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How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged
Lauren Weinstein writes to point us to his essay on the realities of using an idle cell phone as a bug, as a recent story indicated the FBI may have done in a Mafia case. From the essay: "There is no magic in cell phones. From a transmitting standpoint, they are either on or off... It is also true that some phones can be remotely programmed by the carrier to mask or otherwise change their display and other behaviors in ways that could be used to fool the unwary user. However, this level of remote programmability is another feature that is not universal... But remember — no magic! When cell phones are transmitting — even as bugs — certain things are going to happen every time that the alert phone user can often notice."
You could check the old fashioned way - slide off the back cover if an insect falls out you can be sure it is bugged.
liqbase
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
When cell phones are transmitting -- even as bugs -- certain things are going to happen every time that the alert phone user can often notice.
For example, when using a Palm Treo 650, the phone will crash and reset often, and without notice.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Like a poster on the earlier story commented, why not simply connect one of those flashy LED thingies to your phone? My mom has them, and every time she's on a call, or even on an incoming SMS, the LEDs go berserk!! They don't even need batteries and power themselves off the cellphone radiation. Pretty foolproof method, IMHO.
The "essay" is nothing but speculation with a few facts, no references, and no actual testing or experience. I'm sure this is an amusing blog entry, but why is it on Slashdot? There's nothing to discuss.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I have a pay-as-go phone they are not anonymous. In many places (e.g. Germany), you have to register your details to get it, in other places your purchase details are used from the credit card to register it.
When I bought one with cash, just after I bought it, I received wrong number calls, but the people involved didn't seem to want to hang up like normal wrong number calls.
Them: "Is Mark there?"
Me: "I'm sorry, there's no Mark here, you must have a wrong number."
Them: "I'm sorry, are you sure you're not mark"
Me: "you have a wrong number"
Them: "Oh my mistake, thanks again erm Mr erm...." pauses to see if you'll complete the sentence.
This happened again and again and again, different scripts, but always a wrong number guy who just wouldn't go away. Until one day my wife answered and said my name.
Her: "No this is ???????'s phone"
After that I never received another wrong number call.
Now I put that down to random chance, since I'm not worth spying on. But then my wife got a new pre-pay mobile, again she paid cash, and sure enough she got the same pattern of calls. We were talking about it yesterday, when the phone rang, and it was woman this time, who again was a wrong number, but didn't seem to want to hang up.
Many different phone numbers used each time, we're building a list.
Put your cell phone next to your computer speakers. If it's transmitting you'll know it.
Sorry FBI for killing your wiretap program.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Yes, I recommend everyone to do this. I also recommend everyone to change the apperance of their face with plastic surgery once a year, just in case. Also, only use rental cars, and change these just as often. Only pay by cash, change what appartment you're living in as often as you can. Sleep with a gun underneath your pillow, have few friends, and don't tell them much about yourself. It's all about protecting yourself from the government, we're all suspects until proven guilty after all.
Life is Reality
Just use a pay phone. Get rolls of dimes from the bank.
... It's when your girlfriend, for no apparent reason, says: "who is nikki and why is she telling you to get tested for syphilis?"
God Be Gone
This has always stood as one of those easily reinterpreted components of the constitution -- just look at the way the US Supreme Court enjoys reinterpreting it. And, to some degree, I do see why this should be interpreted in a somewhat fluid way. There are terrorists/freedom fighters out there, and governments should be capable of protecting their citizens-- that is what they're ultimately designed to do.
However, the egregious trampling of our right to privacy, as outlined in the US constitution, starts moving us very quickly in the direction of fascism. And people tend to use the term fascism lightly, but you have to ask yourself how a state can move from one type of government to another? History has shown that this happens everywhere -- just look at history
So, why would I take a break from my ultimate presentation on latency markers in tuberculosis? Well, I feel strongly that you (the person reading this, not just the general "you") should take it upon yourself to encourage those people that you vote for to stand up and strengthen the first levee against tyranny -- our right to privacy. The FBI may, at this point, consider using your cell phone to track you as a legitimate means to and end, but when the FBI cycles through it's current leadership/membership then we can only hope that these means lead to good ends.
