamflimflam1]

And to be fair. The people who paid 99cents for the app got an awful lot of free SMS messages...

Re:TANSTASFL

[JadeNB]

Methinks the grandparent's point was that “TANSTASFL” would have to expand to “There ain't no such thing as a s.* free lunch”, and it wasn't obvious what the ‘missing’ word should be. (I politely refrain from guessing myself.)

Re:Didn't The Register have this...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great I'll be able to finish all the stuff I was supposed to do last week.

Alll's Well that ended well.

[Ostracus]

You had it. Now you don't. Does the definition of abuse really matter since it will not change people's behavior to the point there isn't a repeat.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[danwesnor]

I'd say that since it was the central theme of the comment, it does matter how it was abuse.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

Telecommunications cost someone, somewhere, somehow. We all know this, and it is made obvious by the fact that the telecom companies make their living off of our communications. It is abuse to take advantage of some free service, thereby circumventing the telecom's charges. Google's "free" offerings are meant to entice users and customers to sign up for other Google services. Google Heinlein, and "taanstafl". Pretending ignorance doesn't impress anyone. If you are going to steal Google's (or anyone else's) services, at least admit that you are thieving. We might respect an honest thief.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[commodore64_love]

But... but... but... I want it my free stuff!!!

Wah.

/end juvenile mode - I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, a period often criticized as the "me generation", because we wanted it all. But I think we recognized we're not entitled to other people's stuff; if we want a new toy, we have to EARN it through hard work. ----- Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money. Or google's SMS, even though it costs google thousands of dollars to support that overload. More than being the "entitlement generation" they should be called the "inconsiderate generation". It is inconsiderate to cause financial harm to other people (and then whine about it when the neighbor or google cuts access).

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[nicklott]

The BBC calls them narcissists: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7943906.stm

Yes, a generation of self centred jerks who've never been told they're wrong; I look forward to the bright new future...

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[danwesnor]

It is abuse to take advantage of some free service, thereby circumventing the telecom's charges.

So by using a free web browser instead of paying for a paid web browser, am I abusing the free web browser, the paid web browser, or both, or the internet at large?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[umdstu]

Not that I disagree with your overall point, but how does using your neighbors wireless cost them extra money? They pay a monthly fee for these broadband services, not per KB...

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Ihmhi]

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money.

What could you possibly mean by that?

Are we talking the initial USD$70 cost for the wireless router? Is there some sort of "I have a wireless Internet connection and therefore pay a larger Internet bill" fee that I don't know about?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[tjwhaynes]

Are we talking the initial USD$70 cost for the wireless router? Is there some sort of "I have a wireless Internet connection and therefore pay a larger Internet bill" fee that I don't know about?

Depends on the terms-of-service. For people who pay for every Gb over a specific value or who get reduced throughput after they max out their allocation, having someone freeloading on their wireless is indeed costing them either money or quality of service.

Now you can argue that they should damn well learn to secure their wireless adapter. But I dare say you'd be upset if your neighbour jumped your fence and plugged an extension cable into your outdoor outlet. Why didn't you padlock it up?!

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

None of the above. By using the "free" web browser, you are viewing advertisements, you are supplying user data to data miners, etc. Those free browsers all have an established business model, whereby they recoup the money invested in them, and hopefully make a profit. Read the license or EULA supplied with your browser. Read the TOS of your ISP provider. Money is changing hands, and your use of a free browser facilitates some of that money moving around. UNLESS, of course, you are one of the few who have researched that cash flow thoroughly, and have turned off said cash flow. NOTE 1: you said "free", but did not specify "open source". May I assume that you are using Internet Explorer, or Opera? NOTE 2: I am the "honest thief". I don't view advertisements, and I am not tracked, and data miners glean precious little from my browser due to addons, hacks, and anonymity applications. :)

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[ParanoiaBOTS]

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money. Or google's SMS, even though it costs google thousands of dollars to support that overload.

While I don't disagree with your overall point there are some things I would like to point out. Hopping onto an unsecured network is basically taking advantage of a free resource. This is basically like saying that while your playing your boombox, no one else should be able to listen. But you are too lazy to plug in your headphones. If the person the network belongs to won't take the 3 minutes to turn on wireless security then they shouldn't have the right to bitch when someone hops onto their network. They also shouldn't be surprised when they eventually become a victim of identity theft. Same thing with Google. They opened up an API to allow people to send text messages for free. They didn't limit it, so why would people assume that it was supposed to be limited? It would be a VERY different case if someone had hacked the google API to allow unlimited texting. This is google's fault, not the person who wrote the app.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[repvik]

Free and "ad-supported" are two different things. My wild guess is that GP was actually talking about free as in beer browsers. Where does the money change hands with eg. Firefox?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[FreeFull]

Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine. Since Mozilla is a non-profit organisation, nobody at Mozilla actually gets any of it.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

But I think we recognized we're not entitled to other people's stuff; if we want a new toy, we have to EARN it through hard work.

You're right. I guess that's why your generation didn't invent the credit card which didn't allow most people to take on heavy devt because they didn't want things they couldn't afford but felt entitled to.....oh wait. Give me a break. There is no difference between people growing up in the 80's and 90's versus growing up in 2000. Nobody has learned anything. If they did part of America's recent economic crisis would have been avoided (purchasing homes you definitely can't afford to live in),

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[RCL]

They get less than they paid for, so they are effectively losing money.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[mdwh2]

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, a period often criticized as the "me generation", because we wanted it all. But I think we recognized we're not entitled to other people's stuff; if we want a new toy, we have to EARN it through hard work. ----- Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money.

Aren't you just making the same criticisms that were made of your (and my) generation? Why not let them grow up to see if it turns out to be true.

Moreover, I'd like to see evidence. Children and teenagers are using their neighbour's wireless? Why would they be more likely to do this than anyone else, and where's the evidence?

As for this article, are children and teenagers going to be the most common users of the Iphone? I bet there's a whole load of 20-somethings, far more so in fact, suggesting that it is our generation that's the "me" generation, after all.

And your statement doesn't make sense. How is using a service that's intended to be used for free anything to do with being self-centred, or using "other people's stuff"? And how do you think they got expensive Iphones in the first place without paying for one?

If this cost Google too much money, that's their own fault for offering it.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

In America, I don't know anyone with metered bandwidth. If the average joe only uses his internet after work, why shouldn't you use it during the day? Even if he is using it, a few KB of his 20mbit won't be noticed. Also, if you aren't using your entire bandwidth constantly, why not share, aren't you then getting a better value for your money, by having more of what you pay for used, since it isn't metered?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[mdwh2]

Opera is ad-free, and has been for years. I don't see any ads in IE, either. Secondly, "free" can mean "free as in freedom" without needing to specify open source (in fact, Free Software and Open Source have subtely different meanings, IIRC). Thirdly, even if he meant free as in beer, Firefox is still available for free as in beer too.

Your statement doesn't make sense anyway: yes, companies offering free stuff have other ways of making money - just like Google! So why is using their free SMS service any different to using anything else offered for free? Especially since you yourself admit to avoiding all the ways that they could make money?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

you sound like a cynical old person with no real gripe. feel like you're losing your youth? go to a spa or something. make sure you're nice and tip the young people serving you too; don't be mean because you think they're all theives.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money. Or google's SMS, even though it costs google thousands of dollars to support that overload.

Way off on your comparison. Utilizing a neighbors internet doesn't cost them anything extra. The worst someone might do would be to abuse the privilege and take all the person's bandwidth, but it wouldn't cost them extra (unless you have one of those new fandangled caps).

It DOES cost Google money per text, but then, they're offering the service completely free and willingly (much more so than the neighbor unless you think an open wireless is an open invitation). If they didn't want to pay for it, they wouldn't offer it, or they would limit it's use.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[horza]

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money.

It does?

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, a period where people were fed up of getting ripped off by telecoms companies. The cost of switching had dropped to fractions of the cost, yet the cost of calls kept getting higher. We were fleeced making international calls whilst the telecoms companies raked in billions. We paid through the nose for Internet access over slow modems. The monopoly deliberately held back cheap broadband in the form of ADSL as they didn't want to cannibalise their rip-off ISDN service. SMS was added as an after-thought to GSM and used to be free for everybody via numerous gateways. I used to have it so people could message my mobile via my web site. Then once the big mobile operators saw a cash cow they blocked the free operators by creating a cartel and charging an inter-operator penalty. The digital revolution is starting to open a few holes in the old monopolies and good thing too. The resentment, much like with the record industry and their restrictive practices, are coming back to bite them.

It's the "you don't have an entitlement" generation, and it's going out to the telecoms companies, the RIAA, Microsoft, large drugs companies, foreign oil powers, and anybody else that things they have a license to print money whilst sitting on their asses and doing very little.

Phillip.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[BPPG]

Well, it is ironic, because if it didn't go on the Internet and was strictly cellular, SMS message actually cost nothing, they're carried on the control channel (the one cell phone just listens on). The average SMS message is about the tenth of a kilobyte, so the machine that google was providing this service on must have been seriously DDOS'd by all these people.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

But I think we recognized we're not entitled to other people's stuff; if we want a new toy, we have to EARN it through hard work.

Then why did you people elect a socialist?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[LongestPrefix]

Google's service was offered free to their users, and it can be revoked at any time, just like all the other free Google services. Google users used the free service. The Infinite SMS application made it easy for them to do so.

It costs Slashdot money to run these servers. Are you a thief to access their web pages?

It costs Google money to host Gmail, or perform your searches. Is Firefox enabling theft because it makes Google searches easy?

Of course not. The argument seems to be that popularity, i.e., heavy use in the way it was intended to use, means that the service was being abused, is specious.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

"free as in freedom"??? WTF? There is nothing subtle about the difference between free and opensource. Opensource is as good as my own property, for the taking, because I can do ANYTHING with it. Free software is something that I am permitted to use AS LONG AS I use it in a way approved of by the authors/owners. Subtle? Hardly. Now, your second paragraph. I remind you - I am the honest thief. I know that I am ripping off every advertiser on the internet. I am quite willing to rip off any and all corporations who subsidize the internet. It is dishonest to use all the "free" stuff I can find, and at the same time prevent the owners from making any profit from it. taanstafl. Do you understand the concept? Less than half of /. seems to comprehend. "OOOHHH! Google USED TO allow us to use their resources, now they don't! OH! EVIL GOOGLE!" Pure bullshit. Admit that you're a thief, and steal stuff, and you're cool with me. Stop whining and trying to rationalize your greed - that is NOT cool.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money.
Er, false. It doesn't cost them anything extra. What the fuck are you talking about?
Anyway, if you don't want people using your wifi, put a password on it. There's always a default dialog to let you do this, it's not very hard. If you don't have a password, it's assumed you don't care. (alot of people don't)

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

Bottom line question: who owns the resources used for these SMS exchanges? If Google owns them, and Google decides not to allow third party applications to use them, how has Google done anything wrong? It really doesn't MATTER what you or I think of it. If the resources have little or no value, then you have lost nothing. If the resources have enough value for people to whine over when they are gone, then they should be willing to pay for them. But, that is all really beside the point. I can send an SMS via my gmail account, if I want to. (no, I don't use SMS - it's pointless, since I can function for weeks at a time without "checking in" with dozens of freinds and family)

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money.

