“How can I send SMS text messages from my application for free?” I see this question asked so frequently on forums that I decided a few months back to do some research on it, and was surprised to learn of a little-known service most mobile carriers provide absolutely free.

GFI FAXmaker for Exchange/SMTP excels in its seamless integration with your mail server. This allows users to send and receive faxes and SMS/text messages directly from their email client, making GFI FAXmaker easy to use and learn. Leveraging your email infrastructure and Active Directory also allows for unparalleled scalability, reliability and hassle-free administration.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

*I am icily determined to watch this, no matter how stunningly boring it is.
I’ve known for a long time that stunning boredom is the secret weapon of
European integration. Europe succeeds precisely by being so entirely and
utterly boring that the world’s most fractious and warlike peoples are, like…
huh? What were you saying? Cucumbers? We freakin’ firebombed Dresden
and you’re talking about cucumbers now?

*That’s right, Hans, Francois, Giuseppe. You did firebomb Dresden and, that’s why
you’ve been sentenced to sixty solid years (and counting) of cucumber regulations.
And it works, too.

*And now the SWEDES are at the wheel. The world’s best-organized,
most tedious socialists. Guess what: in a sudden, daring move, the Swedes ease
up on the cucumbers:

http://se2009.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/a-good-day-for-consumers/

“A good day for consumers
“2009/07/01

“On this very first day of the Swedish EU presidency, there has been a lot of improvements for consumers across Europe.

Starting 1 July, prices on sending SMS and web surf will be drastically reduced for anyone using a mobile phone in another Member State. The competition on the internal market has not worked well in this case, and that’s why we really need common regulations.

“I am also glad that we won’t have to pay a 14 per cent import duty for multi-functional mobile phones imported to the European Union. They will still be defined as mobile phones even with a GPS or a MP3-player integrated.

“As from today, we can also buy ‘crooked’ cucumbers. Few consumers have experienced that crooked cucumbers constitute a true cross-border problem. I am therefore delighted that this famous regulation, that has been the very symbol of euroscepticism in many countries, has finally been removed.”

*I dunno how much of this I can take. It’s beaten better men than me.

Thanks to this week’s advertisers and partners for enabling us to bring you the latest social media news and resources. We’re particularly inspired by those brands that are engaging with our readers as part of our Twitter Brand Sponsors program: Mashable’s sponsors are as social media savvy as our readers!

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This week, our valued sponsors are Clickatell, Vivvo CMS, Influxis, EdgeCast, Microsoft BizSpark, MailChimp, Sun Startup Essentials, YieldSoftware, Eventbrite, Behance, and Livestream.

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Behance is on a mission to organize the creative world. The Behance Network is the leading online platform for creative professionals to showcase their work and develop their careers. The Action Method (actionmethod.com) is a revolutionary “action management” tool that is replacing traditional project management applications across industries.

Livestream democratizes television on a global scale. The technology provides a highly effective, easy to use TV studio, with the power to create live original programming, controlled by users, and embeddable on any website. Livestream has introduced several new groundbreaking innovations, in addition to paying homage to traditional TV, and has even bigger plans for innovation and interactivity on its roadmap.

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Security researcher Charlie Miller has revealed that Apple is working on a patch for a security flaw he identified in the iPhone's SMS implementation. The flaw can actually lead to arbitrary code execution, as he explained to Ars last month. Miller hasn't yet detailed the flaw, citing an agreement with Apple, though he and partner Vincenzo Iozzo plan to detail their discovery later this month at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.

During a presentation at the SyScan security conference in Singapore, Miller explained that a vulnerability in the iPhone's handling of SMS messages makes it possible to send code instead of strictly text. Despite SMS's 140 byte size limitation, the iPhone can reassemble larger messages that are broken up to fit the limitation, which allows larger programs to be sent. The iPhone can be instructed to execute SMS data as code instead of text, and when it executes the code it does so with root privileges and without any interaction from the user.

