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If you’re being plagued by cell text message spam (cell txt msg spam) like this one we received from 702-541-4047 – “Do you have $20,000+ in CREDIT CARD DEBT? Our national program REDUCES it by HALF! Reply “DEBT” to see if you qualify! (cuturdebts.com-optout,reply:out)” – you’re not alone. (What is SMS? Short Message Service SMS service is a way to send short text messages directly to a cell phone). The problem is that those unwanted SMS messages that you see as cell phone spam, the sender sees as an SMS campaign. Those rude SMS text messages – often anonymous SMS text messages – are bulk SMS messages sent by the SMS sender as a text message advertising campaign (often facilitated by free SMS text message services). Sending SMS text messaging spam is illegal in most states, but figuring out how to go about reporting spam received on your cell phone can be tough. Here’s how to submit your spam that you receive via SMS message to the right authorities, as well as how to stop it. (Bonus: The elusive Verizon customer service phone number!)

“iPhone text messages won’t stay deleted and keep coming back,” complains one user. “How can I permanently delete iMessage SMS messages?” asks another. It seems that no matter what you do to delete those text messages, they keep coming back! Here’s how to delete text messages and text message threads on your iPhone permanently, so that they don’t reappear.

A new law introduced in New York would allow police to take your cell phone on the spot, and analyze it to determine whether you were on the phone, or texting, or reading email, in the moments leading up to the accident. Dubbed the Textalyzer – or Textalizer – the bill’s proponents say that the concept is not much different than a Breathalyzer, which police use on the spot to see whether someone is over the legal blood alcohol limit while behind the wheel.

A brand new SMS text message scam has hit smartphones. Coming from prvs=1846e0b0b3=kross@bloodsystems.org, it is an image of text, which reads “CONFIDENTIAL Mrs Thorens has assigned a rewarding charity project worth $2.5 Million USD to you. For full details, please contact her only at her private email address below.” The sample that we saw had an email address of mav22@rogers.com, although it’s quite likely that as that email address gets shut down, the scammers will swap in a different email address.

Imagine traveling over the holidays to see friends or family, and your flight is delayed or, worse, cancelled. Or traveling to a business meeting, and because of a flight delay, you miss your connection. Now imagine a service that, for only $19, will alert you of the upcoming delay or cancellation, and that will automatically find you alternate flights, and book them for you at no extra cost to you, all from the privacy and hassle-free convenience of your smartphone. No standing in lines, no calling around to other airlines, no waiting on hold, no having to frantically surf travel sites. Sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not – it’s a service called Freebird.

Wired’s Joseph Cox has a brilliant idea: what is the best, most readily available consumer device to use to make completely secure calls, and to use for secure text messages and secure chat? (Well, at least as secure and locked down as the average consumer can easily make them?) An iPod Touch! Brilliant! Here’s why.

In the past few years the term “dark social” has come into play, but just what is dark social – what does it mean, and why does it matter (if it does matter)? Here’s the low-down on dark social.

Ford has just added the Life360 “don’t text me while I’m driving” Drive Mode app to the Ford SYNC applink system – the system that integrates your smartphone into your Ford vehicle’s own voice recognition, voice command, and communications system. Life 360 is touted as a boon for parents of teenagers, we’re not so sure.

General Motors (GM) has announced that many 2015 Chevrolet automobiles will have native, on-board 4G LTE wifi next year. The list of cars that will have onboard wireless hotspots includes the Chevrolet Corvette, Chevy Impala, Malibu, Volt, Equinox, Silverado, Silverado HD, Spark and Spark EV, and in Canada the Chevrolet Trax.

The FBI glossary of Internet slang acronyms reads like a leet speak (l337 5p3@k) primer, albeit a massively over-inclusive one. Indeed, in the time it would take an FBI agent to skim through the Internet slang glossary looking for a particular term, one would hope they could have just inferred it from context. Put together by the FBI Intelligence Research Support Unit (IRSU) and starting with ADN (Any Day Now) and ending with ZOMG (“emphasized OMG”) and ZUP (“what’s up?”), and everything in between, the FBI primer on ‘net slang is a whopping 83 pages containing nearly 3000 terms, many of them, if not most of them, not even really a thing. Although we are fond of BOGSAT (bunch of guys sitting around talking) and are now using it every chance we get.

Getting SMS text messages on your Mac or iPad may just be the holy grail for many Macbook and iMac users, but until now iMessage has not worked with messages sent from Android phones. If the person with whom you are messaging has an iPhone, then you can message them from your Mac with iMessage, but that has not been the case for texting with Android and other non-iOS phones.

Efforts to ban texting while driving don’t work. Heartfelt pleas from heartbroken parents whose children have died while driving and texting while in traffic don’t work. So maybe putting up billboards with pictures of drivers who are caught driving while texting while in traffic will work. At least, that’s the hope of Brian Singer, the founder of the TWIT Spotting site.

Reports are saying that WhatsApp users are leaving WhatsApp and signing up with an alternative to WhatsApp at an astonishing rate since the announcement that Facebook is aquiring WhatsApp for $19billion. While the WhatsApp outage that happened just a few days after the announcement hasn’t helped, most industry sources say that the international userbase is jumping ship primarily over privacy concerns, with users trusting neither the United States in general, nor Facebook in particular, to protect their privacy.