But it doesn't cost their neighbor extra money. I think people would understand that water, power, long distance and other things that are billed on per-usage models would, in fact, be a bad thing, as they do cost the neighbor money directly. Internet service, however, has moved to a single-payment structure (at least in most of the US), where the neighbor is paying their $60, no matter how much of that network connection they actually use at any given time.

Now, if you're arguing that the ISP will then start to raise rates since they don't have that hanger-on paying for service as well, then you're not running into costing the neighbor extra money directly, you're running into a business with a bad, non-sustainable business plan. And that's a completely different set of arguments.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

how exactly does using your neighbour's wireless connection cost them extra money?

Actually, at no point in your ranting did I hear anything resembling a coherent thought. You just seem to think your shit smells better than the younger generation's, and you aren't ashamed to spread the word.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

Speciousness is a common commodity these days. Why is it hard to comprehend that a "free service" - ESPECIALLY one that is in beta testing - can be arbitrarily shut down at any time, with or without notice, reason, justification, or whatever? One of the most common complaints about Google, is that nothing ever leaves beta testing, LMAO Check out this image, carefully: http://www.google.com/mail/help/images/logo1.gif

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[BrokenHalo]

I guess the moderator who decided the parent post was flamebait hadn't saddled up his brains before charging off with his mod points.

The issue of wardriving is a grey area, in the sense that if you leave your front door open, intruders might not be considered to be committing a crime if they walk through it. I'm not going to bother arguing the semantics of this, but the Google thing seems fairly straightforward: they were running a testing version of a service that they hadn't allocated the resources to run as a full-scale project. One might see this as a blessing, in so far as this is one less way for a spammer to flood SMS inboxes.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[SanityInAnarchy]

It is abuse to take advantage of some free service,

Is it, now? Well, you better stop posting on Slashdot, then...

thereby circumventing the telecom's charges.

I don't really see how.

Put another way: If my ISP offers both Internet and TV, but I choose to only purchase Internet, and watch the Daily Show free online, is that "abuse", because I'm not consuming exactly the service they want with exactly the fees I want?

It seems to me it's simply a more efficient use of a service I am paying for. After all, that app presumably does use the telecom's own Internet service, meaning you are paying for that -- if that's abuse, the telecom clearly isn't charging enough for bandwidth. I would suggest that, instead, they are clearly charging too much for text messages.

If it's not using the telecom's own Internet service, but rather some local wifi, I see even less "stealing" going on, given that you're taking place in a communication completely outside of what the telecom is providing. Should it be considered "stealing" that I prefer instant messaging to text messaging, and actually don't send text messages?

If you are going to steal Google's (or anyone else's) services, at least admit that you are thieving.

You first. Or have you just purchased something you saw in a Slashdot ad?

Clearly, Slashdot makes enough money from all of us visiting this website to keep it running. That, or someone is being very, very generous -- but if it really is losing money, that's not "stealing", that's their own failed business model, and they could shut it down.

Similarly, this service Google has provided was shut down, because they didn't anticipate that much traffic, and couldn't figure out how to monetize that. That is Google's failing in creating a service which could handle it, not our failing in using it.

That's a bit like suggesting that it's "stealing" for me to actually use the bandwidth I paid for, because I am slowing everyone else down. Well, no, I paid for my bandwidth -- if the ISP oversold it, and I'm now lagging someone else, that's really the ISP's fault, not mine. I'm just using what I paid for.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

Obviously, you haven't read the REST of my posts in this discussion. I have ALREADY admitted to being a thief. If your ISP offers both internet and television, and you purchase only one, then continue to make use of both, YES YOU ARE CONSCIOUSLY ATTEMPTING TO ABUSE THE SYSTEM. Did you read the TOS? Did you discuss your plan with the ISP? Were you completely open and honest with the ISP about your intentions? Did a salesman actually approve of your plans? Or, did you just sort of sneak around and put this thing together to your own satisfaction, hoping that no one would catch on and block you? I'm pretty sure we all know the answers to every question. But, go ahead. Surprise me if I'm wrong. Hell, just name the ISP company officer's name who approved of your idea. We can invite him here to advocate just such a plan. ;)

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Planesdragon]

Since Mozilla is a non-profit organisation, nobody at Mozilla actually gets any of it.

Not entirely true.

Mozilla itself cannot make a profit for its "owners", but it can have revenue to pay for expenses -- like the salaries of programmers.

Not-for-profit means "no money" for owners (or as a colloqialism), not "you work for free."

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[SanityInAnarchy]

If your ISP offers both internet and television, and you purchase only one, then continue to make use of both,

Ah, but I'm not. I'm watching the Daily Show on a website -- this may or may not have anything to do with actual television. For that matter, if I were to watch Ask a Ninja, which isn't on any television network that I know of, is it still "stealing"?

YOU ARE CONSCIOUSLY ATTEMPTING TO ABUSE THE SYSTEM.

What you call "abuse", I call "use".

Did you read the TOS?

Yes. And while it was a bit unreasonable about bandwidth expectations, there were no restrictions on actual content beyond "keep it legal".

Did you discuss your plan with the ISP?

I don't know -- do I discuss every time I plan to use Slashdot with my ISP?

Wouldn't it kind of defeat the fucking point of the Internet if I had to discuss every website I visited with my ISP?

Were you completely open and honest with the ISP about your intentions?

My ISP never asked. And that is the honest truth -- they never once asked what I intended to use my Internet service for. Being reasonably savvy themselves, they had to assume that "Internet" includes audiovisual media.

Frankly, I don't see why that's any of their business, any more than the phone company has any business asking who I intend to call. In fact, I'm allowed to telephone their competitors! Fancy that!

Or, did you just sort of sneak around and put this thing together to your own satisfaction, hoping that no one would catch on and block you?

No, I did it pretty openly, and legally, hoping that the ISP would realize that this is precisely what the Internet is for, and why it is valuable -- to promote the free exchange of information. I was also pretty much hoping the ISP would be in favor of net neutrality, and not openly "block" anyone, as that would be blatant censorship.

Now, I am a bit lucky in that respect -- my own ISP, while they do sell a television service, they realize that they are for the moment primarily an Internet Service Provider. They also realize that if I use too much bandwidth, they can purchase more to cover it, and charge me more if they have to -- for the moment, they openly support network neutrality.

But that is how it's supposed to work.

Tell me, in your imaginary non-thieving world, should I have discussed this post with my ISP, and with the local post office, just to make sure I wasn't "stealing" by not sending it via snail mail? And just how is anyone supposed to get anything done on the Internet, if the ISP is meant to micromanage it so much?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, a period often criticized as the "me generation", because we wanted it all.

You mean 'Generation Me' not the 'Me Generation' which were what baby boomers were called in the 1970s

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

One more time: "Obviously, you haven't read the REST of my posts in this discussion. I have ALREADY admitted to being a thief." Where is this "imaginary non theiving world" to which you refer?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[WCguru42]

More than being the "entitlement generation" they should be called the "inconsiderate generation". It is inconsiderate to cause financial harm to other people (and then whine about it when the neighbor or google cuts access).

Yeah, it's really bad to cause people devastating financial harm and bitch about how it's not your fault and you still deserve your multimillion dollar salary, that one that you're getting paid for not fucking up your company. Last I checked that wasn't my generation, the generation of "inconsiderate people" as you so eloquently put it, that destroyed this economy (no matter how much the RIAA wants you to think it could be). It wasn't my generation looking to make money by doing no productive work, just simply by trading and gaming the system to generate wealth from nothing. I get really tired of hearing about how inconsiderate my generation is when the worst we've done is steal/infringe on the copyright of some person. I'm not saying we're perfect but hell, we're young and stupid, not like those old, wise congress people that "forget" to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, or don't understand that it's wrong to take advantage of subordinates. We grew up in a time where nearly everyone in a position of respect deserved none of it, whether they be presidents, senators, judges, or business leaders (notice the lack of athletes or celebrities, seriously congress, take a mirror to yourself instead of wasting my tax dollars on attacking athletes that did nothing nearly as corrupt as you), so you can't be too surprised that we have very little respect for much at all. The true test will be how we handle ourselves in the next few decades, when we'll actually have real influence.

Sorry for the rant, it's been a long 23 years.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah that sounds about right, the bbc is telling us to watch out for narcissists.

i'm more worried about thieving corporations setting up fraudulent phone competitions e.g. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12096744

what part of the bright new future involves a public service body that steals money from gullible consumers?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Opensource is as good as my own property, for the taking, because I can do ANYTHING with it.

Clearly, you are quite ignorant of Open Source, as defined by the OSI.

Free software is something that I am permitted to use AS LONG AS I use it in a way approved of by the authors/owners.

Actually, that is true of most Open Source as well. It's also far from the FSF's definition of "free software".

There isn't a lot of software which could be classified "open source", but not "free software", by your definition. I could only mention sqlite, and DJB's stuff (qmail, djbdns, etc) -- these are public domain.

No, the difference is actually quite an obvious one: Open Source only requires that the source code be available. Before DJB's work was open source, it was very much open source, in that everyone could freely acquire the software. However, it was not free software -- once you have the source code, you are not allowed to redistribute it with your own patches.

If you wanted to improve qmail, for instance, you had two choices: Either beg DJB to include your change, or distribute your patch directly to users -- they would have to then download the qmail sources, apply your patch, and compile.

Free Software, on the other hand, only requires that you be able to both obtain the software, and fork it to distribute your own version. It doesn't place any other restrictions, it doesn't even require "free as in beer".

By the FSF's definition, the official distribution of sqlite is very much Free Software. By the OSI's definition, it is very much Open Source. And it is completely public domain, meaning there is absolutely no restriction placed on its use.

Your confusion probably stems from the fact that the FSF advocates the GPL, which does impose quite a lot of restrictions. The GPL's purpose is to ensure that this software must continue to be Free Software -- compare to sqlite, which could be forked into a proprietary version.

But there's nothing about the idea of Free Software itself which requires the GPL, or anything like it, and it's quite ignorant of you to suggest that.

"OOOHHH! Google USED TO allow us to use their resources, now they don't! OH! EVIL GOOGLE!"

Nice strawman. Can you point to a single post with that sentiment?

It's possible you can, but I've been reading this thread for awhile, and I've found nothing of the sort. I've found a few people who suggest that Google should have considered the implications, and certainly some people are disappointed, but I haven't actually seen anyone say that Google is evil or wrong for doing that.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Voyager529]

I, for one, welcome our new inconsiderate overlords.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Obviously, you haven't read the REST of my posts in this discussion.

Not much, no. If you like, feel free to point to any you feel are particularly relevant.

Where is this "imaginary non theiving world" to which you refer?

The fact that you refer to us as theives means you're either suggesting that it's possible for someone not to be a thief -- and I'm suggesting that by your criteria, this is impractical and not desirable -- or you're suggesting that everyone is a thief, kind of like the Christian view that everyone is a sinner.

