Forget job sites that is not the way to go. There is a very good book What Color Is Your Parachute? that explaines the right way to do this. The most helpful website I have found is Linkedin
The way to do it would be to use a software defined radio (SDR), I know that several manufactors are looking to use SDR for their latest UMTS (3G) basestations, and eventually for the phones as well. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/ would be a good starting point, but you would need some specilised hardware to work at GSM frequencies.
There is a very simular system being trialed in Cardiff. http://www.atsltd.co.uk/ Some interesting analysis on waiting times and congestion on the site. More like a personal taxi without the back chat from the driver.
OK lets bring up the thorny issue of paper sizes. The US is about the only place on earth not to use metric paper sizes. And this has serious tech consequences.
The key thing to recognise here is that although the individual data items (emails in this case) are important what is more important is the relationships between them.
Just like the Internet an individual page has some value but its value is greatly enhanced by the quality of the links as much as the quality of the content. So how could this apply to personal data.
Take for example a message about a product from a supplier. I would want to link this to other similar products from their competitors, projects or client who could use this product. Experts in this field who could give advice on this etc.
We already have some of these links in place with discussion threads, but contact links are usally restricted to the sender and other reciepiants.
I have been thinking about how to organise contact information along these lines to alow linkages between contacts. Along the lines of the studies of "Six Degrees of separation" witch says that we are all connected via social networks and nobody is more than six contacts away from anybody else.
So if there was a VCARD that incorporated connections individuals and groups could combine their contacts together. This would be very useful, say I wanted to find out about a company, I could search through my contacts, and then through their contacts for someone who worked there.
Well that is the theroy. The standards state that the phone should indicate when encription is on and off. The problem is that most phones do not do this.
Often when a network is having problems involving the encription functionallity the switch it off while it is resolved. The only way for a user to know is to have a handset that displays the "engineering" displays from the phone.
There is also lots of comments here about the cyphering algrothims. GSM uses A5 currently there are 2 algorithims defined A5/1 and A5/2 almost all networks use A5/1 the purpose of A5/2 was to allow GSM to be deployed in contries covered by the US export restrictions on encription technology (wassinar aggrement). Many networks were orignally only allowed to use 56 bit keys so in these countries the top bits of the key are zero, as the restriction has been lifted networks can now use the full 64 bits. GSM3 standards use 128 bit keys.
The GSM association guideing principals on Privacy has a specific section of SMS advertising in their document AA-38 (Only available to GSM operators) I quote the section below:
IV. WIRELESS ADVERTISING
The GSMA recognizes that traditional advertising models may not apply to wireless services due to technology and application limitations, the restrictive user interface, and the as yet unproven effectiveness of and market for such services. Indeed, the wireless advertising industry is in its infancy. The GSMA supports the development of standards for advertising and cooperation with marketing associations to ensure that privacy is protected while new channels for information dissemination are developed. However, the GSMA guiding principle is that advertising sent to any wireless mobile device requires user consent and clear identification of the sender.
There are two basic forms of wireless advertising today. First, wireless "push" advertising covers any content sent by or on behalf of advertisers and marketers to a wireless mobile device at a time other than when the subscriber requests it. Push advertising may include voice or audio, short message service ("SMS") messages, e-mail, multimedia messaging, cell broadcast, picture messages, surveys, or any other pushed advertising or content. Second, and in contrast to push advertising, wireless "pull" advertising covers any content sent to a wireless subscriber upon his or her request.
Wireless portals may evolve where a third kind of advertising - passive - become viable, but at present, limitations on the size of the user interface has made this impractical. Instead, it is much more common for a mobile network operator today to brand the user interface with its own messages. It is assumed that such messaging is within the customer relationship.
The difference between push and pull advertising is palpable when viewed through the GSMA Data Privacy Guidelines. In pull advertising, the user consents to receive the information from a known source. Of course, the marketing initiative must provide notice to the user of any personal information that is collected, how it will be used and to whom it will be disclosed. The user not only must consent to receive the advertisement but also must consent to any other information practice.
In the case of push advertisement, the user seldom knows the source of the message and has never asked to receive the information. Unsolicited wireless communications from third parties generally occur without the knowledge or consent of the mobile network operator as well. The GSMA Data Privacy Guidelines reject "wireless spam." Of course, the GSMA does not include within this definition certain push messages from emergency service providers that warn consumers of impending dangers or problems such bad weather or traffic mishaps.
Firstly in the GSM world the [PDF] Benefon has been out for a couple of years now, not a big seller and has some limitations. GPS only works with line of sight to the satellites so the GPS will not work indoors and where you have limited view of the sky, i.e. in cities with tall buildings.
More interesting are the issues around release of location information, how would/. Readers respond to these questions?
