Ping is designed to look like the SMS app, and behaves much the same way. The messages you send arrive at the recipient’s screen instantly—similar to IMs—but also pop up with a Push Notification if you’re not actively using the phone.

It’s basically free SMS for you to everyone who has an iPhone or iPod Touch (over Wi-Fi) as long as you can convince them to sign up for Ping. Even if you can’t, the ones you do switch over might be enough for you to downgrade your SMS plan one notch to save some money.

In the end, this may either be a really useful SMS alternative for iPhones, or a service that’s not different enough from SMS or IM that people will use it. It’s too early to say. [Ping on iTunes via Gear Live]

Click image to enlarge

It is pretty simple and absolutely brilliant: To launch a new deodorant in Uruguay, the Lowe Ginkgo agency in Montevideo created an incomplete ad. The ad showed a purrty neekeed girl in a suggestive pose. It didn’t, however, show any of her naughty bits. Instead, it came with the following text:

To complete this ad send AXE to 2345 after 9 pm.

The message would trigger a server to send a multimedia message to your phone with the rest of the ad, so you could complete the image. Absolutely genius. [Direct Daily]

Henan province promises a lockup of “up to five days” for one message, or ten days for three messages. If you’re going to send three, you might as well do it in a chunk to get the discount rate.

“I’m totally for the rules. It’s uncomfortable to get dirty text messages from male friends and even more gross when they are from strangers,” Zhang Kai, 26, told the daily.

What’s even better is that the normal people are questioning why so much government effort is being spent in this area.

Since July 10, Shenze party officials have held 480 meetings to discuss the harmful effects of obscene messages, a degree of dedication that has been questioned by the public, the People’s Daily said.

“It’s not necessary to hold 480 meetings on this. This is an enormous waste of administrative resources,” an Internet user named Han Haoyue was quoted as saying.

[Google via Mobile Crunch]

The system was designed by a Melbourne IT developer and will be trialled at Melbourne’s Avalon airport before being rolled out across the country over the next couple of years, according to Geoff Easdown at the Herald Sun.

The obvious beauty of the system is that because it’s based on SMS, it’s completely device agnostic so anyone can use it. Just make sure your phone’s battery is charged before you leave home…

[Herald Sun via Lifehacker]

The flaw involves invisible SMS bursts that allow hackers to gain total control over your phone. The two dudes who discovered it plan on unveiling it at the Black Hat conference on Thursday. They say they told Apple about it a month ago, but nothing’s been done.

So how do you prevent your phone from being hijacked? Well, if you get a text containing only a single square character, turn your phone off. Fast.

Hey Apple, wanna fix this please? That’d be great. Thanks. [Forbes]

Discussions over on the Whirlpool forums have some people arguing this is a feature rather than a bug – apparently some telcos around the world only charge per MMS sent, rather than per SMS received. So if you send an MMS to six people, you only get charged once, where sending an SMS would see you charged six times. However, as is also discussed, most people on cap plans have SMS, but not MMS included in their contract, meaning that it’s still cheaper to send 100 SMS rather than 1 MMS.

The problem seems to affect all iPhones, regardless of carrier, although Whirlpool hackers have come up with a workaround for Optus customers. Telstra is also aware of the problem, sending this message to reader William’s wife:

“Service Message: If your iphone is running 3.0 OS any SMS sent to 2 or more recipients gets converted and charged as an MMS. A fix is being developed & we will notify when this has been completed. You can turn off MMS funcionality through the “settings” menu to avaid MMs charges in the interim.”

So if this has happened to you, it appears you have two options: switch off MMS in the settings menu whenever you want to send a group SMS, try this fix on the Whirlpool forums. Although a third option would also be to bitch about it to both your carrier and Apple. Considering I’ll never use MMS, I’m gonna go for the first one.

[Whirlpool – thanks William!]