Again: If I were to avoid being a thief, does that mean I have to discuss this post with my ISP and the local post office, and get approval from both? If not, how is posting this different than the activities you've described as "stealing"?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[greentshirt]

It's incredible how long the line of people who want to post "lol zomg newbsauce teh neighbour doesn't payz extra if you stealz their internets" is. There was a point the poster was trying to make, but clearly it is impossible for some to log on to the internet and not jump on every opportunity to point out a perceived error while missing the bigger picture. That being said, I don't even agree with his bigger picture. If Google created a service that could be used by third party apps, it is their fault for leaving it open to the public. If they want it only accessible to their own third party apps, I'm sure they can come up with a creative way to do it. This is clearly bad design or bad planning. They either never realized their service could be used as a third party gateway, or they didn't think their system could be overloaded. I'm not familiar with the service so I don't know which it is. It's like the people who give away free samples of various food products at the grocery store sometimes. Yes, they are there to push their samples on people who may make a purchase, yes it sucks for them when a group of 5 teenagers show up and take multiple samples and don't buy a thing - but that is part of the cost associated with that particular marketing scheme. Unless accessing their system via third party hardware is against the EULA, Google has nobody to blame. They'll probably relaunch the service soon and start sending out contextual SMS ads to people using it. Before your urge to reply to this last sentence takes you over, it's a joke.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[greentshirt]

You can however, complain about the big wall of text. I guess a forum designed by tech nerds for tech nerds can't figure out how to automatically put in line breaks when I press enter.

So here are

couple of

br's to make up for

the lack of them in

my giant wall of text

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

This post, in particular? Of course not. Your use of the internet to view television shows? Yes, you probably should, if you wish to think of yourself as completely honest. You choose to watch television, without paying for it, which impacts on bandwidth usage. A mutual agreement might be arrived at, whereby you pay 5 or 10 percent extra for internet, without being charged for the unused television service. And, such a package SHOULD BE AVAILABLE for everyone. Discussing your digital activity on the interwebz with the post office is so absurd that no rational person would consider it as more than a joke. But, feel free to act on the idea, if you wish.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[commodore64_love]

>>>They pay a monthly fee for these broadband services, not per KB...

How do you know? *I* pay a per minute fee for my cellphone (18 cents) and a per GB for my wireless service. So if my neighbor would happen to "tap" in somehow, then yes they they'd be driving up my costs.

That alone is inconsiderate. Naturally I'd respond by cutting-off their free access once I received the huge bill (like google did). Then the freeloader would want to "waaaah" about it. Well too bad.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Dhalka226]

The issue of wardriving is a grey area, in the sense that if you leave your front door open, intruders might not be considered to be committing a crime if they walk through it.

Erm, no. If it's not a public place, that's called trespassing. In some states, it's also called breaking and entering (even without the need to actually break anything; I believe Massachusetts is such a state).

And more to the point, unauthorized access of a computer network is a felony in the United States and Australia at least, and probably many other countries as well. Somebody not taking a step to prevent you is not an authorization, even if it is a fairly decent defense. Some laws codify this, others leave it to the court to work out.

I'm not equating legality and morality, but it's fairly clear that this is not a legally gray area. It's illegal, and so was the activity in your analogy.

I don't personally care very much about the Google thing. They opened up an API to use the service, so in that sense they're responsible for their own success. The only part of it I don't care for is the fact that somebody made money writing a tiny little program that does nothing but use that API, leaving Google to foot the bill while they roll around in their piles of money. It's not illegal, it's probably not even amoral, but it's pretty scummy too.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[commodore64_love]

>>>Hopping onto an unsecured network is basically taking advantage of a free resource....If the person the network belongs to won't take the 3 minutes to turn on wireless security then they shouldn't have the right to bitch when someone hops onto their network.
>>>

I agree 100%.

But now google has done the equivalent of turning-on their security to block the free access, and people are whining like a bunch of toddlers. Which goes back to my previous point about the entitlement generation: "But... but... but... I want my free stuff!!! Wah."

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

you're old.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[nametaken]

I don't know about thieving... definitely irresponsible.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[commodore64_love]

>>>I'd like to see evidence.

The evidence is right in front of your face ("I don't think I should pay for stuff.") and happens on slashdot almost every day. The evidence is in professors' offices when they have students demanding A grades even though they only earned an A- or B+. This isn't a new phenomenon but before it was just one or two students. According to profs, it's now becoming epidemic where nearly-all the students think they should get an "A" just for showing up in class.

>>>How is using a service that's intended to be used for free anything to do with being self-centred, or using "other people's stuff"

It's not the using part that bothers me. I probably would have done the same if I had an Iphone. It's the whining that is occurring after google decided to block access, as if they think they are entitled to google's private property (hence the name Entitlement generation). The 80s "Me" generation never felt they were entitled to other people's property.

And it's not just here on this topic. I see whining because nbc.com won't stream video overseas; if nbc doesn't want to pay for they overseas load, they shouldn't have to. Plus I see whining because "OMG I have to wait until Sept to get the Galactica Season 4 DVD" as if that short wait is too much to bear. And on and on.

Oh one more thing:

Get off my lawn! ;-)

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[tftp]

It may not cost your neighbor extra money. However imagine that you own a home and a homeless man broke into an unused bedroom and lives there. He doesn't cost you extra money either, but will you tolerate that? Let me summarize:

1. He is using a resource (house or Internet) that you paid for. You pay, he is getting it for free. See a problem here?
2. He is living inside of your house (or inside of your LAN) and has access to your internal property (computers, cupboards, files.) This is a security issue, since he is bypassing the firewall that your router likely has.
3. He may be engaged in crime, be it child pr0n on Internet or drug dealing in your house. You will be seen as accessory in either case; probably even it's tougher in the Internet case, since MAFIAA and FBI shoot first and never ask questions.
4. As other posters mentioned, he may be eating into your Internet caps or just drag the speed down by large downloads.
5. Even if he is doing none of the above, who is to guarantee that his friends will be also benign when they decide to use your "free" resource? You aren't objecting to it, after all...

It seems obvious that there are too many disadvantages for such a sharing, and no WiFi router owner should allow neighbors to connect, just to be safe.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[commodore64_love]

>>>SMS was added as an after-thought to GSM and used to be free for everybody via numerous gateways. ..... they blocked the free operators by creating a cartel and charging an inter-operator penalty.
>>>

See? This is exactly the attitude I don't understand. It's *their* property and *their* hardware that bears the burden. They have every right to block access, just the same as I have a right to close my WiFi server from free to password-protected. ----- But you don't understand that because you think you are "entitled" to O.P.P. (other people's property).

>>>The cost of switching had dropped to fractions of the cost, yet the cost of calls kept getting higher.

Not really. My local calls were free, and my long-distance calls dropped from 25 cents to 9 cents per minute. And modems increased from around 1k to 56k in just ten years time, while prices for National BBSes/ISPs dropped from $10 an hour to $1 an hour to $10-15 for unlimited time. You seem to be engaging in revisionist history in order to justify your point.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[commodore64_love]

>>>We grew up in a time where nearly everyone in a position of respect deserved none of it, whether they be presidents, senators, judges, or business leaders

I wasn't talking about those idiots. I was talking about respecting other people's property. As in - "get off my lawn". You have no business walking across my private property, or google's private property, and I can't believe you think you do. And when I say "you", I don't mean you specifically, but those in the teen and 20-something generation who are whining because Google decided to block SMS. Google has the right to control their property (i.e. servers).

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Achromatic1978]

or they would limit it's use.

Which is, gasp, exactly what they did. They offered it with the intention of it being used as an adjunct to Google services, which ties into their revenue base. Along came a bunch of freeloaders, bypassed that tie-in to get all the benefits with no 'cost' (advertising metrics, whatever), and it got turned off. Color me unsurprised.

When (and if) this is reintroduced, there'll be mechanisms in place to push you through something to get access. To those who mention POP3 and Gmail, realize you are in the minority. What you typically give Google in exchange for your non ad-sponsored mail experience is 'goodwill' that pays for your service by virtue of active or passive referrals.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Dahamma]

That's a stupid argument.

The gateway used TCP/IP instead of SMS to send messages (they are still received via SMS, so the telecom is still making 1/2 of it's 1000% profit on SMS. I pay $20 for unlimited networking on my phone, so why should I pay another $0.10 for a short text message? In this case it was Google getting the shaft, since they were providing the free service. But hello, how much do you pay for your Google searches? Their entire company is base on providing "free" services, and supporting them through ads, etc. It's ridiculous to call using those free open services in a way Google can't monetize "stealing"!

Besides, you can send SMS messages to anyone on AT&T's network in the same way via YOURNUMBER@sms.att.net (I'm sure all other networks have a similar email gateway). Is that stealing $0.10 from your cellular provider?

Is it abuse of the phone company to use Skype over a DSL line instead of long distance to talk to someone? They are both using the same physical medium - it's just one is using an ancient, inefficient technology (POTS) and the other an efficient, general puprpose data transport mechanism (TCP/IP).

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[i.of.the.storm]

Actually, Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation are two separate entities, and MoCo isn't a non-profit.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[MadAhab]

"Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money"

LOL! Extra money. That's a good one. Actually I think it's generally perfectly fine to use someone's wireless precisely because it is not costing them extra money when I do. My wireless is open - and if someone abused it, I would close it, not complain.

But as to propriety: with the ubiquity of wifi and laptops, anyone miffed that someone used their unsecured wireless deserves about as much sympathy as sone who stands in front of their window, naked, without the curtains drawn, but is offended at the inconsiderate behavior of those who look.

Massive abuse of Google's SMS service is, while wrong, predictable.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Runaway1956]

It doesn't MATTER what protocol was being used. It doesn't MATTER what AT&T or any other telephone company is doing, or not doing, or what price they might be charging. AT&T doesn't own Google's servers. The iApple store doesn't own Google's servers. Google provides a lot of free services, yes. But, only Google can determine WHICH free services it offers, and TO WHOM it offers them. Obviously, Google wasn't obligated to supply the SMS service to a third party application. If they yank ALL OF THEIR FREE SERVICES TOMORROW, big deal. It's not like they have signed a contract with me that obligates them to maintain my gmail account for the next hundred years, or anything. They can end it today, if they wish, or charge me for it, or limit my usage of it - it's all theirs.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Dahamma]

Huh? Did you even read your own post?

It is abuse to take advantage of some free service, thereby circumventing the telecom's charges

Google is not the *telecom*, AT&T is. So if you are going to claim it's abuse or theft of the *telecom's* service, it matters that the telecom itself provides the very mechanism to circumvent their SMS fees.

They can end it today, if they wish, or charge me for it, or limit my usage of it - it's all theirs.

Which is EXACTLY why it's NOT THEFT. They have the right to cancel, limit, or charge for whatever service as they please. But if they offer an open API for free and don't limit it, it's not theft to use it!

Anyway, I'm not even sure what your point is, your two posts are so contradictory. But my point is simple: don't call someone a thief when they are not.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[aliquis]

But it's not stealing unless they try to prevent it. If they have some sort of login or something such and you worked your way around that it would be stealing, not so if it just simply works.

Same for linking an image of someone else webserver, some people consider that theft of bandwidth, I consider that preservation of eventual copyright since I don't copy and host my own copy of the actual image.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[virtualXTC]

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money.

