Who’s Reading Your Cell’s Text Messages?, from eWeek [via Slashdot]
Bubrouski, a computer science major at Northeastern University in Boston, is the proud owner of ‘Null@vtext.com,’ an account on the popular Verizon text messaging service…
“I started getting phantom text messages with no callback number and an empty ‘From:’ field,” Bubrouski wrote.
For example, text messages… told Bubrouski that “A student at 4105704297 has just completed Princeton Review Word Set 1 with a score of 71%.”
A message… informed him that “A user at 7325894169 has not responded to his/her 01:45 PM dose of Pronestyl-SR.”
The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring–the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity–he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.
Ah Bubrouski! Ah humanity!