Security researcher Charlie Miller has revealed that Apple is working on a patch for a security flaw he identified in the iPhone's SMS implementation. The flaw can actually lead to arbitrary code execution, as he explained to Ars last month. Miller hasn't yet detailed the flaw, citing an agreement with Apple, though he and partner Vincenzo Iozzo plan to detail their discovery later this month at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas.

During a presentation at the SyScan security conference in Singapore, Miller explained that a vulnerability in the iPhone's handling of SMS messages makes it possible to send code instead of strictly text. Despite SMS's 140 byte size limitation, the iPhone can reassemble larger messages that are broken up to fit the limitation, which allows larger programs to be sent. The iPhone can be instructed to execute SMS data as code instead of text, and when it executes the code it does so with root privileges and without any interaction from the user.

Parece que hoy en día todos podemos tener problemas con los piratas informáticos, incluso los usuarios de teléfonos móviles y por supuesto el iPhone no es ninguna excepción.

Charles Miller (experto en seguridad de MAC OS X) acaba de anunciar que se ha descubierto un importante fallo de seguridad en el software del iPhone y más concretamente en el apartado de mensajería de texto (SMS). Este problema se ha calificado de grave, ya que podría afectar a cualquier usuario y no tendríamos posibilidad de defendernos.

Según parece el iPhone es capaz de ejecutar código binario que se reciba a través de SMS. Todo el código recibido a través de este sistema es ejecutado directamente y no necesita de autorización por parte del usuario, además se podrían recibir varios SMS con código por lo que se podrían llegar a ejecutar grandes programas.

Apple, junto con Miller, ya están trabajando en una solución para este problema y se espera que este mismo mes tengamos disponible algún tipo de parche que corrija este grave problema.

Vía | AppleInsider

Brando vient d’annoncer une nouvelle petite enceinte USB sans prétention mais qui est plutôt sympathique si vous aimez être dans le noir. Avec une batterie interne rechargeable, vous pourrez l’utiliser avec n’importe quelle source sonore via sa prise jack de 3,5mm, le tout dans 87×60x60mm pour 113g. Comptez 15$.

• Yamaha NX-U10 (0)
• Un tonneau de son (4)
• Targus Portable Speaker Book (1)
• Samsung SMS-M1000 (6)
• M. et Mme Radio Speaker (0)

Happy Fourth of July all! A lovely day filled with fireworks and usually a day off of work (in the US, anyway). It’s also the anniversary of CSS-Tricks. It’s been two years now. It actually feels like it’s been longer than that sometimes, just because of how far the site and myself have come. Last year we didn’t do anything special, but I thought this year we’d kick it up a notch and celebrate a little harder. That’s right, it’s giveaway time!

Check out the prizes below. If you want to enter, the only requirement is to fill out this survey. (Notice the form is a Wufoo form, one of the prizes!). Winners will be picked totally at random. Of course provide your real name and real email address on the form so I can reach you if you win.

Today, I am literally on the road in a UHAUL truck moving from Portland, OR to Chicago, IL. Portland is an incredible city, I’m just moving to be a bit closer to family and friends and for a change of scenery. Please forgive me if the posts are light for the next few weeks while I settle in.

Because of the move, I’m gonna need a little time. I’m going to close the survey July 16th and announce the winners on July 17th.

Ya’ll probably know I’m a big Wufoo fan, so I’m very pleased that someone is going to snag a free account for a year. The bona fide plan is what I personally use both for my personal account and our account at work.

Even if you already know how to convert Photoshop designs into code, it sure is nice to save yourself all the time by having someone else do it. Snobby slice is donating their own time to one lucky winner winner who will get a high quality 2-page slicing.

Packt has books on all kinds of subjects. My personal favorite is the Learning jQuery 1.3 book, but I’m thinking about picking up the Magento book, for next time I need to work on a major eCommerce site. Three people will will a PDF of any of their books.

