A Deadly Wandering tells the story of Reggie Shaw, a Utah college student whose Chevy Tahoe veered into another lane one night in 2006 and clipped a car carrying two rocket scientists, which then collided head-on with a truck, killing the two men. Shaw was texting a friend at the time of the accident. Richtel casts a wide net in the telling of this story, including a cast of characters that ranges from the scientists’ widows and children to lawmakers, prosecutors, neuroscientists and one tireless victim’s advocate. 

Smartphone hacking is one of the fastest-growing issues in terms of cybersecurity, he said, especially with the advent of cloud storage. In Europe, and increasingly in the United States, hackers are able to bypass two-stage identification, whereby a text message is sent to one’s smartphone bearing a private code for entry into account websites. It is a problem that Vigna, computer science professor Christopher Kruegel and researchers from Northwestern University are getting ready to tackle with funding from a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Every few days, text messages like these pop up on the phones of more than 1,000 women in Fresno County, in California’s Central Valley. The messages come in Spanish, alternately offering referrals for affordable healthcare and domestic violence services, legal tips and affirmations. Any resource offered via text has been vetted by a team of women behind the project, called Únete Latina, to confirm that providers there speak Spanish and won’t ask for a Social Security number.

Vietnam, a police state where freedom of expression can come with a multi-year prison term, is awash in cell phones. Whether for talking, texting or taking photos, Vietnamese are buying up mobile devices at a rate exceeding the country’s own population. A sign of the communist nation’s rising affluence, it is also undermining the state’s monopoly on information. With phones available for as little as $20, ordinary consumers are buying up sets that would otherwise have been bound for foreign shores. 

A new report from NDN highlights how society as a whole, and Hispanics specifically, are increasingly using mobile media to connect to the issues they care about. The report ties the demographic rise of Hispanics with the rise in the community’s increased use of mobile media technologies.