And the hope that people mean well is not something I am willing to risk.
It would seem to be much easier to have the phone record to its internal memory and then transmit later. Transmitting needs a fair bit of power (while recording to memory from the microphone doesn't take much and can be compressed) and I would think people would start to notice that their phone would be dead after powering it off for several hours.
The amount of memory and processors in some modern phones makes this a possibility...
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
The RISKS digest carried this news a few years ago.
It's been long known that;
1. some providers can download arbitrary software to some phones
2. a phone can be running that software while appearing not to be making a call
The potential for abuse is obvious.
I gave up my mobile phone about a month ago now. I read through a full list of the ways in which the British State monitors me. When you read them all at once, it has quite an impact. The simple question I have is this: I am completely innocent. I have commited no crimes and am not suspected of committing any crimes.
SO WHY AM I BEING WATCHED?
Hello,
Just as an experiment, I tried placing my cell phone into an anti-static mylar baggy and the signal went from 100% to 40% (or five bars to two). Repeating this with tin foil with a small opening to see the LCD (about 1cm^2) reduced the signal to 20% (or one bar).
I am wondering that if someone wants to have a private verbal conversation sans listeners on the cell phone, all they have to do is place their cell phone in metal box?
This would seem much more convenient than having to pull the battery out, as well as reduce wear and tear on the contacts or thin plastics of today's cell phones.
Perhaps someone who is a bit more familiar with electronics could explain whether or not a "tin foil hat" (or a metal box or foil bag, ala Enemy of the State) for a cell phone would work?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
You could tell that your phone was bugged, because you had an extra wardrobe in your room.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Gangster 1. OK, so I'll just phone [insert non-ethnocentric name here] to confirm the date of the shipment. How many kilos again?
Gangster 2. NO! Shh! Keep your voice down until you dial out — that thing could be bugged.
Phone. "This phone is not being used as a covert surveillance device. Please continue to arrange your morally and/or legally questionable activities as normal."
Gangster 1. Muh?!
Phone. "Please ignore this message."
All current laptops have microphones and some have built in cameras. Desktops also usually have microphones and often have cameras. Many have continuous internet access. Computers are ubiquitous and they are often left on. It is not hard to imagine infecting a vulnerable computer with a small program to send back continuous audio and an occasional picture. With reasonable bit rates and good encoding, it would not use much bandwidth.
Does anyone else worry about such things? Has this been done already? If it has, would you know about it? (pull foil hat on tighter)
It's easier said than done. There aren't as many payphones about as there used to be*, and a lot of those that are left require phone cards.
Then, when you do find a suitable one, how do you know it isn't bugged already?
Lastly, getting a roll of dimes from the just isn't that easy in most of the countries in the world. Of course, most of the world's payphones don't accept dimes either...
-- Steve
* The UK has a unique situation: while the number of payphones in the UK may have decreased, the number of British Telephone Boxes has remained about the same - they've just moved to more exotic locations in other countries. The same goes for British Police Boxes, except that their movements appear not to be limited to the first three dimensions.
The first time it happened, I did what you were saying and write it off to chance. That was after 8 of these odd conversations in the first 2 months, by about the 5th I noticed they all were trying to talk me round into giving my name, so I was really angry when my wife answered my phone and gave my name.
After that it has so far been 10 months of no wrong calls.
I asked her why she told a total stranger my full name, and she said it was the way he persisted in talking, the conversation naturally led to a point where my full name was the gap in the conversation.
Then when *she* got a prepay and it started with her, the very first call she got was in front of me, she said you have a wrong number and when he didn't hang up the penny dropped. I signaled to her remind her about the previous time she'd handed out my name.
I put my head up to listen in, and it is totally clear to me that he was trying to talk her into revealing information. If her phone supports recording, I'll try and record some of these calls and put them up on the web so you can hear for yourself. She's had 10 so far in her first 2 months of having the phone.
I also have a phone for work calls only, but I signed a service contract when I bought it and haven't made any international calls on it, it's never had a wrong number in the 12 months I've had it.