If my neighbor isn't using 100% of their bandwidth, and they aren't forced into buy a higher priced service because of my usage, how could you possibly claim that I'm costing them more $ by using their open AP?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[BrokenHalo]

Lots of countries don't actually have a law against trespassing. Under British law, for instance, it is a civil matter, and in Scotland it is not recognised at all. I'm sure there are other examples, so I believe my analogy (FWIW) does hold. But I have no argument with your take on the Google matter. What seems a bit strange to me is Google's opening up their bandwidth to SMS in the first place, if they didn't want to wear the cost.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[ClosedSource]

I don't believe in ranking generations, but just one point of fact: the generation that created the credit card were born in the 20's and 30's.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Kalriath]

Aye, and I think the Google contract is with Mozilla Corporation, not Foundation.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Sparr0]

Yes, but sending a SMS message costs a total of about a penny, totalled across every network it has to travel, amortizing every piece of hardware it uses. You have to assume that with providers charging as much as a 5000% markup for some users and nothing for other users, they must be subsidizing one with the other.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[SanityInAnarchy]

This post, in particular? Of course not. Your use of the internet to view television shows? Yes, you probably should, if you wish to think of yourself as completely honest.

Why? What is the difference?

You choose to watch television, without paying for it,

In what way am I "not paying for" my own bandwidth? Read my sig.

If you mean I'm "not paying for" the content, I'm not paying to read your content here, either.

If you're assuming piracy, you clearly didn't read. The Daily Show is actually free, as are several other shows.

A mutual agreement might be arrived at, whereby you pay 5 or 10 percent extra for internet, without being charged for the unused television service.

Paying to whom?

My ISP? That's a blatant violation of network neutrality.

A media corporation? That's both a blatant violation of network neutrality, and anticompetitive towards the other shows (Revision 3, anyone?) which aren't available on network TV, but are on the Internet.

Discussing your digital activity on the interwebz with the post office is so absurd that no rational person would consider it as more than a joke.

So is discussing it with people from my local TV company. Demonstrate the difference, if you can.

Better yet, tell me why talking to my ISP about it is any different than talking to my phone company about who I want to call, or talking to my local grocery store about just how I intend to eat that apple.

Fuck no. You provide me a good or a service, which I pay for. Then I use that for precisely what I want. If you don't want me to use it for that, don't provide the service.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[MushMouth]

I hear what you're saying. It increases the power draw of their router, which does actually cost the end user more money. On top of that it is taking some percent of their bandwidth, which if you are trying to use it at the same time as they are, it costs them their time.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you can argue that they should damn well learn to secure their wireless adapter. But I dare say you'd be upset if your neighbour jumped your fence and plugged an extension cable into your outdoor outlet. Why didn't you padlock it up?!

I'd also be upset if they put up a campaign sign in my yard. They are welcome to my unsecured wifi, though, as long as they stay off my property.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Homer1946]

I think for an open wireless network, it is different. A garden variety wireless router running a DHCP server hands out IP address when asked. In fact many computer are configured by default to automatically join open networks. By leaving the network open you are in fact inviting others to join and the router is functioning normally by broadcasting its name and then assigning computers that connect a private IP address.

As soon as the network owner takes any action to secure the network, such as turning off SSID broadcast, or setting up encryption, then the situation has changed, but otherwise by leaving the network completely open you HAVE given permission. To go back to the house analogy, it would be like hanging an OPEN HOUSE sign on your front door and then assigning someone to stand at the door and hand out name tags.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Atario]

Far be it from me to undercut your protestant-work-ethic-appealing "if you like it, it should cost a lot" ranting, but may I refer you to this extremely enlightening post? It has been a pleasure serving you here at Reality. Thank you, drive through.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[spudda]

In country's like Australia they do (pay a monthly fee, but only get a certain number of GBs for that fee) and I believe the number of countries adopting that metered approach is growing

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come now!

Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money.

I don't think you understand how broadband in the U.S. works: it isn't billed on a bandwidth basis, I'll tell you that much.

Or google's SMS, even though it costs google thousands of dollars to support that overload.

It was marketed as a free service by Google, just like their search engine and their mail service, because to Google it's worth the investment in infrastructure in order to gather data about you.

The blame you're putting on this new narcissistic generation (has any generation not thought the one following it was too full of themselves?) is in my mind better placed on the current practice of overselling which is so prevalent in the business world today, especially in the tech industry.

Things are "free" these days. Don't think piracy, think privacy. The new generation has been taught that they don't need to exchange dollars for goods and services, they just need to trade away their privacy.

The question, then, as I see it, is: What have you been doing to fight the formation of this way of thinking?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[turbidostato]

"Telecommunications cost someone, somewhere, somehow. We all know this"

So it's an assumption that the provider knows it too, isn't it?

"It is abuse to take advantage of some free service"

How can it be abuse to make use of a service the way the provider says you can?

"Google's "free" offerings are meant"

Are meant "free" or else the provider would state otherwise.

"Pretending ignorance doesn't impress anyone."

That's true. I'm certainly not impressed by you arguments.

"If you are going to steal Google's"

You can bet Google will sue you. This has not been the case. Might it be because nobody was stealing Google?

"We might respect an honest thief."

If by "honest thief" you mean a company trying to gain competitive advantage by promising what it was not in the situation to support, well yes, we respect it by the name of "marketing practices".

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you asshole - you know that the people who sold the application weren't supporting the application. There WAS theft going on here, idiot. Google certainly didn't advertise that their free service could be exploited for anyone's financial gain.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[FishAdmin]

Sorry for the rant, it's been a long 23 years.

How about you try moving to a backwater village in North Korea for the next 23 years? Then you can come back and let us all know how that whole "entitlement" thing works when you have real consequences for your actions.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[talz13]

Maybe because I didn't plug in a bunch of 100 ft. extension cords to my outlet and leave them laying about in my neighbors' lawns? It's not like they have to have physical access to your property to skim your wifi...

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[alecwood]

20% of my bandwidth is made available to anyone who wants to use it through an open wireless connection. I do this because it doesn't cost me any extra money, and at the time I installed the equipment there were no free access hotspots in our area.

I think I'd be pissed though if some unconnected third party started charging people to access it, which is effectively what Inner Fence has done - found a way to make money from a third party's free service.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[stdarg]

True but in the US usage caps are rare in residential settings. And I'm assuming the "generation me" stuff referred to the US -- I think other countries come up with their own names. Like I doubt Germans call their post-WW2 kids "baby boomers."

I also doubt the kids in question would act the same if they moved to a place where usage caps were common.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[stdarg]

But slashdot isn't mostly children and teenagers, it's a bit older.

As for entitlement when it comes to things like grades, I think that's more to do with the parents (many of whom are in the true "generation me": the baby boomers).

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[stdarg]

If you spend the next 23 years in a backwater village - let alone one in North Korea - how do you see it working out as any way but bad? What does entitlement have to do with it?

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[FishAdmin]

The point was that the poster didn't know what "rough" is. Entitlement is simply a selfish illusion of grandeur, nothing more. When you spend some time in an impoverished Nation, then you can gripe about how "rough" life is, not when you get to grow up in one of the most free Countries in the world, with some of the best benefits anywhere.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[WCguru42]

I'm not saying that I'd be better off in a developing country, but is it so unreasonable to expect the best from the situation that you're in. If I'm in a third world fishing town I'd expect that people wouldn't just go around a put giant holes in my boat. If I live in the US I expect business and political leaders not to fuck around with the system for their own benefit and the detriment of all the others in this nation. Relativism is not a bad thing.

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[The AtomicPunk]

But I think we recognized we're not entitled to other people's stuff; if we want a new toy, we have to EARN it through hard work.

I'd have to say you're wrong, your generation has not learned that. My evidence is their voting record in the 2008 Presidential election. :)

Re:Alll's Well that ended well.

[SL Baur]

Yes, but sending a SMS message costs a total of about a penny,

Nope. That's correct only if you're sending messages locally. International SMS text messages cost between 25 to 50 cents apiece. It depends on the location and the US dollar exchange rate.

Lot's of iPhones out there

[amiga3D]

This kind of puts the iPhone's market share in perspective doesn't it?

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[timmarhy]

err no. maybe this service was already operating at capcaity and the extra couple of % the crap phone added was unexpected?

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely, It wasn't a capacity problem at all. (how big is an SMS anyway?).
Google just got a phone call from a couple of very upset telcos.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[iamflimflam1]

As I mentioned in an earlier comment. If they got into the top 10 as they say they did and they were there for 11 days there must have been a significant number of downloads of the app: 20-30 thousand maybe? All sending hundreds of free SMS a day (it's free after all!). So that's an extra 2-3 million messages being sent on a daily basis...

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they set up the service to serve M people and then M+N started using it. The first thing I ask when designing a system is how many users. Or can I use python I guess htat's more important.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[Anonymous Coward]

3 million messages a day is only 6 kB/s. I think Google could handle that just fine.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[Anonymous Coward]

How much free time do you think these people have? Granted, the number is pulled from an orifice, but just think about how much time it would take to send out these hundreds of SMSs per person per day.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[fractoid]

Yes, but telcos tend to charge for usage of their mobile networks. So while in your little internet-centric world it's not much, if you're paying 1c per message that's $20k-$30k per day of additional overhead to provide a free service.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[dodobh]

It would be truly interesting if the free SMS service was available outside the US. That might show a better perspective.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[argiedot]

I don't know about the iPhone, but most other models have a feature where you can 'Send to All', 'Send to group' or where you just select multiple recipients. In India, where we had free unlimited SMS for a long time (none of the carriers provide that anymore, we get charged 0.1 cents now), people would send 'forwards'. Very annoying, and one person could easily send more than 200 messages a day with just 2 forwards (2 * 3-part SMS * 40 people). And yes, forwards are generally much longer than normal messages.

Re:Lot's of iPhones out there

[iamflimflam1]

How much free time do you think these people have? Granted, the number is pulled from an orifice, but just think about how much time it would take to send out these hundreds of SMSs per person per day.

You don't know many teenagers do you?

See?

[catdriver]

See? THIS is why you can't have nice things.

Next target: AOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

AIM has let you send free text messages for ages. Is there any difference between this service and the one Google was just forced to close down?

Re:Next target: AOL?

[MichaelSmith]

Google haven't closed the service. They have just blocked third party apps from using it. AOL might just do that if a different client starts using this to send messages.

I know somebody who set up an SMS spamming company in about 2000. He was always on the lookout for ways to send tens of thousands of SMS messages for free.

Re:Next target: AOL?

[MartinSchou]

I know somebody who set up an SMS spamming company in about 2000

Have you remembered to give him that special kind of "thank you" that we all know he deserves?

Re:Next target: AOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

A well-aimed bullet in the crotch?

Cue Cartman: 'You never shoot a guy in the dick! Everyone knows that! Shooting a guy in the dick!? That's just.. that's just weak.'

Why would Google provide this service anyway?

[djjockey]

Does Google pay for the SMS's that it sends? I can't imagine the telco's sending them for free.

I'm assuming Google was willing to fund this while they trialled and developed the service, but when the volume went up so did the costs. There would have been little (if any) incremental revenue Google raised from this extra volume - so why should they keep providing the service?

At least from within Gmail they have a chance to display ads.

Re:Why would Google provide this service anyway?

