Slashdot Mirror
Japanese I-Mode Phones Under Attack
radsoft.net is reporting that DoCoMo phones arre under attack by new wormish i-mode attachments. According to the announcement, i-mode phone users shouldn't open emails from unknown senders. I used a docomo phone while I was in Japan a few weeks ago. They are so far ahead of us in phones: lighter, cooler, longer battery life, more features, and i-mode is cool. Anyway, the funny part is that these attachments, if opened, will do nifty things like call arbitrary phone numbers (your worst enemy? Emergency?) or simply freeze your phone. Docomo has market penetration that makes local cel phone mega corps look like mom and pop shops. Anyway, there's no doubt that consumer electronics will be targets of more attacks in the future.
That's a bad analogy. The reason that NTT are in the position of market dominance that they now enjoy is because they were a government-sanctioned monopoly. You literally could not compete with NTT, if you did, you would eventually be arrested. The law stated that NTT were the only people permitted to run a telco, and that was that.
Say what you like about Microsoft, but they achieved market dominance by competing in a free market. Linux is a viable alternative for many applications, you are free to distribute and use it as you please. Neither Microsoft nor the government are in any way able to enforce that you do otherwise - in fact there's this little thing called the Constitution that protects you.
So, really, the situation isn't similar at all.
The reason Japanese phones are smaller, lighter, and have longer battery life than American equivalents is because the cell size is much smaller.
Optimal cell size is a function of population density. In the Tokyo area, you've got about a billion people per square foot, so you can afford to keep the cell size small, which means you don't need a lot of power to transmit.
If you were to try to use the same cell size in a place like Texas, you'd be putting up more cell towers than there are people. It's just not economically feasable to do that.
Americans want phones they can take anywhere in the country and have them work. They need a big battery and a high power transmitter to make that work.
Here in the building where I work in Ibaraki-prefecture there's almost no cell coverage because we're a government lab (KEK) and you can't place a cell tower on government property according to Japanese law. People have to run to the roof whenever their cell phone rings. The lab isn't that big, either. It' can't me much more than a couple of square kilometers. Once you get off the lab, your phone works pretty much everywhere.
Don't expect to see Japan-sized phones in the U.S. any time soon. We need a ten-fold increase in population density before it will become practical.
The answer is as obvious as the answer to email worms: my (telephone|MUA) should not even *try* to be a public compute server, which is exactly what the ability to send "active" attachments means. Just Say No to active messaging. The cool factor simply doesn't outweigh the potential cost.
I was reading iMode's html-ish spec tonight and I saw the URL designation tel:// (as in tel://911)
What a bad iDea *that* is... (Yes, it's already been exploited, though over here, I think it's 119, rather than 911...)
Someone made an innocent goof in a HTML-based game a few weeks ago that highlighted this vulnerability.
On top of that, it costs the *initiator* of the call for calls placed from cell phones here, not the recipient - what was that exchange in the Carribean that was supposed to be so bad - 809?
iMode is just untroducing Java on its phones, but from what i've read on the keitai-l listserve, auto-dialing like this is not on an option.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
-- My Weblog.
I think the worst part of this could be that the virus may cause the phones to automatically dial an emergency number.
Extra calls to emergency call centers that flood the lines is going beyond just filling inboxes. Although I'm not familiar with the "110" emergency number stated in the article, if it's anything like 911, it could obviously affect lives. This seems to me to be far worse than a worm that calls numbers at random or freezes up the screen of a phone (also mentioned in the article).
I hear they're 'r33t'