iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service 420
An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google's free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google's SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google's own GTalk client."
Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?
No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
that's what you get for abusing a free service. Happy now?
No. That's what you get for offering a service without a proper business model behind it.
Hmmm, yes let's all remember that the next time OSS is discussed.
Re:Well, (Score:4, Insightful)
Charging for a service another entity subsidizes without their approval.
Re:kenneth (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not what TFA says (or the part that I read at least). It says, "Our experimental feature that we didn't widely publicize because we wanted to test it with limited numbers of users suddenly got slammed with traffic and we didn't feel like supporting it". That's a bit different than what you are implying.
Next target: AOL? (Score:1, Insightful)
AIM has let you send free text messages [aol.com] for ages. Is there any difference between this service and the one Google was just forced to close down?
Re:Well, (Score:1, Insightful)
Then the restaraunt gets rid of the all-you-can-eat buffet because a few greedy bastards like you ruined it for everybody else. In other words, trendy dumbfucks like you who are willing to pay for an overpriced iPhone aren't willing to pay the extra 20 bucks for unlimited texting. 1600 text messages per month will run you $10, but even that's not good enough for your banal "LOL OMG he did NOT do THAT!!1!!" 's every 5 seconds.
It's like when niggers buy a brand new Cadillac Escalade but don't pay insurance on it.
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
OSS stands for Open Source Software, not services. Why would you want to remember Google shutting down a free service when discussing open/free software?
Re:Well, (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think they charged for a service that Google provided. They were charging for a piece of software to access the service. It's not like they were taking a fee per SMS.
Re:Well, Google HAD a business model! (Score:5, Insightful)
SMS is very profitable to service providers.
E.g. when developing SMS games around 2001, the raito of sent/received messages could go up to 4-5 sent by the game server / 1 sent by the user, and the provider would still buy the game.
Google's model was: enable GTalk and other programs to send SMS-es. The SMS-es are delivered to phones.
Now Google could allocate free sending quota from service providers telling them that these messages will be answered, and service providers can get their profit from the ANSWER SMS-es.
Now this where this iPhone program is dangerous to Google.
It cuts the single source of revenue from the providers: the response SMS could be also throught Google...
Just my 2 cents...
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, (Score:2, Insightful)
If you knew there's a good chance that you'ld be assumed to be the one at fault, lose your license, and probably be thrown in jail until they figured out you didn't steal the Escalade to begin with if you were involved in an accident, would you waste money on insurance ?
How is parent insightful when he's wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who sold this app were not "charging" anyone for Google's service. Would you say that someone who developed and sold a killer browser for iPhone was "charging" people to use the Web?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just people, criminal organizations. SMS spam is already a problem, and if the same people sending the same unwanted junk mail manage to get ahold of a free SMS service, then they have the ability to not just hit millions of phones, but attack people they don't like with big phone bills. For example (obligatory car mention), sending someone 30,000 text messages likely will make most people's monthly phone bills cost more than the MSRP of a decent vehicle.
In some ways, SMS spam is worse than E-mail spam. Unless the recipiant has unlimited text messaging, they pay up to a buck just to read about someone's new pharmacy.
Re:Well, (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but if you bring tupperware to the buffet, you're cheating.
Re:WE WANT OUR FREE SERVICE BACK!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, (Score:1, Insightful)
Probably because every /. discussion of how to make a living from creating open source software involves the magic fairy of selling services associated with the software.
Emphasis mine. Why then would giving away a free service come to play in the discussion? If google charged each user a flat monthly fee (or a one time fee, or a per message fee), I'm sure they would be happy as clams if you 'abused' their service as described.
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is this is AT&T cellular. they charge for every outgoing and INCOMING sms message. So honestly they are not losing any money.
This is the problem with SMS messages. they are overpriced drastically so people are looking for ways to subvert them.
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
It's never going to be possible to charge people a flat fee for all-you-can-use X without the bulk of the consumers overpaying for their moderate usage of X to subsidise the few who exploit the service. This holds for values of X such as bandwidth, pasta, text messaging, icecream, whatever.
Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, Google HAD a business model! (Score:1, Insightful)
Problem with your reasonning is that SMS charges differ in the countries. While in most europeans countries users don't pay to receive SMS messages, they do in the US.
Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score:4, Insightful)
But... but... but... I want it my free stuff!!!
Wah.
Shame, Shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Inner Fence *assumed* they would continue to receive a service for which they had no contract and paid no fees. Further, on top of that unsupported and inequitable assumption, they *sold* a product in which they extended *assurances* of continued service.
Inner Fence now points their customers to Google as being the party responsible for the loss of service. But it seems clear that Inner Fence had no basis for assuring delivery of their service to their customers. They simply took the money, left Google holding the bag, and now dodge their full responsibility.
Hey Inner Fence...do your customers look like they have the letters S-T-U-P-I-D painted on their foreheads?
Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score:2, Insightful)
Today's 2000-era generation thinks it's perfectly okay to tap into their neighbor's wireless internet, even though it's costing their neighbor extra money. Or google's SMS, even though it costs google thousands of dollars to support that overload.