[owlstead]

Um, yes, and they provide ad-free IMAP and POP services. They only cost bandwidth, but they will lure people (such as me) to their ad based web-interfaces, if only to make changes and/or to click on the update button for the external POP interface. Besides that they weaken competition such as hotmail, meaning that M$ will get even less money from the ads.

Sleight of hand

[az1324]

Google: SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. By the way, check out our new service Google Voice which is launching with full SMS support.

Re:Well, Google HAD a business model!

[Anonymous Coward]

SMS is very profitable to service providers.

E.g. when developing SMS games around 2001, the raito of sent/received messages could go up to 4-5 sent by the game server / 1 sent by the user, and the provider would still buy the game.

Google's model was: enable GTalk and other programs to send SMS-es. The SMS-es are delivered to phones.

Now Google could allocate free sending quota from service providers telling them that these messages will be answered, and service providers can get their profit from the ANSWER SMS-es.

Now this where this iPhone program is dangerous to Google.
It cuts the single source of revenue from the providers: the response SMS could be also throught Google...

Just my 2 cents...

Was this useful?

[Fumus]

Huh? I don't know how it's set up in the US, but in Poland all the phone companies have limits set for free internet text messages.
I don't recall the exact limits but each IP has a limit of sending around 20 messages per 24h, and each phone has a limit of receiving around 20 messages per 24h.

Re:Was this useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

In America most phone providers charge you $0.20 per message sent. AT&T charges you for each message received as well.

Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[krunk4ever]

Inner Fence's Official Statement

Google will soon block Infinite SMS and all other non-Google software from sending free text messages.

For now, Infinite SMS will continue to work, but when the block goes into effect, you'll start getting an error every time you try to send a text message.

If you have comments for Google, you can visit their Text Messaging Google Group.

Google has claimed no grievance with Infinite SMS other than its success. Their given reason for the block isn't abuse or wrongdoing; it's that we brought too many users (and thus too much cost) to an experimental service.

We acted in good faith, accessing a feature publicly announced by Google over open protocols they made available. Other non-Google apps have been able to access the SMS feature since its launch. To us, this was no different from accessing Gmail's near limitless storage over the open IMAP protocol. We never could have guessed that the two of us would write an app too big for Google.

Our first warning was an unexpected call from Google on Monday, 9 March 2009, indicating that the service might be blocked as soon as the very next day.

We asked them to reconsider or at least give us more time to change our program or migrate our users. We scheduled a call for the next morning to hear Google's final time line.

We immediately removed Infinite SMS from sale, since we could not in good conscience continue to sell a product whose lifetime was so likely to be cut short.

This morning, Tuesday, 10 March 2009, our email is overflowing with questions about why Infinite SMS is not available in the app store. We've decided we need to get real information out there for people, despite not having the complete picture yet. We will update this page when we hear from Google again.

We hope that Infinite SMS users will see this announcement and have some warning before they can no longer use our app for messaging.

Apple does not give app developers any way to perform refunds. Hopefully, at 99ï people will feel like our app paid for itself after only a few messages.

Google's free SMS feature isn't entirely gone. They've only blocked non-Google apps like Infinite SMS. You can still send free text messages through the Gmail web interface (but it doesn't seem like it works in Mobile Safari). The instructions are in their original SMS chat announcement.

Google's Official Statement

Infinite SMS is a third party app that has been using Google technology to provide free SMS for users, while we were paying for the cost of the text messages. While Google is supportive of third party apps, we've decided we can't support this particular usage of our system at this time. SMS chat is still just an experiment in the early testing stages in Gmail Labs. We're blocking all external XMPP clients from sending SMS; we're not singling out Inner Fence.

Re:Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[HavocXphere]

>>"We acted in good faith" (From Infinite site) That is just pathetic. Google's SMS service was opened up in good faith hoping that no one would abuse it to make money.

Re:Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[angrydotnerd]

Yeah, kinda like YouTube acting in good faith. There are no good guys when money is concerned.

Re:Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's SMS service was opened up in good faith hoping that no one would abuse it to make money.

Actually, if that iphone app had been free, it might have had even more users.

Re:Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[slyn]

That is just pathetic. Google's SMS service was opened up in good faith hoping that no one would abuse it to make money.

Do you hate vendors like Red Hat and Novell who took an "opened up" piece of software and made money off of it? To say they abused the service is patently false. There's an open API so people can write third party clients for it, how is it abusive to write a third party client for it???

Though it seems to be their modus operandi over there, I would blame Google for exposing an API for a function they arn't ready to support. In a way its a problem caused by Googles versioning system. The API may have been a true beta build, but no one would ever know what that actually means, as everyting is still in beta according to Google (including things as rock solid as GMail).

Re:Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[TinBromide]

Red hat has given back to the community, how has google been bettered by infinite sms? Is there now a free "fedora core" sms gateway? Novell and Red Hat provided value without depriving the linux community of anything. Infinite SMS increased google's monthly bills without giving ANYTHING back. (Give vs Take). When you develop open source, you fix bugs, advertise, and raise awareness, everybody wins.

Perhaps you should have tried a car analogy because yours is broken.

Re:Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[Chrono11901]

Software != service.

The software never goes poof, the service may.
Never rely on a free external service for this very reason. They have zero obligation to you or your product.

Dude tried the make money off Google's dime. Google stopped/changed the free service (they have every right to). Its his own fault for relying on a service that he has no control over, or contract protecting him.

Re:Inner Fence's and Google's Official Statement

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how they leach off Google's free service for a profit, and Google even goes as far as giving them an advance notice, yet they still belittle Google in an attempt to look like the good guys in all of this.

Re:Didn't The Register have this...

[troll8901]

I think I'd rather have a few late news on Slashdot, than many early news.

With late news, there's time to verify, find links, understand the points of views, and decide whether to post the news in the first place.

It's not as though a day's delay would hinder our ability to, say, argue for/against bills in congress, or patents under application.

How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[PopeRatzo]

The people who sold this app were not "charging" anyone for Google's service. Would you say that someone who developed and sold a killer browser for iPhone was "charging" people to use the Web?

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

In essence you're correct, but at least post a coherent rebuttal. You stress out that "the people who sold this app were not charging anyone for Google's service", but why would it be "abuse" if they did? If the killer browser that I sell also had a monthly fee, then I would be abusing?

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[rrossman2]

You had to BUY the app off of the IPhone Store, right? The author of the iPhone app just made money, right? They are using a service Google provides without compensating Google in any fashion, right? So which part of that wouldn't constitute charging people to use Googles' service, since it sure seems you had to BUY the app which gave the iPhone programmers MONEY, and the app used GOOGLES SERVICE to send the SMS MESSAGES...

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[SuperAlgae]

When people buy this app, they are paying for the functionality that comes from the combination of the app's software and Google's service. If a major differentiator for the app is its use of Google's service, then they are effectively charging for that service.

Ask yourself this. Of all the apps people could buy, why would they buy this one? Does its competitive advantage come from the excellence of the app itself or from its use of Google's service?

Does this constitute "abuse"? I'm not sure that it does, and I think even Google has not claimed such. But it is overuse, even if unintentional, and it is a form of "charging".

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[commodore64_love]

No. You original comment is still wrong:

>>>>>Charging for a service another entity subsidizes without their approval.

Iphone == some $cost
Addon SMS application == some $cost
Google SMS service == free.

As this line-item "bill" shows, the service was free. You bought the hardware, and you bought the add-on software, but you did not pay for the SMS service. The previous poster was correct when he compared it to a web browser. You might pay $20 to Microsoft for a browser, but not for the internet service. That comes from somebody else, like Verizon or AT&T.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[SuperAlgae]

The important factor is where the effective value comes from, not a line item bill. As an extreme example, let's say I'm selling a toaster for $5000, and it comes with a free luxury car. If I stop offering the free car, do you think people will still buy the toaster. Stated price is not always a reflection of real value.

The reason that web browsers are different than InfiniteSMS is that there is a strong competitive market of browsers that all use the same internet access. Therefore, browsers must distinguish themselves by some means other than simply having internet access. In the case of InfiniteSMS, I think the competing messaging apps are not using Google's service. When people buy the app, Google's service is the distinguishing factor, not the app itself.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to streamline the use of Google's service is the distinguishing factor. Cutting the hair pretty thin, I know. But it's a valid distinction.

You're not paying this company for Google's free service, you're paying them to get you there faster.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[mdwh2]

When people buy this app, they are paying for the functionality that comes from the combination of the app's software and Google's service.

And when people buy a web browser, they are paying for the functionality that comes from the combination of the app's software, and the websites they visit?

The Internet would ground to a halt if we went down this route. Thankfully Google took the correct route and shut down their service, rather than trying to go after the application developers.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

FOXnews was the 3rd most-popular cable channel in February (after USA/TNT). Left-leaning CNN/ MSNBC were a distant 15/23

That's because left-leaning people don't need to have their worldview spoon fed to them the way conservatives do. Progressives prefer to receive their news from unbiased sources (if there even is such a thing) and then come to their own conclusions.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[Ashriel]

Really? I just figured it was because fewer people have cable.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[ADRA]

And if the Addon SMS agent wasn't directly tied to Google's service, you may have a leg to stand on. Does the Addon SMS product function without Google's service? From my brief reading on this, no.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[mysidia]

At a one-time $0.99, they're really just charging for their costs involved in developing the application, and NOT billing additionally the service performed by the application after purchase, which is reasonable.

What's unreasonable is the expectation to bypass provider's SMS charges, when clearly, Google has to pay for SMS messages.

Certainly it shouldn't be any sort of shock that Google killed the service, when someone actually built a successful app doing just that, the resulting cost is simply too high.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[SuperAlgae]

Did you read my full post? I did not advocate any action against the InfiniteSMS app developers. You should also read my other response that explains how this is different from web browsers. My point was just that InfiniteSMS differentiated their app (and thus made money) by using the Google SMS service rather than by outperforming competing messaging apps in other ways. The Google SMS service is why many people chose this app over others. I did not make any legal or moral claim about it.

Yes app developers have a right to make use of the services available. Unfortunately, in this case, the high level of usage resulted in the service provider scaling back their service.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[pembo13]

The user is paying for web access directly.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[commodore64_love]

>>>Does the Addon SMS product function without Google's service? From my brief reading on this, no.

Does the Addon Internet Explorer agent function without an ISP's service?* No. And yet you won't get your money back if you happen to buy IE. The program and the service are provided by separate companies.

*
* If you prefer insert HD Radio/FM-HD stations, or cellphone/cell service, or ....

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[abhi_beckert]

Ask yourself this. Of all the apps people could buy, why would they buy this one? Does its competitive advantage come from the excellence of the app itself or from its use of Google's service?

This is the real question:

Should I buy this app for $0.99? Or should I spend hours creating the same app myself? Or should I pay someone $$$ to spend hours creating the app for me? Should I use the iPhone's built in web browser to send SMS's via google?

You're not paying for the SMS service, that is free. You're paying for a more convenient way to access said service.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[abhi_beckert]

And the effective value is not having to use your web browser to use google's free SMS service.

Re:How is parent insightful when he's wrong?

[atraintocry]

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
The part where charging for a client is not the same as charging for the service it hooks up to.

There are plenty of Twitter clients for iPhone. Maybe some cost money. But Twitter is free. The situation is the same with other, similar services.