I advocate, especially for beginners, that downloading templates and customizing/altering them is a great way to learn HTML/CSS. It also can be a real time and budget saver for you and your potential low-budget clients. Flash Mint is giving away three free CSS templates to three winners.

Flipping Book makes an extremely cool Flash component for displaying interactive booklets. These aren’t substitutes for entire websites, but rather a cool way to present things like PDFs, brochures, or books. We just used it at work recently to display a PDF we did for a client on their website. Two winners will win the compontent of their choice.

StayValid literally crawls your site looking for validation errors in the code. What better way to stay on top of errors on websites and their ever-changing ways. Two winners here, one for their premium plan and one for the basic plan.

Are My Sites Up watches your website for you. If it goes down, you’ll be notified by any methods of your choice: Email, SMS, Twitter, or the iPhone application. Two winners will receive the Premium Pro service for a full year.

Enter to Win

Get your hot and fresh design and development links at Script & Style!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Different markets have different needs for marketing products or services. We all know that much. But that doesn’t take away the weirdness of a company like Google advertising its core product (online search) by using ink that was printed on paper.

Guilty of this hideous crime (I kid, I kid) is Google India, who apparently ordered some targeted quarter-page advertisements to appear in a variety of city supplements of The Times Of India, the leading English-language daily newspaper in the country.

According to PluGGd.in - who we can also credit for taking the picture of the ad - this isn’t exactly the first time Google India has advertised services in dead tree form. They apparently also ran a print campaign to promote the company’s SMS search service back in November 2008.

But this could well be the first time the Internet behemoth feels the need to pimp its search service in print. Or is it?

Have you ever heard about other countries where Google advertises its search engine in printed publications? Let us know in comments.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Die Gefahr kann in einer harmlos aussehenden SMS-Nachricht lauern, warnt Charlie Miller. Der renommierte Sicherheitsexperte hat bereits in der Vergangenheit verschiedene Schwachstellen in Apple-Software entdeckt und die Öffentlichkeit über mögliche Bedrohungen informiert. Demnach soll es im aktuellen iPhone OS 3.0 möglich sein, Binärcode per SMS an das iPhone zu schicken, der wiederum von dem Handy ungefragt ausgeführt wird. Auch Root-Zugriffe sollen damit sogar möglich sein. Mehr Details wollte Miller aufgrund einer Vereinbarung mit Apple allerdings nicht verraten. Man arbeite jedoch bereits an einem Patch, der das Problem in Kürze beheben soll. Ob es dafür ein separates Update (aus der Reihe quasi) geben wird oder Apple die Schwachstelle erst in der nächsten Firmware-Version 3.1 beheben wird, ist nicht bekannt.

In einem Interview mit dem IT-Portal “The Register” wurde der Experte dann doch noch konkreter – und ruderte mit seinem Statement ein wenig zurück. Demnach könne man die entdeckte Sicherheitslücke noch nicht zum Ausführen von Schadcode nutzen. Derzeit führe der Versuch, einen Binärcode per SMS an das iPhone zu schicken, zu einem unweigerlichen Absturz des iPhone-Betriebssystems. Das Potenzial für einen möglichen Missbrauch dieser Schwachstelle sei dennoch enorm.

Eine Warnung gab der Experte auch den Nutzern eines geknackten Apple-Handys mit auf den Weg. Der Grund: Der Jailbreak umgehe rund 80 Prozent der Sicherheitstechniken des iPhone OS und mache diese Geräte für einen Angriff deutlich anfälliger. Nutzer, die Wert auf Sicherheit legen, sollten deshalb von einem Jailbreak absehen.

Via: fsckblog

(Michael Friedrichs)

It’s a long weekend and you’re happy because you’ll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required - just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.

There’s no magic here, it’s the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you’re AFK (Away From Keyboard).

Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security.

Protecting the account means that you prevent other users from reading your tweets which in this case are email commands that you sending to the computer. To protect your Twitter profile, log in to Twitter with the credentials you want to use, click Settings and check the box next to "Protect my Updates".

