The Post's findings come shortly after Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said that he is thinking of lifting a citywide ban on mobile phones. Despite the ban, kids report using the phones to send answers to classmates, store electronic cheat sheets and take photos of exams and pass them along to other students. Here's one example: "Rico Johnson, an 18-year-old senior at Park West ... said he saw a classmate receive answers for the January state Regents global-history exam. The answers came in by text message from a friend taking the same test at another school. The recipient then distributed the answers by cell to other students. 'It was not like, "Let me sneak it behind the teacher"' Johnson said. 'Every time his phone vibrated, he'd pick it up, look at the answer and be good with it.'"
Pulled 'Toothing'
Last year we, along with several other news sources, wrote about the practice of "toothing," a growing fad in the U.K. in which strangers send each other pictures and messages through phones enabled with "Bluetooth" technology in order to meet for anonymous sex. With a range of about 10 meters, the idea was that people could spot each other on public transportation, as well as bars and restaurants, and hook up on the spot.
| ___About Random Access___ Random Access is a daily column by Robert MacMillan that explores the latest trends in technology and how they are changing daily life. Random Access won't tell you why a new gizmo will revolutionize your ad server. It will tell you about episodes from daily life -- exasperated waiters who use blogs to vent about their customers, whole runs of salmon injected with nanoparticles for individual tracking in Norwegian fjords and the growing number of DJs who are sick of being sidelined in favor of iPods. (Only one of these stories is fake.) Most of what you see will be culled from news sources and blogs from around the world, though we will supplement Random Access with original files on the novel, unusual, bizarre and reactionary happenings in the world of technology and society. E-mail: Send links and comments. | | |
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Too bad it's a hoax. Wired.com reported that one of the sources in its story came clean: "After first creating an online forum, the pranksters persuaded friends to fill the site with scores of salacious, but fictitious, stories."
The source whom Wired interviewed wrote about the tale at his blog: "It is important that you understand that the concept of Toothing -- beaming a sexual text message to a random phone on a commuter-packed tube train -- is a bit like going into a crowded nightclub, throwing a brick at the dancefloor with a love letter attached, and hoping that the person it hits will agree to sleep with you. It's technically possible, and it's not going to happen. That made it even better when the whole world fell for it."
The blog poster claims the successful hoax resulted in its perpetrators:
• Writing Penthouse Forum-style letters to satisfy a deadline in the Telegraph.
• Getting a conservative M.P. to declare an interest in toothing as a way of meeting women.
• Receiving an invitation to attend China's national sex exhibition.
It's worth remaining skeptical. Wired doesn't tell us the name of the Triforce source, and we can't find it on the site. And who knows? Maybe the hoax spawned the real deal. Not that we've ever gone toothing ...
How New Yorkers Eat
Online grocery-delivery services were one of the biggest casualties of the Internet boom, but FreshDirect -- by aggressively targeting the Gotham market -- is filling bellies and turning heads. "After two years and 2 million deliveries (and $600,000 in parking tickets), FreshDirect has become the online grocery service that many New Yorkers have embraced, even while its ubiquitous trucks, piles of discarded boxes and high prices have irritated others. In 2004 FreshDirect had $100 million in sales, almost double the sales of the year before," the New York Times reported. "Real estate brokers now routinely cite FreshDirect in their sales pitches in neighborhoods like Battery Park City, Harlem and Bayside, Queens, which are known to have poor access to fresh food." (There's a Whole Foods just down the road from Bayside on Northern Boulevard, but I digress.)
The Times said online grocery shopping represents less than half a percent of the $570 billion grocery business, but it is growing in urban areas such as Minneapolis-St. Paul, Washington, D.C., and in California. Among the top services are Peapod in the Northeast and Safeway.com out West.
The article also contains interesting notes on how FreshDirect operates at its headquarters: "FreshDirect's 300,000-square-foot facility in Long Island City ... employs about 1,000 butchers, bakers, produce pickers and other food workers. Like the largest, coldest warehouse store imaginable, it includes two huge kitchens, a special room dedicated to bananas (always kept at 60 degrees) and miles of conveyor belts, which carry tubs from the far-flung departments -- health and beauty, coffee, dairy -- to the central packing area near the loading dock."
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