Saturday, November 04, 2006

Mobile Telephone Evidence

SMS texts to audio - mobile to landlines

For those for you who are unaware, SMS messages can now be sent to landline telephones by dialling a landline destination number. The landline telephone receiving the message does not need to have text capability to read the messages. Instead, the text messages are translated and
converted into audio speech. Whilst this seems a good idea, some problems envisaged at this stage are raised.


1. Extensive testing has not been conducted yet, so it has not been possible at the moment to identify whether any corruption in the translation will occur. For example, text-slang such as: L8TR (later), LOL (laughing our loud) and such like may not be converted. Moreover, use of such characters to make a statement e.g. [ : - ) to form ] may equally suffer in any translation, if it is possible for the network to decode such characters at all.

2. Additionally, according to the network announcement, the network operator only saves the message for one day. Potentially, this may hamper any investigation for messages received by the called party. This brief retention period may disappoint a lot of users too if the receiving party is away for several days. However, as mobile-to-mobile texts messages are stored for between 5 to 8 days at the SMS service centre platform this new service does not suggest the calling party's
message can't be retrieved.

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