Was it OK to do what they did? I guess not, since had to shut it down. But maybe they wouldn't have if the traffic wasn't so severe. If Google planned on directly monetizing the service, they would have done that initially. But as is the case with Blogger and any number of other things that they provide, a lot of it is just about getting you to use their services. The more people use it, the more they can sell the ad space for.

That means a per-use charge or limit

[hessian]

The only way you keep people from going crazy over a free service is to put in a per-use charge or some kind of hardcoded limit. The former is annoying with commercial cell phone providers and their text message charges, and the latter is really annoying when your ISP flags your account for sending that funny link to 25 friends instead of the 24 you usually email(*).

* - I now have Mailman set up for this purpose, as it's the legal and ethical thing to do. But the point stands.

Re:Well, Google HAD a business model!

[PopeRatzo]

I hope this AC's insightful comment doesn't get lost in the bloviating. He's absolutely spot-on about how Google sold their free SMS model to the providers.

WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[Skylinux]

Ohh this is funny, iPhony customers are already bitching on Googe groups http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-help-text-messaging/topics

Someone even created an "Online Petition" http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/googlesms/

We wanz ourz free stuff back!!

lol

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[The MAZZTer]

I wish you could "anti-sign" online petitions.

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[True Vox]

Well, you COULD create a second petition against the first...

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised that nobody has developed a script that reads through each of the petitions, collects the names, and spams a signature for each name signed with the message "DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS - " or other some such 4chan or Encyclopedia dramatica inspired line. Then any time someone would go to count the signatures, they'd be presented with a sea of immaturity.

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish you could clue all these people in to the fact that they should be bitching to the providers that text message plans are too expensive and should be brought down. We pay far too much for a service that is far too useful and less system intensive. We should be encouraged to use it, not double charged for it.

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[Chrono11901]

I agree WTF Google! You should give back all the money people payed you for your service.... oh wait...

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[RobBebop]

I'm glad they blocked it. Making things free and easy leads to abuse from users. Remember how e-mail is an essentially free service, and people are surprised that a huge percent of traffic is junk, spam, or garbage? I would hate to see that happen to SMS... so I think Google is right to do this until at least the point where they can restrict it to legitimate users only.

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never received a junk IM over AIM or XMPP, so I see no reason to expect SMS spam.

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[argiedot]

What, woah? You've never experienced SMS spam? I live in a country where SMS is very cheap (0.1 US cent). Every week I get at least 4 or 5 spam SMS. Can you send IM to people without them first adding you as a 'friend'? If so, then maybe that explains why you don't receive spam IMs.

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[argiedot]

That place is unbelievable! A bunch of iPhone users, none of which can manage to notice the number of similar threads there, all bitching about Google withdrawing a service that they labelled experimental. It doesn't make any sense! If you paid one party for a service, and they stop providing that service, you go bitch at another party? How does that even make sense?

Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!!

[MistrBlank]

I'm an iPhone customer and I'd sign that anti-petition any day. It's a great device, but I'm smart enough to realize it's not Google or Inner Fence's fault. It's the crappy stranglehold cell phone companies have on their customers. There is no reason or excuse for cell phone customers to be charging so much for Text services. Maybe that's where the customer's voice and petitions should be aimed instead.

Erk, paying for a free service

[dbIII]

Reminds me of NeoOffice. When are these Apple developers going to get the point that freely available things are not so they can make a profit off somebody else's work.

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[djmurdoch]

That's exactly wrong. Free software is designed so that everybody profits.

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[Anonymous Coward]

How are they going to recoup their losses for their Mac Pro then?

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[KingAlanI]

NeoOffice is GPL'ed. GPL allows people to charge for the software covered (not necessarily free-as-in-beer). So it sounds like Apple's using LGPL,GPL and BSD code for its intended purpose, or at least totally allowed, purpose.
Plain and simple.

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[illegalcortex]

When are these Apple developers going to get the point that freely available things are not so they can make a profit off somebody else's work.

So Google built the internet all by itself, now?

And let's not forget the just how much of google's back end is built on top of gpl/open source software.

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidentally Inner Fence is made of of Microsoft employees.

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[freedom_india]

Free software is designed so that everybody profits.

WRONG, WRONG and WRONG Again.
Free software is designed so that nobody profits out of the efforts of unpaid developers.
Got it?
Why do you think noone is profiting from Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian (no not Ubuntu per se), and Linux in all its prior incarnations?
Plus Open office, etc

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[djmurdoch]

No, you have it wrong.

The unpaid developers profit in the same way other users profit: they get software for free that they couldn't develop on their own.

Most of them also profit by being put in contact with like-minded individuals.

Most of them profit by spending time doing things they like.

And best of all, most of these profits are not taxable. For a few, there are also taxable profits: They may enhance their reputation enough to be hired to do something they like.

Re:Erk, paying for a free service

[freedom_india]

Well, we both are right and wrong.
I was crapping about how corporates don't earn a cent out of Ubuntu.
You were saying that individuals save money and earn a profit thus, by getting ubuntu for free.
Guess we both mean the same-:)
My apologies.

Who cares.

[Anonymous Coward]

The service wasn't available to most of the world to begin with.

Abuse?

[nurb432]

So its abuse if you actually use what is offered?

Odd way of thinking.

Re:Abuse?

[Yosho]

If you have a headache and take a Tylenol, that's a proper use.

If you have a headache and take a whole bottle of Tylenol, that's abuse.

Ok, let's rephrase that now:

If you need to send a SMS and use Google's experimental SMS service, that's a proper use.

If you need to send a SMS and write an application that uses Google's experimental SMS service, charge people for it, and then publicize it as widely as you can, that's abuse.

Does it make more sense when it's put that way?

Re:Abuse?

[nurb432]

Yes, you make sense, but i happen to disagree.

If its free, its there to be used.

Re:Abuse?

[mdwh2]

But he's not sending all those SMSs himself. A more accurate analogy would be that ten people in the room have headaches, and he gives pills to all of them. So more usage, but why is it abusive, when the service was offered for free to all, and it's simply that more people are now able to take advantage of it?

And before you suggest it, no, he's not charging for the pills. It would be like pills only being available in some remote location, and he sells you a car to travel them. The increased demand might decide them to stop giving out free pills. But there's no abuse here. It's just a consequence of offering something for free, when you can't actually support that for too many people.

Re:Abuse?

[BlatOdea]

Jesus, now I need some Tylenol.
Walls are free, go put your head through one.

Re:Abuse?

[Firehed]

Within reason. Free software and services can (and often do) still have terms of service attached, including fair use clauses. For example, I'll happily answer some of your computer questions for free (family techie thing - we all do it), but I will not be your personal support bitch. Asking a couple of questions is fine; calling me at two in the morning asking me to walk you through an OS reinstall over the phone is abuse.

Re:Abuse?

[nurb432]

Some of us don't believe in restriction and TOS

If the service is there, Ill use it as i please. If they don't like it, then they can close it and and charge a subscription ( and not have me as a customer ).

While you may not agree with my attitude ( which is your right ), i'm tired of bending over for companies and really don't give a damn what they like or don't like anymore. Screw em.

Re:Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't believe in TOS and restrictions...

don't use those products or services.

Re:Abuse?

[LiXiang]

So, because you don't believe in restriction and ToS, you are free to overuse anything.

Wow, you don't bend over for company, you use it as you wish, and now, the free service is gone, and nobody can use it.

You know, Google doesn't give a damn about that. If it is not available, that won't make them lose anything. Maybe more the other way round.

Who suffers from that ? The users.

Way to go, continue abusing free services, and poof, off they go. And they never come back. Not free, anyway.

Just think about free service as community property, not yours. What you do with your things is not my problem, I don't care. What you do with EVERYONE's, on the other hand, is EVERYBODY's business...

Thinking "if it is everyone's property, then it's mine and I can use it any way I want and even keep it for myself" is just plain old egtistic behaviour.

Developers seem a bit naive

[Ash Vince]

I love their comment that they never would have guess they could write an app to big for google.

Did they really never guess that writing an application that allowed you to perform one of the primary functions for a mobile phone that is usually chargeable would cause problems if it was free. The mobile networks would have started moaning at google immediately and since Google are currently trying to get them to sign up to android they were going to have to cave in.

Re:Well, Google HAD a business model!

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem with your reasonning is that SMS charges differ in the countries. While in most europeans countries users don't pay to receive SMS messages, they do in the US.

Another bussiness model is still possible

[goombah99]

There is however a flip side to this business model that is still viable.

Basically google decouples the choice of sms provider from the cell phone service provider then you can have price competition.

This ought to happen because providing SMS is almost free to the cell services. Not only are message minimal number of bits to send, but they usually piggy back those bits on unused parts of the the handshaking signals they would send anyway. So they don't even consume cell bandwidth, just some trivial comlexity in routing them. So there should be a lot of room for prices to fall.

Re:Another bussiness model is still possible

[Zerth]

But there is a limited amount of bandwidth available to SMS traffic, since the system wasn't designed to support increased usage of the signalling channel, so if usage were to rise, it would become a limited resource, necessitating higher prices to prevent gridlock.

It'd be much better if everyone just joined the Year of the Fruitbat, got a data plan and used messaging or email.

Re:Another bussiness model is still possible

[ep32g79]

But there is a limited amount of bandwidth available to SMS traffic, since the system wasn't designed to support increased usage of the signalling channel, so if usage were to rise, it would become a limited resource, necessitating higher prices to prevent gridlock.

It'd be much better if everyone just joined the Year of the Fruitbat, got a data plan and used messaging or email.

Carriers could stop bilking customers on SMS rates considering that the data is already being sent regardless as to whether or not a SMS is coming through.

Or carriers could charge a fair rate for SMS messages.

Shame, Shame

[bartwol]

Inner Fence *assumed* they would continue to receive a service for which they had no contract and paid no fees. Further, on top of that unsupported and inequitable assumption, they *sold* a product in which they extended *assurances* of continued service.

Inner Fence now points their customers to Google as being the party responsible for the loss of service. But it seems clear that Inner Fence had no basis for assuring delivery of their service to their customers. They simply took the money, left Google holding the bag, and now dodge their full responsibility.

Hey Inner Fence...do your customers look like they have the letters S-T-U-P-I-D painted on their foreheads?

Re:Shame, Shame

[HyoImowano]

//Hey Inner Fence...do your customers look like they have the letters S-T-U-P-I-D painted on their foreheads?

I would reply to that but I would just get modded as a troll...

Re:Shame, Shame

[bartwol]

I regret that in rereading my comment, I had the same inclination. The situation brings to mind a couple of truisms:

• If it looks too good to be true, then it probably isn't true.
• Nothing in life is free.

But both of these truisms run up against a popular strategy:

• Shut up, take the money, and don't ask questions

So, yes, in this regard, many people's foreheads are mislabeled as blank.

Re:Shame, Shame

[7 digits]

> Hey Inner Fence...do your customers look like they have the letters S-T-U-P-I-D painted on their foreheads?

Based on what I read in google gmail labs groups:

"Google could've at least sent a warning to our emails. If google comes
up with something like this in the future and it is actually stable,
all of us(customers) who purchased this free infinite SMS messaging,
should recieve the future app FREE.",

I'd say that some of those customers have the letters M-O-R-O-N painter on their foreheads...

