Yet another of those projects that work on the assumption that people really want to rent music launched this week. Omnifone boasts that its users can download "unlimited" music to their phones for a monthly fee with its new service Music Station, but isn't as keen to point out that if you stop paying the fee (or anything else changes), it will invoke a DRM client to render the music unplayable.

Well, that's so popular on the desktop, it's bound to go over well on mobile. Right? There was some debate about this at Informer Towers, with the Informer taking the view that nobody likes DRM, it always gets hacked, and this is better than sideloaded iTunes how? Others suggested it might go down better, while still another colleague was too busy ripping CDs to his new HTC Touch gadget to take part in the discussion.

"Others" later reported that he had introduced a girlfriend to the idea, and she expressed "horror", "outrage", and "disgust". To the boring drawd back, then. Perhaps it was invented by the same person who came up with the Novarra proxy Vodafone is using that won't let you download files of more than 230KB? Or maybe the Amstrad PCW's 3" disk drive, or some other such e-spork?

They could always rebrand. Like the GSM Association, which has taken another Italian leather-shoed step towards world domination by stripping any mention of specific technology from the title of its two main trade shows. No longer to be known as 3GSM World Congress and 3GSM World Congress Asia, the shows have been renamed Mobile World Congress and Mobile Asia Congress.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, the trade body has conceded that you can't have a 'World Congress Asia', because it doesn't make sense. Second, and much more importantly, it allows the group to welcome proponents of other standards to its shindigs. You can bet the GSMA also has its eye on muscling out competitor associations and events. Who'd have thought there could be a market economy for 'not for profit' trade associations.

The GSMA could, of course, be tacitly conceding that WiMAX is set to be become the dominant global force in wireless standards. But this is probably not the case.

The lobby group will doubtless be changing its own name in the not too distant future, as well. The Global Mobile Association will soon be born, the Informer predicts. At this point, it'll probably drop the 'Mobile' from the flagship event title and it will just become the World Congress. The show will be permanent and attendance for all citizens of the Earth will be mandatory. Each country will be designated as a hall and given a number. That way it can put all the porn stands in Hall 673 (formerly known as Micronesia) and pretend they're not really there.

Every morning will start at 8am and all of us will have to pound the aisles all day long, doing that trade show thing of looking people in the badge, rather than the eye. Every evening will be a Gala Dinner, with a strict rotation of minor celebrities entertaining the guests. Cab fares the world over will shoot up for ever, every building on the planet will be plastered with corporate hoardings and the principal unifying forces between all humans will be sleep deprivation, leg pain and an aversion to fluorescent lighting.

At this point, having reached an evolutionary pinnacle we will be hit by a giant meteorite and wiped out. That's what happened to the dinosaurs; you should have seen the stands at Cretaceous World Congress, or gone to the break out stream on Long Term Evolution to Armoured Land Squid. It was the IMS of its day. Eventually the competition skipped straight to mammals and literally ate their lunch. Then they ate the dinosaurs.

Honestly, doesn't the fact that at least one dinosaur had no less than three brains in different parts of its body but was rather less intelligent than a cow remind you of anything?

In other event news, the Glastonbury Festival used to be a sort of anti-3GSM, as different as it was possible to get. These days, it's just the same people, but covered in filth. So no surprise that Orange does a special gadget for it. This time it's something that might be vaguely useful - a 150 gram, folding wind turbine that mounts on the top of your tent and charges a battery in six hours, which then charges your gadgets in two. Now that's useful - better than the last one, a light on your tent that flashes if you send it a text message.

Meanwhile, the Open Mobile Terminal Platform issued a sizable list of things it wants the IMSanta to bring it in his IMSack. The document is actually quite sensible, but it strikes the Informer that if IMS is meant to be a standard, it ought to be, well, standard. And it seems a little late to be tinkering with the thing now.

The same thing goes for the Apple iPhone, which is presumably being prepared for launch in a whitewashed cleanroom by silent technicians in their Apple-issue media specs and probably at least a couple of robots. There's been some concern that, with only two weeks to go, there is still no SDK available from within the Cupertino Curia. But Steve Jobs is not being moved - his answer to this was simply to suggest you'd be better off implementing your app as a web service. He is, of course, right that you don't need no stinkin' SDKs to do it in a browser, but it does sounds worryingly like a case of Thin Client Syndrome - that curious affliction that periodically causes titans of IT to discover an alternative to the PC architecture, with tragic results.

Thrillingly, crystal ball outfit M:Metrics this week concluded that there was "high demand and widespread awareness" of the iPhone. Ya think? The Informer will content himself with the remark that just using the phrase "iPhone" is known to send website traffic through the roof. iPhone. iPhone. You see what they did there? Even that Music Station thingy was pitched to him as "an iPhone story".

We've got the iClones in the LG Prada and HTC Touch. You'll probably need to take out an iLoan to buy one. iGroan.

In more serious news, it looks like Sprint-Nextel is choking on the cost of its Mobile WiMAX rollout. It's planned to cost $3bn, but the management is being pressed to cut this by a group of activist shareholders. And this time, the group doesn't include anyone whose blatant stupidity and greed destroyed a perfectly good electronics industry. Hence the fear - there's talk of getting the cable TV operators whose junkvision might be distributed over the system to chip in up front, or possibly selling a stake to fellow WiMAX kamikazes Clearwire.

But at least they're not in the position AT&T is in. The US ubercarrier's lawsuit with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (in their satin tights, fighting for your digital rights) took a turn for the worse this week when it was forced to 'fess up to spying on everyone else's customers. Recap: whistleblower Mark Klein walked out of the company with a wedge of documents describing a secret installation in the firm's San Francisco facility that tapped and deep-packet inspected all traffic to and from AT&T's peering connections on the West Coast. AT&T, to say nothing of the National Security Agency, wanted the details sealed. Judge says no, so everyone gets to hear that they were in a position to snoop on 15 per cent of US Internet traffic, and the spy room was wired up to a separate, private backbone network. Wonder who else is on that one.

Take care, and encrypt everything.

The Informer

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