Would you be prepared to release your location when making calls, in much the same way that your phone number is currently released. Your location could only be read by those with appropriate equipment. We will probably be required by law to release this information on all emergency services calls (999, 112 911)?
No, I would not want my location released at all. (except emergency calls)
No, Normally not released, but I would be able to release it by selecting an option when making a call.
Yes, but only to services approved by (My network operator).
Yes, released on all calls, except when I specifically specify not to release the location.
Yes, released on all calls.
Would you want the location of callers calling you (who have released their location) displayed on your phone display?
Yes, display the grid reference of the caller.
Yes, display the direction and distance of the caller from my current location.
Yes, display the nearest town name to the location of the caller.
Yes, but only if the information was provided free of charge to me.
No, I would not be interested in this.
.
Would you allow the release of you current location to a caller who is calling you?
No, I would not want my location released at all.
No, Normally not released, but I would be able to release it by selecting an option.
Yes, but only to services approved by (My network operator).
Yes, released on all calls, except when I specifically specify not to release when answering the call.
Yes, released on all calls..
Would you allow the tracking of your phone to enable (My network operator) and other companies to extract statistical information on your movements for providing information on traffic congestion and other services. All identification information would me masked so it would not be possible to identify you from this data?
Yes. I would trust (My network operator) to manage this information securely.
Yes, Only if I then had access to the traffic information.
Yes, but I would want to select who received the information about me.
No, I would want to opt out of this sort of service.
No, I don't think (My network operator) should collect or release this information..
Would you want (My network operator) and other companies to send you information messages about events happening near to you?
Yes, only when I requested them.
Yes, as soon as they happen and I am in the area.
Yes, but I would want to select which companies information I receive.
No, I would want to opt out of this sort of service.
No, I don't think (My network operator) should collect or release this information..
Would you be interested in a find a friend service. The network would look thorough a list of your friends numbers to see if any of them were near you. Only friends on your list would be able to find you?
Yes, I would not mind my friends knowing I was nearby.
Yes, but I would want to be able to disable the service, so I could not be found.
Yes, but I would want to know who was looking for me before releasing anything to my friend.
Yes, but I would only expect to pay if the system found a friend for me.
No, I would not want this sort of service.
No, I don't think (My network operator) should offer this sort of service.
Firstly don't forget the inverse square law. The power of a transmitter goes down as the square of the distance. For an omni it is the cube.
The power of a basestation is not that much more than that of a mobile. In engineering a mobile system it is critical to tune the reception of the up-link signal. So transmitting at high powers is useless, just increases interference and reduces frequency reuse. There are much larger sources of non-ionising radiation around, eg power lines.
The only area that has been raised that MAY be a concern is the pulsed nature of TDMA transmissions. This is not an issue with basestations as they transmit continuously. At the moment nothing has been proved, nor any mechanism shown for how this could work..
As you approach the 2.4GHz water absorption frequency the range of mobiles goes down considerably because of absorption by water in the atmosphere. Hence the range of a 900Mhz phone is considerably larger than an 1800MHz one at the same power. But at the moment in most countries this is an advantage as capacity is more of an issue that range. The lower range of 1800MHz means smaller cells so more channels in a given area and also more channel reuse (the nearest cell that can use the same channel without interference).
The warming effect is NOT a problem standing in the sun you will absorb many times the thermal energy given off by a mobile even transmitting at maximum power of 0.25 Watts
The spectrum allocation in the US is a knotty problem as the 1900MHz band that most of the rest of the world has adopted has been allocated for PCS networks. Perhaps an advantage to Voicestreem and Bell South GSM operators to integrate 3G into their existing spectrum
Perhaps this is behind another interesting development, AT&T seem to be going down the GSM route to 3G according to this article in Communications Week (Registration required) Here is a summary for those who can't get there:
AT&T's decision to build out quickly a GSM overlay network on top of its existing network of time division multiple access (TDMA) basestations has swung the balance of competing wireless technologies in North America.
The decision by the third biggest cellular service provider in the United States - with 15 million subscribers - to adopt GSM systems after all as the platform for developing third generation high-speed mobile data, has fired industry analysts with expectation that the European-backed standard could now become a leader in the U.S. market.
Of course the people at handspring did a GSM phone first, this is where the majority of the mobile market is.
GSM is used by 150 countries, 447 networks, and more customers than all other standards put together: 300 million (55 per cent of the total world cellular market), the Japanese PHS system has more customers than CDMA.
This is one market where the US tendency to ignore world standards has seriously backfired and the future is also bleak as they have set up their own standard for UMTS (3GPP2) rather than participate in 3GPP
Given the success of the comunity development model in such projects as linux, could this be used to find the perportrators of this kind of attack. Perhaps a dedicated site to contain the detailed information on each attack, with thousands of eyeballs looking for them it would be much harder to hide.