Re:Shame, Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitchety bitch. It's 99 cents! For what AT&T charges per-text, this app would have paid for itself after 5 messages. Sure they "had no basis for assuring delivery" etc. but it's not like they ripped anyone off; given the economics of the situation every single purchaser could have come out ahead.

Google is a private company

[dwhitaker]

It seems from reading at least some of the above comments that people almost view Google as a public service and that it is wrong for them to restrict the people from utilizing all of their features. However, Google is a private company and can do as they will.

Isn't it entirely possible that this huge influx of users was just costing them too much money on a fringe service that they didn't really care that much about anyway? If that is the case, I wouldn't blame them for removing it.

Yes and No

[AliasMarlowe]

Not that I disagree with your overall point, but how does using your neighbors wireless cost them extra money? They pay a monthly fee for these broadband services, not per KB...

Well, what you're saying is true, if the neighbour has an essentially uncapped service, like services across much of the Developed World (Finland, Sweden, Korea, Japan, etc.). However, caps on monthly throughput seem to be widespread in parts of the Third World (USA & Australia, anyway), with surcharges for anything over the cap. In some service plans which afflicted slashdotters have bewailed, the caps are quite stingy and the surcharges are astonishingly high.

Re:Yes and No

[Khyber]

The USA and Australia are NOT third-world countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

There's a little handy picture included.

Re:Yes and No

[BlatOdea]

parts of the Third World (USA & Australia, anyway)

... Did you seriously just call the US & Australia 3rd world? srsly?

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

woosh....

Re:Yes and No

[Ashriel]

I've never seen nor heard of a capped service in the U.S. since the early days of dial-up - even the later days of dial-up were unlimited. Internet service is cheap here, unlimited high speed access for less money than the utilities bill. And I live in the back-end of nowhere.

Re:Yes and No

[Zerth]

You must've missed all the articles on here about AT&T, Verizon, Time-Warner, et al, trialing the capping of internet service.

Unless you have some nice but somewhat naive connection, it probably includes something like "we may degrade your service to protect the service of our other customers"(ie, you are overbooked) or "we reserve the right to terminate your service if you use it excessively"(ie, we bought a burstable line, knock it off).

Or, as my phone's data plan says, "Your unlimited usage plan is subject to termination if used as a modem. Usage in excess of 5 gigabytes per month shall be considered evidence of use as a modem."

Re:Yes and No

[Ashriel]

Nope - that's not happening here. I've got DSL and I get what I pay for - i.e. unlimited usage at the bandwidth stated (OK, close to the bandwidth stated).

Not that I'm necessarily opposed to metered usage, as long as it's fair. The $40/mo. I pay is worth about 600 GB to me.

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

right, I forgot about the millions of US citizens who die every year from malaria. Our health care is some of the best in the world, something even progressives can't argue with (they argue about money and access.)

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be the same country that has a rapidly increasing number of un-immunized children, is seeing the resurgence of easily treated diseases previously thought conquered in the First World, and has growing rates of poverty and hunger in children?

We may not have millions dying from malaria, but there has been reported cases near where I live. If it were to increase, it would rapidly overwhelm our local capability to handle it.

Re:Yes and No

[ProfessionalCookie]

OK- I understand the sentiment but I'm going to reply out of respect for my dear friends that live in 3rd world countries. You're using a different scale of "poor" at least on Crappy Economy, Poor Standards of Health, Poor standards of education, poor standards of living and especially poor standard of internet service. You need to go somewhere 3rd world and live there for a few months to even begin to understand what you're claiming. In the mean time, you can still hang out.

Re:Yes and No

[p0tat03]

I don't know how you got modded insightful - if you truly believe that our economy is third world, or that our health is third world, or that our education is third world, you are delusional.

While there are plenty wrong with the US economy, health care, education, etc etc... To claim that we are in a third world state (or even close to it) is an insult to people who actually live in third-world countries.

Re:Yes and No

[commodore64_love]

>>>>>parts of the Third World (USA & Australia, anyway)

>>Did you seriously just call the US & Australia 3rd world? srsly?

Yes to draw out stupid people like you - same way you draw a mouse into a mousetrap with cheese. C;mon man, did you really think the poster was serious? There was no need to ask the question since the answer is obvious.

Re:Yes and No

[Achromatic1978]

It is? We rank #27 in number of hospital beds per capita. We rank #47 in the world in life expectancy. We rank #52 in the world in number of physicians per capita. Cuba has three times as many per head. Significant portions of the developing world have more doctors than us. #13 in the number of nurses.

Shall I continue? #19 in the world on Acute Care Beds.

We DO, however, SPEND by far the most on health care. Over $4,000 per person per year. Our health expenditure increases over 3% per annum, in excess of inflation. Ask yourself what you got for that money some time, when you're talking about defining "best" healthcare.

We DON'T have some of the best healthcare in the world. But we ARE told that, in order to justify the fact that our premiums keep going up and up and up. (My wife and I went from $431 to $510 a month last year, despite no non-routine events).

In fact, according to the WHO, on an overall index of "overall health performance" we're not even in the top 20 countries in the world. On "levels of health" we rank SEVENTY SECOND, and on "level of health care performance", THIRTY SEVENTH (from http://www.photius.com/rankings/world_health_systems.html).

Re:Yes and No

[BitZtream]

Crappy economy, check.

Not really, stop listening to the sensationalist media and do some research for yourself. Our unemployement rate while high, has been higher during my life time which is relatively short. Foreclosure rates are not really all that high, unless you pick a some specific areas where it was obvious to everyone that the people were being stupid by paying the prices they were for homes.

Industrialization outsourced, check

Lets see, would you rather be working in a factory doing manual labor, or behind a desk, pushing others in another country to do the grunt work? Outsourcing this crap increases our standard of living.

Poor standard of health, check

Are you fucking kidding me? You should actually look at countries that actually suck. American health care may have its problems, but its hardly 'poor' unless you're an idiot with blinders on.

Poor standard of education, check

Again, are you fucking kidding me? Not at the top of the heap, sure. Poor? Thats just ridiculous. Sure we want to do better, but we're still one of the top dogs.

Poor standard of living, heading that way

Maybe you should actually visit a country that has a poor standard of living. Go to any small town in Mexico away from a tourist spot. Visit Ethiopia. Visit Somalia. This are just the first countries that came to my mind, I'm sure there are at least a hundred more that could be used as examples of poor standard of living, America is no where near that list. Get out of your house at least once before you make such retarded statements.

Poor standard of internet service, double check

Ahhh, humor. I missed it by seeing the others mod you insightful. Sorry. After seeing that I'm now sure you can not possibly be serious. You must be, right, since anyone living in a 3rd world country is more likely concerned with eating and living than playing WoW.

We're pretty good at pretty much everything. Perhaps not the best at anything, but this sort of crap is just silly. Go live somewhere that actually sucks for any period of time and get some perspective. I suggest Chahuatian, Mexico. There people drink from the same river they wash their cloths in, the animals defecate in, and all the fertilizer enriched run off from the farms upstreams drains into. They eat goat, that was stored directly after gutting it, by hanging it from a tree in the hot sun, gathering flies. You can help make their health care system better there as giving them a box of sterile band-aids would probably be the closest thing these people see to medical supplies for years. Bring your sat phone with internet access and a PC and you'll be able to give an infinite improvement to their Internet access, better bring lots of batteries though seeing as how they don't have any electricity. That, is 3rd world. Something you've obviously never seen.

Re:Yes and No

[commodore64_love]

>>>We rank #27 in number of hospital beds per capita.

Isn't that generally a good thing? It means we're healthier and don't need to lie in hospital beds. Oh, and I don't know where people come-up with that $4000 figure. I spent about $100 on health last year, and that was just to get my teeth cleaned. Who the hell spends four thousand dollars every year??? Probably the same idiots who bought $400,000 homes they couldn't afford.

Americans are addicted to spending; they need to learn to pull back and stop wasting money foolishly.

Re:Yes and No

[Achromatic1978]

My wife and I combined spend $6,100 a year (although 80% of it is reimbursed by my employer) for health "insurance" (cast back through my comment history to find what I think of this, and why I wrapped insurance in quotation marks)... Looking at ehealthinsurance.com, I could see it as a very accurate figure - the figure came from the WHO.

Re:Yes and No

[TexNA55]

And did we mention the "quality" internet connections available for those who live in rural areas?

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

I have relatives that live in a portion of the US with 70%+ unemployment, ignoring drug producers.

Infections caused by tooth decay is an actual cause of death here.

Only a dozen people have starved to death this year, it is farm country.

There is one store, and it's a gas station. They have cereal, milk, diet coke, and some kind of meat, depending on the week.

95% of the students do not get highschool diplomas. They only have 1 graduation reunion for everyone that went to highschool, because the graduates of a region of 20,000 can all fit in the gym.

Everyone has 0 health coverage, except for the manager of the local fastfood joint. State provided health coverage is entirely useless, as it requires them to drive 4 hours, while the nearest medical facility is only 2 hours away.

While everyone has working electricity, probably half get it only during winter, because they've been cut off for non-payment.

There is no cable, but everyone has a working phone line, if they can afford it, so that's a plus. I think they can get about 9600 bps, but every ISP is long distance.

I tried setting them up with a cellphone for data, but since Verizon canned analog CDMA they only get signal if they stand on the aforementioned water tower.

Other than "downtown"(ie, right under the water tower), they're usually on a water boil alert for the wells. You can almost taste the fertilizer.

Can you guess which part of the US they live in, it must be pretty damn rare.

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

I can has Irony?

GGP links to an ambigously worded wikipedia page, can't GP have some fun with it without you going off on her/him? S/He didn't even claim the US was third world, just headed that way.

Obviously, you feel guilty about your excess good fortune. Maybe you should move somewhere with diptheria?

Re:Yes and No

[beav007]

I don't think we call invading other countries "globalisation"...

Re:Yes and No

[Zerth]

Yes, the post was trollish reply to the original poster.

I do not think the US is a third world country, which is why I stated "3rd world here we come" instead of "3rd world, here we are".

Is the Andes mountains sufficiently 3rd world for you? There are places in Appalachia that are almost that bad. I've met people that have neither phone, nor electrical service, nor running water. Nominally, there is assistance for such people, but they aren't getting it, whether from ignorance, apathy, or choice.

I once delivered a package whose instructions included "turn off the paved road", but also "stop your car, walk 10 minutes to the GPS coordinates, leave it on the stump, don't try to make smalltalk - you won't be able to understand the accent".

I think the US is by far and away one of the better places to live, but that is only a generality. There are exceptions that would freak many people out. Hell I don't even believe this AC. But there are places near where I live that have hit 40%+ unemployment, so it might be just because I'm afraid it's true.

PS, nice music in your sig.

Re:Yes and No

[Simetrical]

Crappy economy, check.
Industrialization outsourced, check
Poor standard of health, check
Poor standard of education, check
Poor standard of living, heading that way
Poor standard of internet service, double check

Compared to, say, China? India? Africa? Are you kidding? Everyone in America is well-off compared to most of the world's population, even the large majority of people who are unemployed in the worst recession since the Great Depression. That's how rich we are. Americans' pets have better health care than a lot of people in the world do.

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you've never been to the third world.