While I don't disagree with your overall point there are some things I would like to point out. Hopping onto an unsecured network is basically taking advantage of a free resource. This is basically like saying that while your playing your boombox, no one else should be able to listen. But you are too lazy to plug in your headphones. If the person the network belongs to won't take the 3 minutes to turn on wireless security then they shouldn't have the right to bitch when someone hops onto their network. They also shouldn't be surprised when they eventually become a victim of identity theft. Same thing with Google. They opened up an API to allow people to send text messages for free. They didn't limit it, so why would people assume that it was supposed to be limited? It would be a VERY different case if someone had hacked the google API to allow unlimited texting. This is google's fault, not the person who wrote the app.
Re:Well, (Score:3, Insightful)
remember that a lot of people are developing iPhone apps now.
I'd complain if it were some large company that based their business model on this, but chances are it's just some guy or small company that figured out a cute, easy trick and tried to charge for it rather than give it away for free.
I'm not condoning it, just pointing out that as the number of people grows, morals and consideration always go out the window unless forced.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well, (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, because OSS developers are always whining, and shutting down their software, everytime someone makes money from their product.
Oh wait, they don't. In fact, Open Source explicitly allows, by definition, other people to make money from it.
I feel sorry for the Google group members (Score:5, Insightful)
Inner Fence's attempt to deflect criticism by redirecting complaints to http://groups.google.com/group/gmail-labs-help-text-messaging/topics [google.com] is so unfair to the honest service users who were already there. People who really need, or offer information or help are being buried in an avalanche of whiny tripe.
So Inner Fence has punished another group of people, this time innocent.
Re:Abuse? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of us don't believe in restriction and TOS
If the service is there, Ill use it as i please. If they don't like it, then they can close it and and charge a subscription ( and not have me as a customer ).
While you may not agree with my attitude ( which is your right ), i'm tired of bending over for companies and really don't give a damn what they like or don't like anymore. Screw em.
Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score:3, Insightful)
Opensource is as good as my own property, for the taking, because I can do ANYTHING with it.
Clearly, you are quite ignorant of Open Source, as defined by the OSI.
Free software is something that I am permitted to use AS LONG AS I use it in a way approved of by the authors/owners.
Actually, that is true of most Open Source as well. It's also far from the FSF's definition of "free software".
There isn't a lot of software which could be classified "open source", but not "free software", by your definition. I could only mention sqlite, and DJB's stuff (qmail, djbdns, etc) -- these are public domain.
No, the difference is actually quite an obvious one: Open Source only requires that the source code be available. Before DJB's work was open source, it was very much open source, in that everyone could freely acquire the software. However, it was not free software -- once you have the source code, you are not allowed to redistribute it with your own patches.
If you wanted to improve qmail, for instance, you had two choices: Either beg DJB to include your change, or distribute your patch directly to users -- they would have to then download the qmail sources, apply your patch, and compile.
Free Software, on the other hand, only requires that you be able to both obtain the software, and fork it to distribute your own version. It doesn't place any other restrictions, it doesn't even require "free as in beer".
By the FSF's definition, the official distribution of sqlite is very much Free Software. By the OSI's definition, it is very much Open Source. And it is completely public domain, meaning there is absolutely no restriction placed on its use.
Your confusion probably stems from the fact that the FSF advocates the GPL, which does impose quite a lot of restrictions. The GPL's purpose is to ensure that this software must continue to be Free Software -- compare to sqlite, which could be forked into a proprietary version.
But there's nothing about the idea of Free Software itself which requires the GPL, or anything like it, and it's quite ignorant of you to suggest that.
"OOOHHH! Google USED TO allow us to use their resources, now they don't! OH! EVIL GOOGLE!"
Nice strawman. Can you point to a single post with that sentiment?
It's possible you can, but I've been reading this thread for awhile, and I've found nothing of the sort. I've found a few people who suggest that Google should have considered the implications, and certainly some people are disappointed, but I haven't actually seen anyone say that Google is evil or wrong for doing that.
Re:Yes and No (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes and No (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how you got modded insightful - if you truly believe that our economy is third world, or that our health is third world, or that our education is third world, you are delusional.
While there are plenty wrong with the US economy, health care, education, etc etc... To claim that we are in a third world state (or even close to it) is an insult to people who actually live in third-world countries.
Re:Yes and No (Score:2, Insightful)
Shall I continue? #19 in the world on Acute Care Beds.
We DO, however, SPEND by far the most on health care. Over $4,000 per person per year. Our health expenditure increases over 3% per annum, in excess of inflation. Ask yourself what you got for that money some time, when you're talking about defining "best" healthcare.
We DON'T have some of the best healthcare in the world. But we ARE told that, in order to justify the fact that our premiums keep going up and up and up. (My wife and I went from $431 to $510 a month last year, despite no non-routine events).
In fact, according to the WHO, on an overall index of "overall health performance" we're not even in the top 20 countries in the world. On "levels of health" we rank SEVENTY SECOND, and on "level of health care performance", THIRTY SEVENTH (from http://www.photius.com/rankings/world_health_systems.html [photius.com]).
Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:SMS and system load (Score:1, Insightful)
So open up the SMS service for TCP access by smart phones... Don't send the SMS messages via the control channel except to old dumb phones...
Geez this is the Internet... we DO know how to move bits around. That's what convergence is all about.
Until then I'll continue to consider SMS pricing a cash cow..
Re:Lot's of iPhones out there (Score:2, Insightful)
How much free time do you think these people have? Granted, the number is pulled from an orifice, but just think about how much time it would take to send out these hundreds of SMSs per person per day.
You don't know many teenagers do you?