Is there any evidence that such features are implemented in (GSM) phones? Because to me it looks more like an urban legend than anything else. Such a feature should have to have some traces: like being part of the GSM specifications, for one. Also, programmers working on cell phones should also be aware of such functionality (when I was working on conventional telephone switches I had - not too deep, since I was uninterested - knowledge of the wiretapping features).
But, it seems, all this craze comes from some over-paranoid tinhats and has no grounding in reality.
Real life is overrated.
Use their own designed encrypted systems, or buy $5000 comms talkies from the russians.
They use high tech RF mapping signature maps to see where there are dark spots
in the FBis monitoring systems.
If your making billions in profit each year, you can afford to spend $5-10m in custom design hardware from china
or fly 1000s of flights to map the intercepts.
Only part time low lifes use mobiles, because they cannot afford anything greater than $200USD, which means they must
be very small time crooks.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
My life is so boring, spying on me is its own punishment.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
"Nice conspiracy theory, but you do realize that you're identifiable without your cooperation if you have a cellphone, don't you?"
I don't think they are interested in me or my wife, (not that they know she's my wife). I think they are profiling all telephone calls for patterns of interconnection.
We both make international calls to the far east, and I think we score highly on some equation in a computer somewhere. International calls from prepay phones in foreign languages where the phones were paid for in cash and the extended guarantee wasn't accepted and the top up cards are all paid for with cash.
If you only know us from our mobile phone logs we must look very suspicious if you were a spy agency involved in call profiling.
OK, this has come up a lot in many conversations.
First off, cell phones have batteries internally, much like the battery your mobo has to keep it's settings.
Why would cell phones differ? Take your main battery out, the time/alarm/etc settings are saved, doesn't that give you any clues?
The phone is powered at any given time, it's not a matter of whether the screen is lit or not...
They could, and can, and do, use cell phones as bugs, there's nothing new to that.
If we are concerned with the ability of somebody to alter the phone's behavior sufficiently to initiate a call without your intervention, then we shouldn't assume too much about what other things can or cannot be done.
For example, not being able to make a call when a call is in progress. In time division multiplexing, you're taking one or two timeslots out of eight or sixteen. However, it's pretty clear that if we have modified the phone ostensible behavior enough to use it as a bug, it could also take more than one half channel at a time.
Checking the warmth of the phone is good idea, but not perfect either. The assumption is that the phone is transmitting your words live. What if the phone recorded your conversations at a reduced bit rate, say 3kb/sec, using voice activiation. It could the be stored and dribbled out intermittently, particularly when close to a cell tower. This would reduce telltale power effects. This might not be enough to monitor your every waking moment, but it could be used to monitor snatches of your conversation, particularly as part of a surveillance program.
Even if the phone doesn't transmit your speech, it could use the signally channel to record that you are talking, combined with the GPS or wi-fi snooping, over time the network of people you talk to could be recontructed.
It's a bit paranoid to worry about these things, unless you think the government has a compelling reason to snoop on you. But if you do have such a reason, then you shouldn't make too many assumptions about what they could do with a phone, particularly a "smart" phone which might have megabytes of storage. A simpler phone with a removable battery would be a good choice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Personally I wonder if it's not just a case of Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It could be that someone just wrote down the wrong phone number for someone named Mark, and your obstinacy to not give any detail tripped _their_ paranoia.
I'm saying it because something similar happened on my normal (non-mobile) phone line. And the Deutsche Telekom certainly had all my data there, so there would have been no need for such a masquerade.
Anyway, someone with an extra-thick arabic or maybe turkish accent repeatedly called, first to ask to talk to Achmed or something like that, then gradually after a few calls (spaced a couple of weeks apart) it turned into trying to bully me into "admitting" that I'm Achmed. (Dunno what gave him _that_ stupid idea.) And, yeah, demanding to know who I am, if not Achmed. By the time it turned into screaming at me in his weird language, I told him I'll call the police if he doesn't leave me alone.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, if They have ordered the phone company to intercept your call, why would they bother with turning off encryption anyway? IIt's not like the phone company needs to break it to intercept your call. f state authorities want to listen in to a conservation, they surely don't have to tune in on the air interface between mobile phone and base station. The call has to be routed through a phone network anyway.
