According to the New York Times, AT&T is going to launch a text-message service to send SMS messages to customers in certain locations.

Um, hell no!

It’s called “ShopAlerts” and is designed to allow “brand-partners” (i.e. HP, Kmart, JetBlue, S.C. Johnson, etc.) to send advertisements and coupons to customers who happen to be in range of the “geo-fence” (a pre-defined geographic area around a particular place) for that brand.

The service is opt-in, which makes it a little less about. The troubling thing is it is just another way for people to give up their privacy.

If you allow a service to track when you are *in* a particular place, then by default it will also know when you are *not in* that place. Checking in on Foursquare should be enough of a trigger to send these kinds of advertisements – it shouldn’t be based on a passive location awareness.

In fairness, JetBlue does intend to use their JetBlue Go Places mobile app to offer their program’s points via check-in. According to the article, there is no mention of similar action-requirements. S.C. Johnson intends to put a geo-fence around Wal-Mart to [passively] offer their discounts.

It all sounds eerily similar to the Minority Report’s retina scanners in the shopping malls. Let’s hope the day never comes when you can walk past an adult novelty shop and the on-screen display asks how that sex toy you bought 2 weeks ago has worked out for you. This technology, if extrapolated to track purchases as a response to the ad, combined with the already-present knowledge of your receipt’s items would surely enable such a world.

Don’t opt-in. It’s already easy enough to track you, without making it constantly available.

Technorati Tags: advertisements, at&t, geo-fencing, hp, jetblue, kmart, location-based marketing, presence tracking, privacy, scjohnson, security, shopalerts, walmart

After much searching on the internet, I found a couple different sites talking about the 49.xxxx Service Errors and what others had done in their troubleshooting efforts. Most of the links I came across mentioned something about reseating the memory stick and JetDirect card. I tried both those solutions, with a printer reboot several times. The only way to clear the error message is to reboot the computer also.

I also tried restarting the Print Spooler on the Print Server, but that had no effect. In fact, that is where I noticed the problem. Sometimes the printers in that location showed up as Offline on the Print Server. And every time I tried to print something from the printer, it worked fine (i.e. configuration pages); but it did not print coming from the Print Server doing a simple Test Page.

We narrowed down the problem to be a Communications error…nothing could communicate with the printer. That leaves the Network Path to the printer, and the JetDirect card as possible culprits. I replaced the network cables to all the printers connected to the switch in the area, and that didn’t solve it. So I plugged the printer itself directly into the wall, and that DID solve it.

Solution

Our solution was a faulty network switch. So just because the printer throws an error related to it’s parts or firmware in some cases, it might not have anything to do with the device – it may just not be able to function in a manner similar to a hardware malfunction.

Hope this helps some folks with their HP Service Error message.

Technorati Tags: 49.ff09, hp, jetdirect, laserjet, printer, printer communication error, service error