Mobile Minutes: Trump text alerts; Diversifying tech; Amazon's Italian data centers; UK security surveillance
You?ve probably, at some point, gotten a text alert on your phone about some nasty weather, an Amber Alert about a missing child, or even a (very poorly worded) alert about police looking for a criminal. These 90-character messages, known as Wireless Emergency Alerts (or WEAs), are part of a program put in place after Congress passed the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act, in 2006. WEAs allow for targeted messages to be sent to every cell phone getting a signal from certain geographically relevant cell towers (or, in a national emergency, all of them).
Amazon is in talks with utility Enel over the conversion of old power stations in north and central Italy into data centers as it seeks to expand its lucrative cloud services business in the country.
SAN FRANCISCO ? The Snowden Effect continues with a new law in the United Kingdom requiring all web and phone companies in the United Kingdom to store users? web browsing histories for 12 months and give police, security services and government agencies access to the data.