If your phone is warm to the touch even when not in use, is that an indication of bugging or a battery designed by Sony?
Those callers are bill collectors. Mark was (and likely is) a deadbeat (not that there is anything wrong with that :]). By law, or convention (I'm not really sure) they don't talk about Mark's financial problem with anyone else but Mark. The next round of creditors will start automated messages "I have an important message for Mark (his last name), call...", and this will repeat 4 or more times a day. Get rid of that number now, it won't stop.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
There is another approach - take off the cover which protects the battery. Underneath the battery, you will see how two wires are connected. If the color of the wires is green, then you're bugged. Otherwise, if the wires are red - it's a bomb.
Other colors are not defined by the standards, so if your phone has wires which are not green, nor red - you have a counterfeit phone.
The saddest poem
Get rolls of dimes from the bank.
And a time machine...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payphone
"In the United States, the coin rate for a local direct-dialed station-to-station call from a payphone has been 50 in most areas since mid-2001"
I can attribute every single crash/reset of my phone within the past six months to a year to particular apps on my phone. In this case, it's GNU Keyring. Keyring really likes to crash my phone if I haven't used Keyring in a while. It's Keyring's way of telling me it wants more love. :)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You know, no offense meant, but it's sorta funny to hear that coming from the _USA_.
What you have over there is some vague principle, that, as you say, is constantly being reinterpreted to mean, "yeah, well, it says we can't search your papers, but your computer's files are still fair game" or "yeah, well, once you gave that info to someone else, or it passed through someone else's servers/wires/whatever, then you have no more claim to privacy" or other such.
What we have in the EU, on the other hand, are very precise laws saying what can you do with other people's data (very little without their consent), what you _can't_ do with it, and what kind of data you're not even supposed to be collecting at all. And not just for government agencies. Your bank or phone company also can't just sell your information to everyone for an extra buck, for example.
So maybe, dunno, maybe you could include _that_ idea in your body of laws?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Just phone your own land-line and then say, "Binladenbinladenbinladen" 10 times.
Wait 30 minutes.
If there are no black helicopters after 30 minutes then you probably aren't being bugged.
This is all just my personal opinion.
You should assume that your cell phone is bugged, at least in the sense that the "proper authorities" have access to any conversations you've had and where you were at the time. Maybe they're not always paying attention, but they can always listen if they choose.
Perhaps I'm wrong, just being paranoid, but I'd say it's utterly foolish to assume you have any privacy by default these days. If you're not taking active measures to ensure privacy, you don't have it.
- Brain.
"Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching." - Dogbert.
RTFA. The newer phones can be programmed so that the display/activity lights do not give them away.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
They're not necessarily bill collectors.
I'm currently stationed overseas, and I got into a car accident while on leave in the States. The other party decided to sue for damages (I love living in America) and my insurance company played the "he's overseas serving the country, are you honestly going to force him to come back to deal with this?" card, the judge agreed, and delayed the trial until my tour's up, which at the time was more than two years.
My wife has been getting calls on her cell phone (she's still in the states) that go like this:
"Is binarytoaster there?" "...No, he's overseas." *click*
It's honestly that fast from the way she puts it - they just ask if I'm there, and upon getting that answer they just hang up. Never say who they are, never leave a number, nothing. Been going on for at least a few months now.
She was completely confused by why anyone would do this, as was I, until I remembered the lawsuit. So they might not be collectors, but they're still just as annoying.
If you're really worried, get a hex die from a gaming store. Then get
8-16 *different* friends to each buy you a prepaid phone. Number them.
When you need to make a call, roll the die, use the phone, toss it in
the trash or better, give it to a random teenager to use up the minutes.
What, did you sleep through elementary physics and the principles of EM radiation?