Let’s get started. Install the TweetMyPC utility of your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).

Now that your basic configuration is done, it’s time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.

By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twitter@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer. (Also see: Post to Twitter via Email)

By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.

By IM: Add the Twitter bot - twitter@twitter.com - to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.

By Web:If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.

While the TweetMyPC is pretty good for shutting down a remote computer, it lets you do some more awesome stuff as well.

For instance, you need to download an unfinished presentation from the office computer so that you can work on it at home. Or you want to download a trial copy of Windows 7 on the Office computer while you are at home.

Here’s a partial list of commands that you can use to remote control the PC - they’re case-insensitive and, as discussed above, you can send them to Twitter via email, SMS, IM or the web.

Screenshot : This is one of the most useful command I’ve come across after the shutdown command. Want to know what’s happening within the confines of your PC when you’re not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to the web (see example).

ShutDown, LogOff, Reboot, Lock : The function of these useful commands is pretty obvious from their names.

Standby, Hibernate : Don’t want to shutdown the remote PC? Save power by entering standby mode with this command. Or hibernate your PC with a tweet, thereby saving even more power.

Download <url> : You can download any file from the Internet on to the remote computer using the download command. For instance, a command like download http://bit.ly/tCJ9Y will download the CIA Handbook so you have the document ready when you resume work the next day.

GetFile <filepath> : The Download command was for downloading files from the Internet onto the remote computer. However, if you like to transfer a file from the remote computer to your current computer, use the GetFile command. It takes the full page of the file that you want to download and will send that you as an email attachment. If you don’t know the file page, use the command GetFileList <drivename> to get a list of file folders on that drive.

GetProcessList : This is like a remote task manager. You’ll get a list of programs that are currently running on the remote computer along with their process IDs. Send another command kill <process id> to terminate any program that you think is suspicious or not required.

Conclusion:

TweetMyPC is a must-have utility and you never know when you may need it. And if you have been trying to stay away from Twitter all this time, the app gives you a big reason to at least create one protected account on Twitter.

That said, there’s scope for improvement. For instance, the app will wait for a minute to check for new messages in your Twitter stream so it’s not "instant". The developers can actually increase that limit because the Twitter API now allows upto 100 checks per hour.

And since the app is dependent on Twitter and Gmail, it will not work during those rare fail-whale moments.

Related: Twitter Guide: How to Do Everything with Twitter

How to Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

À peine le firmware 3.0 disponible, que déjà les rumeurs repartent de plus belle concernant la prochaine mise à jour majeure du système d’exploitation - des rumeurs qui se basent sur les nombreux brevets publiés ces derniers temps !

Le premier concerne des jeux de préférences qui changeraient selon le lieu et l’utilisation faite de l’iPhone, grâce aux nombreux capteurs de position et de mouvements, du GPS, de la boussole, etc. On peut imaginer que le mobile, en entrant dans un hôpital, baisserait automatiquement le son sans que l’utilisateur ait à le demander.

Autre brevet, la possibilité de programmer des actions, par exemple l’envoi d’un SMS sur le portable d’un ami pour fêter son anniversaire. Il sera également possible de demander le reroutage des appels vers sa boîte vocale, par exemple entre 14 et 18 heures.

Évidemment, tout cela est bien sérieux. Heureusement, un troisième brevet fait état des recherches d’Apple concernant une fonction de... karaoké ! Ouais, ça c’est du cauchemar.

Apple arbeitet derzeit daran, eine schwere Sicherheitslücke in der Nachrichten-Applikation des iPhone OS zu beseitigen und plant, noch im Juli ein entsprechendes Update zu veröffentlichen. Dies gab der Sicherheitsspezialist Charlie Miller, der sich wegen einer Vereinbarung mit Apple nur grob zu den Details äußern wollte, im Rahmen einer Konferenz bekannt.