The LA Times ran a story a couple of days ago which shed some light on the reason why the humble text message, or SMS, was restricted on its inception back in 1985 to 160 characters. There were technical reasons why the messaging protocol could only cope with 140 x 8-bits (or 160 of the GSM's 7-bit character set) but the burning question was whether this would be sufficient space to convey anything useful. Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the researchers on the project, spent some time tapping out random sentences and questions, and came to the conclusion – despite the doubts of some colleagues – that 160 characters, including spaces and punctuation, would be "perfectly sufficient" for people to literally get their messages across. And so SMS was born. ( Read more... )

I was contacted over the weekend by a slightly distressed reader whose email I won't paste here, but the gist was that she found herself on Facebook despite not actually having a Facebook account; she believes that her ex-boyfriend has set up the profile and is contacting people while posing as her. She obviously wanted to know what on earth she could do about it, as repeated emails to Facebook haven't elicited any response.

I've got plenty of sympathy, but I'm hard pushed to know how to advise her. Of course, it's against Facebook's terms and conditions to pose as somebody else; if you've ever tried setting up a Facebook profile for an actor, artiste or sportsman, you'll be aware that it'll get deleted at some point. Even if you use a fake name you'll incur the wrath of Facebook's privacy team when they eventually notice it. But when a service has 150 million users and only 700 staff – of which presumably only a small percentage are dealing with customer complaints – it's no wonder that emails sent to privacy@facebook.com don't get anyone springing into action immediately.

You can see why social networking sites are reluctant to force you to somehow prove your identity when you sign up (their priority is to make it easier to join, not more difficult) but having your online identity swiped by a disgruntled former partner, and not being able to do anything about it, is a hideously unpleasant situation to be in. What on earth should she do?