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Comment Re:Correlation (Score 2, Interesting) 570

In some parts of the world, notably the North American continent, one cannot expect SMS between carriers to work properly; there are many missing routes, including where there is a route from carrier A to carrier B but not from B to A so you can't get a reply to your SMS. Also even when it works it can be very slow, transit times of hours are within my experience.
It's not like Europe where SMS can be expected to work so well that it effectively always works and is fast.
Of course the North American telcos still charge you for your SMS when it disappears into hyperspace because their network isn't configured properly, but I'm sure you all expected that.

Comment There's infrastructure as well as bandwidth (Score 1) 570

While it is true that SMS is carried in the control channel of GSM [1] and that control channel has reserved bandwidth not available for voice call channels, it is also true that heavy SMS traffic will saturate this control channel and that some carriers have had to increase the control channel bandwidth in order to make room for the volume of SMS. You can observe the control channel saturation (and resulting inability to set up new calls, while existing calls continue fine) in any major city in the UK from around 23:45 on 31 December to 00:30 on 1st January. So the carriers do have to put a bit more bandwidth into lots of SMS.
However there is also an SMS messaging centre to operate, which is a pile of computers to route messages, as well as storage on each cell base station for the SMS waiting to be transmitted to the handset - rather like email it's too cheap to meter, except for all those mail servers you need to forward and store the email.
The profit margin on SMS is clearly huge (consider that bulk SMS rates are at most half the cost of single SMS out-of-plan from a handset in the UK) but it's not 100% profit and 0% cost.

And finally, think about spam: the reason you don't get much SMS spam (compared to email) is that it costs quite a lot to send SMS compared to email. If you make SMS as cheap as email, you'll make it as spammy as email, and you need to think about how to avoid that.

[1] I'm going to ignore CDMA here, I wish the rest of the world would do the same.

Comment Missing some market leaders (Score 3, Insightful) 170

This is an interesting test, but some market leaders are missing, notably Trend (El Reg quotes Gartner saying Trend has 13.8% market share, third after Symantec and McAfree). If I am to use this research to pick a solution or to pick a better solution, the chances are high that someone in the management is going to "suggest" (try to make me use...) "Trend" because they've heard of it; if they suggest "McAfee" I can use this research to shoot that down, but not Trend.
Meanwhile, to bang the open source drum, they also didn't test Clam AV. I don't know Clam's market share, but I have to say I like it a lot for its ease of integration into my UNIXy infrastructure compared to the commercial ones I've tried, and I consider it worth testing because of its different development methodology with undoubtedly different strengths and weaknesses compared to the big commercial AV vendors.
So it's all very interesting but not entirely useful to me.

Security

Alarm Raised On Teenage Hackers 213

Arno Igne writes to tell us that the number of underage participants in "high-tech" crimes has risen steeply in recent history. Reporting children as young as 11 swapping credit card details and asking for hacks, many are largely unskilled and thus more likely to get caught and arrested. "Communities and forums spring up where people start to swap malicious programs, knowledge and sometimes stolen data. Some also look for exploits and virus code that can be run against the social networking sites popular with many young people. Some then try to peddle or use the details or accounts they net in this way. Mr Boyd said he spent a lot of time tracking down the creators of many of the nuisance programs written to exploit users of social networking sites and the culprit was often a teenager."

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