Kill Junk Calls on the iPhone

I really hate sales calls, campaign calls, and solicitation calls. Getting them on my regular home phone is bad enough, but getting them on my cell phone really drives me nuts. Out of the box, you can’t block annoying callers on an un-jailbroken iPhone, but you can make them less of a pain. I will show you my method first, and then tell you about a few alternatives.

1. Create a contact named “Blacklist”. We don’t care about all the details of the contact, just that it has a recognizable name and is a place to store number. I make this a company contact with the name of the contact as just “Blacklist”.

2. Give the contact you created the following picture, or any other ugly picture you desire.

3. Next we want to assign that contact a custom ringtone, but first we have to get that ringtone to your phone. The ringtone I use is one called “silence“. Click to open it with iTunes or download it and put it in iTunes.

4. Now that you have the contact created and the ringtone in iTunes, sync your iPhone.

5. Almost there, just go into your Blacklist contact and set its custom ringtone to be the one you just uploaded.
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Tags: att, blacklist, blocked callers, iphone, spam

Software Firm Faces Scrutiny

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids’ online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children’s chat messages, and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games.

The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids. “This scares me more than anything I have seen using monitoring technology,” said Parry Aftab, a child-safety advocate. “You don’t put children’s personal information at risk.”

The company that sells the software insists it is not putting kids’ information at risk, since the program does not record children’s names or addresses. But the software knows how old the kids are because parents customize its features to be more or less permissive, depending on age.
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Tags: children, privacy, Security