Autoclean your mobile inbox

A British company has come up with a "self-destruct" text-messaging mobile service that will automatically delete messages after recipients read them, reports Xinhuanet. The service, called StealthText from Staellium UK, will prove a hit with celebrities trying to conceal affairs and business people guarding secret deals.

Derived from military technology, StealthText works only on mobile phones that can use the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). Only the sender needs to have downloaded the StealthText applet. Recipients receive a text notification with the sender`s name and a link to the message.

Once opened, the message will disappear after about 40 seconds.

Microsoft and MCI will partner to offer a new Internet-based phone service through Microsoft`s instant-messaging service, adding another entrant to a growing number of competitors selling cut-rate, computer-based calling. According to Washington Post, the partnership allows users to place calls from a personal computer to almost any phone in the world at a lower cost than traditional long-distance phone service.

Skype Technologies SA, owned by eBay, has a two-year head start on Microsoft and has a worldwide user base that includes more than two million subscribers who pay to make phone calls to mobile or traditional phone lines. Last week, Yahoo launched a trial of a new version of Internet phone service in the US and parts of Europe and Asia, offering rates cheaper than Skype.

All of those companies, and others such as Google and America Online, offer free calling to users within the same instant-messaging system. Yahoo and Microsoft plan to integrate their systems next year so their IM users can send messages to each other.

Web pages with extremely long titles can appear to make the Firefox browser and applications of the Mozilla suite hang, says the Mozilla Foundation. The advisory said that a page designed to demonstrate the bug had 2.5 million characters in its title.

According to SMH and contrary to earlier reports, the bug did not expose users to attack. Members of the PacketStorm research group said last week that the bug would not just cause a denial-of-service but also allow attackers to compromise a user`s system.

But the Mozilla advisory said the issue had been investigated by its researchers and no basis had been found to back up claims that variants of this denial-of-service attack could cause an exploitable crash. "No evidence for this claim has been offered. There does not appear to be any risk to users or their computers beyond the temporary unresponsiveness at start-up," the advisory said. It did not say when a fix would be released. A workaround has been provided along with the advisory.