A cell phone is nothing more than a fancy radio with an omnidirectional antenna. That antenna, per its name, is going to radiate a certian amount of RF energy in all directions. RF that is radiated in the direction of the cell tower will be recieved by the antennas on the tower. RF that is radiated in any other direction will gradually be absorbed by the surrounding environment to no practical effect. So if your LED RF detector happens to be in the close vicinity of your cell phone when the phone is transmitting, it's going to be hit with RF that wouldn't have hit the cell tower anyway!
The only possibly conceivable way that the LED RF detector could have any impact on the signal strength between the cell phone and the cell tower is if it was exactly in the path between the cell phone antenna and the cell tower antenna. The probability that this would occur is so small as to be trivial, and with the wide angle of radiation on most cell phone tower antennas, and the fact that there is usually more than one antenna for any direction, reduces the probability effectively to zero.
Yeah, but some aren't. I had an interesting run in with some credit card scammers earlier this year. I got a call from my credit card company about 10 minutes after I bought lunch one day. It was from the fraud early warning system, which I'd gotten a few times now. These were usually due to me flying around the country, or taking extended road trips, or making very large purchases ($900 in appliances, $1500 in furniture, etc.). I wasn't too worried about it.
.com that was based in the same state as this old address, and donations to a charity of a few cents.
This time, though, I it asked if I could verify a purchase for "theme park tickets," "appliances," and some other things. I told it no, and an amazingly easy 15 minutes later, my account was frozen, all the obvious charges were rolled back, and a new card was on the way, along with some paperwork for me to flag other charges that the CC company missed.
The scammers had my old address apparently. I knew this because they tried to order a convection oven (who'd have figured?) and have it shipped to my old address. My guess is that this is the address in whatever database that got cracked. When I did get my next statement, I noticed a few charges to some random "music store"
It turns out that credit card company had cancelled far more of these "song" purchases, and "donations." The thieves had made, over a few weeks, donations of varying amounts from a few cents to about $2, and random song purchases of about $1. It seems that they were trying to establish that I was "normally" spending money in the area where I used to live, and also verifying that my card was still legit.
So yeah, some criminals are dumb. Others are not. The fraud detection systems we have are pretty good though.
Michael C. Hollinger
One correction to the article: WCDMA definitely is used as a primary voice channel. It's not data-only like EVDO technology. That's why WCDMA phone specs often have separate talk times listed for GSM vs. WCDMA modes.
I for a number of months heard computer speakers popping and buzzing away, even if no one was in the nearby cube. I suppose someone COULD have left their phone in the cube while at lunch or a meeting, but... now I am wondering if it was MY phone. Might not have been. But, for shits and giggles, I sometimes just turn off my phone, or leave it "somewhere" for a few hours, then retrieve it.
What's REALLY weird, is during November, on no fewer than THREE outbound calls, I got cross-connected with OTHER people who were NOT even IN my contact list, and were NOT the people I was trying to reach. One acted like she was already talking to someone as if in another conversation. Another I think didn't quite want to hang up, either. Then, I've gotten the "wrong number" call where they caller asked for "Mo", and despite my saying I'm not "Mo", he didn't want to hang up. My friend standing next to me noted my time with this caller and then told me "You're very nice, patient...I would have just hung up..." Truth is, if I could reach through the phone, I'd probably tear the jaw off that caller, even if it were an agent just doing his/her job. Or, euphemistically, I'd deal with that situation.
(I could also go on about my website having been experiencing WEIRD stuff, like my updates not going through, the server crashing on the ISP side (I asked them, "Don't you have fail-overs or redundancy to cover this stuff?" The rep didn't answer. Thing is, I don't know about outtages of my site when I'm NOT on my site, but at least 3 times over the past few months, my site croaked while I was updating pages. Not doing anything special. Just using THE (major Host)-provided tool, just text, a few pics and some flash-based image presenters... And, on my log stats, there are sometimes more "unresolved IP" sites than normal IPs/geography. Some are from overseas as I expect/presume, but some go to the US east coast, and have weird names, making me think a front company for some agency is periodically checking my site. Go ahead. look all you want. I wish I had friends all over the world and could reach them anonymously; I could have them report to me their successes and failures to see my site to once and for all put my mind at rest over possible disruptions and plain old blocking of my site. http://www.otanashide.com/ is one of them. I suppose some bastard will try to throw the 2006 military commissions act against me, retroactively...)
