Il existe pourtant une solution pour communiquer à moindre frais, se munir d'un "e-mailer", à savoir un appareil qui n’a qu’une seule fonction : envoyer et recevoir des mails. Disponible en Suisse depuis peu, il se nomme Peek et ressemble un peu à un Blackberry, en plus mince et plus stylé.

Emily Turrettini pour Les Quotidiennes

PewResearchCenter on adults, cell phones and texting:

Texting by adults has increased over the past nine months from 65% of adults sending and receiving texts in September 2009 to 72% texting in May 2010.

Adults who text typically send and receive a median of 10 texts a day; teens who text send and receive a median of 50 texts per day.

5% of all adult texters send more than 200 text messages a day or more than 6,000 texts a month.

Heavy adult texters -- those who send and receive more than 50 texts a day -- also tend to be heavy users of voice calling.

Read more.

Ringtones from thousands of mobile phones have reached the level of spoiling the pious and spiritual air at the holy mosque. It has almost killed the tranquility of worshippers. Moreover, on a tour of any nook and corner of the holiest shrine in Islam, worshippers are also encountering the flashes of cameras, Al-Riyadh Arabic daily reported.

The moment when the obligatory prayers are over, a tsunami of ringtones from tens of thousands of mobile phones seem to befall on the ears of the faithful. Various musical ringtones compete with the chanting and supplication of the faithful. The most unfortunate aspect of this phenomenon is that a large number of Umrah pilgrims are using mobile phones while performing the lesser pilgrimage. It seems that some pilgrims cannot finish the ritual without making mobile phone calls. There are some others, who are not at all concerned about the extent of annoyance and inconvenience they are causing to other pilgrims.

Related:

-- Kenyan Mosque jams mobile calls

-- Turkish imam to fine owners of ringing mobile phones during prayers

-- Links to Fatwa Against Ringtones articles

What's most disturbing writes Chris Matyszczyk and I agree:

People online have so much power in threatening the lives of those who might be guilty--or just might not be. The Web makes it so easy to accuse and so hard to retract. And the definition of a crime becomes "anything of which I don't approve."

This post on Reddit (NSFW), for example, asks people to think about that power. It offers that "Internet lynch mob s***" can harness an extreme negative force, one that might be entirely misplaced.

What's the chance now of Puschnik (who is reported to live in Germany) or--if it isn't, in fact, her--the real perpetrator, suffering physical harm because a resourceful group on the Web has tracked her down?

The parallel with the lady who threw a cat in the bin happened just recently, but this reminds of the story in 2005 of a young woman who refused to clean up the mess after her dog pooped on the floor of a subway in South Korea. Someone on the train took a video on their camera phone and posted it on the Internet which started a nationwide witchhunt.

Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-shit-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Humiliated in public and indelibly marked, the woman reportedly quit her university.

According to The Washington Post which reported on the subject on July 7: the case was “a remarkable show of Internet force and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.”

Apple has revealed its new, streaming-only Apple TV. And it's just 1/4 the size of the old one.

The new Apple TV will stream rental movies directly from iTunes, or beam videos from your own computer, bypassing local storage—and the possibility of buying anything.