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

Third World is a categorical label used to describe states that are considered to be underdeveloped in terms of their economy or level of industrialization, globalization, standard of living, health, education or other criteria for 'advancements'.

Crappy economy, check.
Industrialization outsourced, check
Poor standard of health, check
Poor standard of education, check
Poor standard of living, heading that way
Poor standard of internet service, double check

We are pretty good on globalization, but other than that, 3rd world here we come.

I think it would be worth taking a look at the degree to which we experience each problem in the U.S.

Crappy economy - Still the dominant economy in the world.
Industrialization outsourced - ok, yes
Poor standard of health - better than 3/4 of the world
Poor standard of education - also better than 3/4 of the world. The top 20% of US students are the best in the world, according to the Ted talk Bill Gates recently gave.
Poor standard of living - What is "heading that way" supposed to mean? When you move out of your house into a hut in the middle of a desert, you can say things are heading that way.
Poor standard of internet service - Should not even be a criteria.

I know you were trying to make a point and pandering for karma, but seriously, its like you have no idea what true poverty, poor education, and poor health are.

Also, just to be semantic, 3rd world does not automatically refer to a country of low economic status. The phrase was created after WWII. First world was the US and its allies, Second world was the Soviets and their allies, Third world was anyone else, which almost invariably referred to poorly developed nations but is by no means exclusive to them.

Re:Yes and No

[Zerth]

Also, just to be semantic, 3rd world does not automatically refer to a country of low economic status. The phrase was created after WWII. First world was the US and its allies, Second world was the Soviets and their allies, Third world was anyone else, which almost invariably referred to poorly developed nations but is by no means exclusive to them.

Your point is my point. The GP used it as an indicator of socioeconomic status and P said it wasn't intended to be so, but linked to a page with the above criteria in the first paragraph, so I was razzing them for it. I was not originally making a serious point about the state of the US, although apparently it should have been, considering the responses.

It's interesting what hits close to home these days, I need to start using the </humor> tag.

Re:Yes and No

[indi0144]

There are no CAPS in the ISP's of third world countries, (maybe fixed data plans but not CAPS) neither P2P throttling, neither RIA*, neither snooping unless you are doing illegal pixels. Those are problems were the demand it's high I guess. But thanks for caring.

Re:Yes and No

[indi0144]

Nah I for one don't feel insulted. But your education is indeed bad.

You can pick a random peasant here and ask about wheres X country and at least he would know the correct continent. We normally don't use calculators, all our daily math is done mentally. We know how valuable is to know English so we care to learn it even outside school. Old people is very inclined to learn to use a PC and they normally succeed. Most of third world countries have state sponsored technical education. Our free educated technicians are more valuable for everyone than private college graduates.

Maybe because education really matters here, is the only thing that can help you to get afloat. Is not a luxury and is not just for the sake of a diploma in the wall.

Re:Yes and No

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, to Comcast, that's only worth about 150GB to them.

Re:Yes and No

[Rob Kaper]

Oh, and I don't know where people come-up with that $4000 figure. I spent about $100 on health last year, and that was just to get my teeth cleaned. Who the hell spends four thousand dollars every year???

The people with MS, cancer, HIV, lupus, Alzheimer, Parkinson, diabetes, kids with Down syndrome, those who are hospitalised for sustained periods after unfortunate incidents..

Indeed, what kind of idiot can afford those diseases.

Re:Yes and No

[Magic5Ball]

To claim that we are in a third world state (or even close to it) is an insult to people who actually live in third-world countries.

You're right. Parts of the third-world would never stand for the conditions we have in the west.

I just spent a week with a family in los Alcarrizos outside Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic where the residents routinely experience such hardships as:
* complaints about wait times rising to two hours to get seen by a doctor in a bed at the local hospital
* hiring a private taxi for a day for 500 Dominican pesos (US$15)
* almost door to door public transport between any two points in a 25 km-wide city for $0.80 in 30 minutes
* 24 hour* medical clinics within a 300 m walk from any residence (*the doctor living inside will wake up if you ring their cell phone)
* fresh produce and meat vendors within 50 m of any residence, with door to door service, at around US$1.50 per pound
* Free K-8 education within 150 m of any residence, free 9-11 education slightly further away. Their post-secondary fees are only 50% subsidized by the government, unlike Canada which pays for 67%.
* collaborative communities where doors are not only unlocked, but wide open during daylight and welcoming to all visitors
* easily extensible and reusable structures built around open standards (cinder blocks, rebar and cement) that grow with the community
* streets around schools that are closed to car traffic during the day

The down side:
* probabilistic electricity means sometimes all there is to do is talk to friends and neighbours, or fire up the generator for the sound system at the community building for a spontaneous block party
* probabilistic mains water and potable water by truck means that you have to plan and pay attention to resource usage, and that you have to understand sanitation and cooking
* the need for a guard tower at the U.S.-style supermarket which charges U.S. prices for articles of inferior flavor and nutritional value
* toddlers and pets get fed at the neighbours without your knowledge until after the fact
* the need for mosquito netting around the bed at night
* life expectancy 10% less than in Canada
* structural inability to participate in global recession

Overall, the place and lifestyle reminded me of growing up in the slums here in a Canadian city of over 1 million people, except that S.D. feels safer and civic services are more accessible.

Re:Yes and No

[Magic5Ball]

Poor standard of education - also better than 3/4 of the world. The top 20% of US students are the best in the world, according to the Ted talk Bill Gates recently gave.

Let's ignore that India and China each have more genius-level children than the U.S. has children. Ask why only the top 20% of U.S. students are the best in the world.

I feel sorry for the Google group members

[ishmalius]

Inner Fence's attempt to deflect criticism by redirecting complaints to http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-help-text-messaging/topics is so unfair to the honest service users who were already there. People who really need, or offer information or help are being buried in an avalanche of whiny tripe.

So Inner Fence has punished another group of people, this time innocent.

Re:Question for iPhone users

[Anonymous Coward]

This is outrageous!!! somebody needs to ban anonymous cowards from posting this shit!

Walls are free?

[nurb432]

Well, that is a new one to me. Last time i got a set of walls i had to pay for them.

It's free because ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google benefits from servicing "free" SMS just like a market research trial benefits from giving away swag for filling out a survey. On the surface, google can analyze SMS sending patterns paired with geographical locations (towers). The real gold mine is in data mining the actual SMS data. You have access to a thousands of peoples daily conversations in text form. You could easily correlate this with the geographical data and local news to rate stories maybe even see where Friday nights party is going to be. American Idol winners can be calculated before they are announced. I don't even want to think about how this data could be used politically. So ya, information isn't cost free.

Complaints abour financial harm from a FoxNews fan

[FatSean]

You're funny dude. Hilarious.

Laws are legal.

Gosh

[Derrikex]

maybe it DOES cost ~$0.20 per SMS to run those servers. Who knew?!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Well-Tivo.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, because OSS developers are always whining, and shutting down their software, everytime someone makes money from their product.

Oh wait, they don't. In fact, Open Source explicitly allows, by definition, other people to make money from it."

Or changing the 'definition'.

Re:Well-Tivo.

[mdwh2]

The problem there wasn't people making money out of it, it was using hardware to restrict people's freedom. Thus they decided to write a new licence to take account of that. In particular, previous licences won't be changed, so it's still not true that they "shut down their software" (if you have something released under GPL v2, you can continue to use it under that licence).

SMS and system load

[King_TJ]

I largely agree with you, although I've also read a counter-argument from a telco engineer where he claims the SMS messaging rides over a "control" channel that's also used for sending digits when placing calls on the cellular network, communicating with phones about switching towers, etc. etc.

As SMS traffic increases, the control channels get full and it starts impacting quality of service for the carrier -- so they do have *some* validity behind the rationale of charging users for texting.

Re:SMS and system load

[Anonymous Coward]

So open up the SMS service for TCP access by smart phones... Don't send the SMS messages via the control channel except to old dumb phones...

Geez this is the Internet... we DO know how to move bits around. That's what convergence is all about.

Until then I'll continue to consider SMS pricing a cash cow..

I Still Have Working "Infinite SMS"

[meehawl]

It's called SERO.

All things must pass...

Re:I Still Have Working "Infinite SMS"

[MistrBlank]

Yeah, but you're on Sprint's crappy network. I can't even get service standing next to one of their active network towers.

It's your service that is free

[ClosedSource]

Slashdot is a free service in the sense that we don't get paid to provide the content.

Friend, you have NO idea

[Anonymous Coward]

at all what poor standards on health, education and living are like. We in the Eastern Europe ("2nd world") had it relatively easy compared to the third world, and it still sucked. The US was and is ahead by leaps and bounds. To claim otherwise is not only ignorant but actually offensive to the rest of the world.

ipv6 solution to the sms charges

[Anonymous Coward]

Develop app's and a freesms clearing house to route SMS messages to customers via ipv6.

Course how's it different from email. I'm sure even this app did not actually receive SMS messages in real time unless they were forwarded to the cell company to be delivered thus only one side of the SMS equation was free. AT&T even charges for delivery against the quotas.

Re:Well, Google HAD a business model!

[foniksonik]

Yes, but at least for now, it's only available for an iPhone - where SMS is not a profit mechanism (at least not in the way other plans had it set up). Additionally other providers are starting to offer unlimited SMS plans in exchange for customer loyalty... so the SMS profit model will be drying up soon anyways.

Re:Complaints abour financial harm from a FoxNews

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh!

This is Apples Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

This product is built for Apples product, why does Google have to deal with the bandwidth ?
Next time someone makes a app for Apples iPhone, it should use Apples servers.
Leave Google out of it.

I've got an easy fix for you

[Morinaga]

If you believe in the WHO rankings and I'm sure you do then a cheap ticket to Canada will afford you better care. I encourage you to embrace the UN rankings and try them out. Or, if you prefer you can take a bit of a longer trip to Columbia, according to the UN they are fantastic. Sure, you're taking a pretty big leap of faith when indexing your preferences based on the disability mortality rates via the UN from a report nearly 10 years ago. And sure, you're kind of taking a chance on using the widely publisized Overall Performance (OP) rannkings for your trip instead of the Overall Attainment (OA). And sure, it's kind of strange that WHO could do a study in 2000 but now they won't because it's too complicated. So, my advice is NOT to pay your $510 a month. Emergency rooms will take anyone regardless of medical coverage (some might call it forced National Health Care as you were actually paying for that guaranteed coverage with part of your $510...but I digress). When you're stable, get a flight to your highest rank WHO country and breath a sigh of relief.

YMMV

[meehawl]

I'd get your phone checked. I use mine occasionally as a WiFi access point and am able to download torrents at close to 1 Mbps. I also like it for streaming, Skype, and Microsoft Portrait (video VOIP).

I drove NY->Cali last year and used a 3G Sprint phone (HTC Titan) as a music player, hooked up to the line-in on the mp3 player.

I used mainly Resco Radio (Windows Mobile software that aggregates a lot of streaming radio stations) and Last.FM as music sources. It worked okay. Even in the middle of 2G-only areas, I was able to select the lowest bandwidth streamers and still get acceptable playback.

As a bonus I was able to tether my phone at various stops to my laptop for Internet, and do video conferencing along the way. All this, plus voice, for $30/month. Sprint rules, for me anyway.