I also, notice that my inbound calls' timestamps are set for the east coast. I called my carrier and the CSR told me I had to go to a landline phone, call them, then he would give me a sequence of codes to reset the phone. I told him I don't HAVE a landline phone, and that he could help me by giving me the sequence. He said he couldn't do that. He suggested I go to the local authorized retailer and have them punch the code into my keypad.
Sheesh.
Then, there are times when I have had my phone turned off, and not just by my OWN hand. When I turn it on, it tells me "Updating Contacts". This is MetroPCS, for shit's sake. It's a cheap, lousy, S14 from 2004, and they can "update" my contact list? Hell, I've for some time been thinking they or some agency is lifting my contacts. Fine, go ahead. But when/IF I enter a contact "bomb local FBI office" I'm SURE they'll REALLY up the ante, like knock down my door, confiscate my shit, and ship me off to Guantanamo. Could probably happen to ANYONE, if you become a person of interest. Might be safer to just stick with "Fuck you through and through" as a contact name...
Yep, my phone mysteriously and occasionally TURNS ITSELF OFF, even when the battery is fully charged. I COULD be a bad battery, as only one of the two regularly does it, but I think they both will or have. So, I suspect someone is trying to test whether I am monitoring my phone, or maybe trying to reinitialize some soft-feature in the phone. Maybe I'll just give up cell phones all together. Could save me $55 per month, anyway.
When
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I for one would not mind being killed by a drunk driver if it saved our right* to privacy and freedom of speech. No officer needs to hear what I'm saying to see that I'm swerving or chugging from a tall silver can at every stoplight.
*: The word "right" in this context is used to convey that it is ethically and morally right that we should have privacy and freedom of speech, not that we have a guaranteed Right as established by government and upheld/squashed by the courts.
Using prepaid cell phones seems like a fantastic way to gain anonymity, but at at least here in teh US, pre-paid phones are considered a 'red flag' for evil doing. Remember those poor guys in Minnesota a few months ago? They purchased a hundred or so pre-paid phones, for legitimate sale on Ebay, and were arrested. The logic was pre-paid phones are only used by terrorists and drug dealers. In a way, using a pre-paid phone may attract more attention than just using a standard phone. Very sad, but very true. The reality of the situation is there are only a few thousand bugs/line taps performed by intelligence services each year. They just don't have enough 'listeners' to do all the spying the like. Thankfully we haven't gotten to the point where there is an individual 'listener' for each man woman and child. It probably isn't far off. I'm glad teh article mentioned the 'buzzing speaker test', that was my first thought also, as I've noticed all my phones over the years have created that buzzing sound when they ring or transmit.
Et In Arcadia Ego
Actually there was a problem with OnStar employees doing this to some famous people and or their ex for kicks.
I am pretty sure that you can find kits on line that add an LED that lights up when you the mic is active or a switch that kills them mike
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Ponies!!!
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
You can probibly tell the bill collectors that you are not that person and ask them to stop calling you and they will. Another route is to tell them that you are not that person and that the phone they are calling is a business phone, that might work better.
Another route is to tell them that you are a government worker and that the phone they are calling is your government issued cell phone. I did this with the intention of telling them that if they called again I would refer the matter to the State Attorney General's office but it never came to that as they quite ready to take my number off the list at once.
No matter where you go, there you are.
why not simply connect one of those flashy LED thingies to your phone?
Because newer phones can act as voice recorders and transmit the data later. You don't really think that an ordinary cell phone connection would have sufficient quality do you? It would be much better to make a high quality voice recording and transmit it as a file late at night or while the target is actually using the phone to talk or upload their favorite pictures to Photobucket. Internet capable phones can do all sorts of things regardless of your subscriber allowing you to benefit or not. They are computers with a good chunk of flash memory.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.