links for 2008-12-01

• SMS 411: How to send email to a phone
  'Most carriers have "SMS gateways" which take email messages from the Internet and deliver them to their customers' cell phones as SMS text messages. The trick is that you need to know what carrier the recipient's phone is on -- it's not enough to know their phone number. That's because the carrier determines what the email address of the receiving phone is going to be. For example, Cingular phones' address are all "something@cingularme.com" while Verizon phones are "something@vtext.com."'
  (tags: sockitoo Web2.0)
• Burton Group Identity Blog: The Limited Liability Persona
  'We're in a new age of exploration now - the Terra Incognita we're exploring is the Internet. It's a risky place. You could lose your identity, your privacy, even your bank account. In this new age of exploration, we need a way to invest a little of ourselves in an online venture (a purchase, say, or an online game, or maybe a social network) without taking the chance of losing everything. But individuals, who bear a lot of the risk in this new world, don't have many liability limitation tools available to them. This means, among other things, that when individuals deal with corporations online, the corporations assume less liability than the individuals do - a relational asymmetry which creates risks...'
  (tags: society+and+culture information+security identity)
• You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? - NYTimes.com
  'Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize. But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of. '
  (tags: scenario+planning information+security society+and+culture)
• Three Hypotheses of User Interface Design
  'I'm calling these hypotheses instead of laws because they have yet to be proven out through rigrous scientific study and critique. I've developed them merely from anecdotes and examples. However if these hypotheses survive the harsh critiques of PhDs with larger brains (and attention spans) who subject such assertions to sufficient controlled (reproduceable) experiments, then perhaps future generations may see fit to call them "laws". '
  (tags: Web2.0 design usability hci)
• I0: the evolving "Internet of things"
  'The Internet is appearing everywhere. Phones speak it, appliances process it, coffee shops and even coffee pots serve it. But we'll be doomed if your coffee pot demands the services of an IT department. As remarkable as its growth has been, Internet implementations that were appropriate for mainframes are not for connecting everything everywhere. Yet there are compelling reasons for a light bulb to have Internet access, ranging from construction economics to energy efficiency to architectural expression. Accomplishing this with the cost and complexity expected for installing and maintaining a light bulb rather than a mainframe raises surprisingly fundamental questions about the nature of scalable system design. The success of the Internet rests on the invention of "internetworking" across unlike networks; the Internet zero (I0) project is extending this insight to enable "interdevice internetworking" of unlike devices.'
  (tags: Internet+of+things ubicomp)
• uwnews.org | Future of social networking explored in UW's computer science building | University of Washington News and Information
  'If you need information, the Internet offers a wealth of resources. But if you're hunting down a person or a thing, a computer's not much help. That may soon change. Electronic tags promise to create what some call the "Internet of things," in which objects and people are connected through a virtual network. To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington's computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting. '
  (tags: social+networks research ubicomp)