Slashdot Mirror
Cellphone Forensic Software Open Sourced
Niek writes "The Netherlands Forensic Institute (part of the Dutch Ministry of Justice) has open sourced one of their high-profile software frameworks, TULP2G. With this BSD licensed framework, one can extract and decode all data from GSM SIM cards, e.g. called phone numbers and received SMS messages. This was previously only possible with commercial software. Dutch press release, Powerpoint presentation. Earlier this year, the Dutch government GPLed their online election software."
The netherlands has gotten used to something called coalition goverment. Unlike the US or england we got a lot of parties ranging from (when I was young) to extreme left to extreme right. To be sure both extremes were tiny but they were there with a seat in the goverment after some elections (we are talking really really small here).
So to get a majority the biggest partie would form a coalition with smaller parties and agree on a common policy to govern the country with. A bit of give and take.
This type of goverment was applied also the other areas like the eternal war between goverment industry and unions. Basically for a long time these three social partners talked and achieved a sort of middle ground everyone could live with. By and large it worked or perhaps more accurate failed to fail. Think of it like this. If an action is certain to lead to disaster but there is something opposite of it stopping the disaster from happening then all seems good. The counter action was the growing economy. After the bubble this counter failed and so the polder model started to slide.
The partnership of goverment industry and unions can be reflected in political alignment. Unions are of course on the left wanting the best for the common worker. Industry is on the right wanting the best for their shareholders. Goverment are the liberals in the middel wanting both happy workers and happy shareholders but also things like freedom, a clean enviroment etc etc. (Unions are not anti-enviroment just as long as it doesn't cost jobs and business is not anti freedom as long as it cut profits).
With the economy going down all of sudden things started to go wrong. Money was no longer growing on trees (the netherlands is a fairly rich country with a varied export market and a positive trade balance BUT it is also small and very sensitive to other economies. Shipping relies mostly on trade other countries do, construction on projects in other countries, export obviously on other countries).
The current goverment has forced through cuts and savings that are widely critized as being to harsh and even worse and being bad economic policie by the goverments own think tanks. Before nobody cared about backhanded deals were goverment was just forced through in back chambers without consultation with the voter because each voter was part of the polder model through being represented by either goverment industry or the union.
But now everytime at least one of the social partner seems to disagree. You get the weird situation that the unions and industry agree on say compensating health care cuts (with industry picking up the bill because healthy workers work harder) and the goverment trying to block it because they don't want it. Weird.
So the current economy is in a downward spiral were all the social balances that have been achieved in the decades since WW2 are now being eroded.
There is also a huge other problem involving immigration. Although the golden age for the netherlands came in a time when holland opened its gates to everyone in europe who was persecuted in recent times this has led to frictions.
During earlier decades there was a shortage of labour so it seemed to make sense to import workers from poor countries like turkey. Integrating these workers was never done as things like enforced learning of the dutch language was considered both expensive and politically incorrect. Hell these workers were not supposed to stay here. Just work, get some money then go back to turkey.
However the immigrants did not go back. They stayed. Not only stayed but invited their families over and had childeren. The sad thing is that no matter how much the immigrants might complain about holland and how badly the cultures may clash the simple fact is that you couldn't force them to go back at gunpoint. The goverment is even offering cash payments for immigrants who go back. Take up is very very low.
Over the years three cultures have emerged, the im
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Would a regular smart card reader work?
If not, I found this from a quick search on Google
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I talked to some tech people from a smart card company a couple of months ago and from what I understood, a regular smart card reader can read SIM cards, as long as you have the software for it... which now you have...
Go hug some trees.
you know, if you really are up to that, you must think of a SIM card as a small (16-64k) filesystem.
Files are organized into a tree structure in directories and protected (read, write..) by PIN codes. Files can be seen as fixed size arrays of fixed siez strings. The GSM standard specification (GSM 11.11) says that, and what information can be found where. (example, on the directory 'GSM' - which is really a filenumber on the sim instead of a filename), you'll have the last number dialled (LDN file).
the procotol used to open/read files is fairly open.
That's it. So what's so special to write such a program ? You need e.g. serial access to the card interface, the SIM specification, and a small script language, then a few hours later, voila.
(or you could put the SIM card in a phone and check the information)
What you don't have is access to the pin protected information, and good luck to attack those since all european telco industry relies on this.