A recently released study has discovered that teenagers who do an excessive amount of texting are more likely to also be involved in riskier behaviors, including drinking alcohol, experimenting (or worse) with other drugs, and being active sexually, even to the point of promiscuity. This excessive texting is being dubbed “hypertexting”.

Recently some people have begun to question whether SMS is corrupting our language – have the confines of 140 characters forced people to rethink how they speak such that they use the shortcuts borne of texting even in non-SMS – even face-to-face – conversation? The advent of Twitter has surely pushed us ever more towards that linguistic evolution, and anyone over the age of 30 who has ever had someone, of any age, say to their face “OMG” (pronounced “oh em gee”) may well have asked themselves “Is SMS corrupting our language?” (or may have on the spot concluded that SMS is corrupting our language!) But not everyone – including some experts – sees it that way.

In a unanimous decision today, the United States Supreme Court has held that a government worker had no right to an expectation of privacy when it came to whether or not his employer might review the content of his text messages that were sent and received on employer-provided equipment, even those messages sent while he was off-duty. In the case of City of Ontario v. Quon, the Ontario California Police Department reviewed text messages sent and received by their employee, Officer Jeff Quon, on the text pager which was provided to Quon by the Ontario PD, including messages sent while Officer Quon was off-duty. Quon objected, but the Supreme Court held that Quon had no legitimate expectation of privacy.

In addition to the new iPhone 4 being announced this week, Apple released a new free update to its web browser, Safari. The new Safari 5, for both Mac and Windows, offers a few new features, but none as interesting – or as controversial – as the new Safari “Reader” view or, if you will, Reader function. The new Safari 5 Reader button instantly strips out nearly everything on the page that isn’t part of the article you are reading – ads, external links, pop-ups – everything – and gives you a view of whatever you are reading that has only the content text, and any attendant images or videos.

There is a series of SMS text message spams going around right now, from TM-GODSGIFT, that has people wondering. The messages from TM GodsGift say that you have won money – usually in the Coca Cola lottery or the Exxon Mobile draw. It’s all spam – it’s all a scam. You can ignore it – or you can report it. But whatever you do, don’t respond to a message from TM GodsGift.

Text to donate? We’ve had a lot of questions about the messages flying around the Internet that you can text “Haiti” to 90999 and it will create a $10.00 donation to the relief efforts in Haiti following the horrible Hatian earthquake that has left hundreds of thousands dead, and many more injured and homeless. It’s important to understand that the $10.00 will be charged to your cell phone bill.

Only Internet-years behind the rest of the cell phone toting, SMS messaging texting world, iPhone users are finally able to send MMS messages. MMS messages are “Multimedia Messaging Service” messages, meaning that instead of just text, you can send multimedia items such as pictures and videos.

We often have debates here at the Internet Patrol about which people prefer: to watch an online video, or to read the same material as text.

The conventional wisdom is that Internet video is the future of the Internet. But we know lots of people who, given a choice, would rather read about something than watch a video about it. Now someone is actually researching this! So please take this short survey!