The obvious diffulcty is that you are then provideing detailed information to the Crackers as well as the white hats.
I have just come back from Japan, and talking to some colleges from NTT DoCoMo they said that 60% of the traffic on I-Mode (the Jap equivalent of WAP) was games. Everyone in Europe and the US is talking about m-Commerce at the big thing on WAP and games don't even figure on the development plans. I think this could be the killer app for WAP even if it is only half as big as it is in Japan.
Yes but Japan is fully behind 3GPP and not going off on their own like the US with 3GPP2.
The usage of data services (and hence the revenue) is only 1% even in Japan. So any solution has got to pay for itself on something other than data. Maby in 10 years time we will have 50% of usage being data but for the vast majority that isn't happening yet.
The only way to pay for the investment costs of building the ubiquitous mobile IP network is to pay for the infrastructure with mobile voice calls. It is then there for the current 1% of users using mobile data applications.
It's too slow, I here you say, well GSM is the world standard, you poor backwards in the US may catch with the rest of the world in the next few years. 9.6K is availabe everywhere, 28.8k is available on a few networks, and GPRS is just starting to roll.
I personally find that 9.6k is adequate for collecting emails and some moderate surfing such as/.
A lot of these systems are about mesuring the progress on developing a system and thus provideing the information to enable management. This is generally not valued by the programmers at the sharp end as they see little benefit, just more form filling.
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Have you a unused mine shaft nearby, pop the fridge down there and that will help. The deeper the better.
Forget job sites that is not the way to go. There is a very good book What Color Is Your Parachute? that explaines the right way to do this. The most helpful website I have found is Linkedin
The way to do it would be to use a software defined radio (SDR), I know that several manufactors are looking to use SDR for their latest UMTS (3G) basestations, and eventually for the phones as well. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/ would be a good starting point, but you would need some specilised hardware to work at GSM frequencies.
There is a very simular system being trialed in Cardiff. http://www.atsltd.co.uk/ Some interesting analysis on waiting times and congestion on the site. More like a personal taxi without the back chat from the driver.
OK lets bring up the thorny issue of paper sizes. The US is about the only place on earth not to use metric paper sizes. And this has serious tech consequences.
The key thing to recognise here is that although the individual data items (emails in this case) are important what is more important is the relationships between them.
Just like the Internet an individual page has some value but its value is greatly enhanced by the quality of the links as much as the quality of the content. So how could this apply to personal data.
Take for example a message about a product from a supplier. I would want to link this to other similar products from their competitors, projects or client who could use this product. Experts in this field who could give advice on this etc.
We already have some of these links in place with discussion threads, but contact links are usally restricted to the sender and other reciepiants.
I have been thinking about how to organise contact information along these lines to alow linkages between contacts. Along the lines of the studies of "Six Degrees of separation" witch says that we are all connected via social networks and nobody is more than six contacts away from anybody else.
So if there was a VCARD that incorporated connections individuals and groups could combine their contacts together. This would be very useful, say I wanted to find out about a company, I could search through my contacts, and then through their contacts for someone who worked there.
Well that is the theroy. The standards state that the phone should indicate when encription is on and off. The problem is that most phones do not do this.
Often when a network is having problems involving the encription functionallity the switch it off while it is resolved. The only way for a user to know is to have a handset that displays the "engineering" displays from the phone.
There is also lots of comments here about the cyphering algrothims. GSM uses A5 currently there are 2 algorithims defined A5/1 and A5/2 almost all networks use A5/1 the purpose of A5/2 was to allow GSM to be deployed in contries covered by the US export restrictions on encription technology (wassinar aggrement). Many networks were orignally only allowed to use 56 bit keys so in these countries the top bits of the key are zero, as the restriction has been lifted networks can now use the full 64 bits. GSM3 standards use 128 bit keys.
More interesting are the issues around release of location information, how would /. Readers respond to these questions?
Would you be prepared to release your location when making calls, in much the same way that your phone number is currently released. Your location could only be read by those with appropriate equipment. We will probably be required by law to release this information on all emergency services calls (999, 112 911)?
- No, I would not want my location released at all. (except emergency calls)
- No, Normally not released, but I would be able to release it by selecting an option when making a call.
- Yes, but only to services approved by (My network operator).
- Yes, released on all calls, except when I specifically specify not to release the location.
- Yes, released on all calls.
Would you want the location of callers calling you (who have released their location) displayed on your phone display?- Yes, display the grid reference of the caller.
- Yes, display the direction and distance of the caller from my current location.
- Yes, display the nearest town name to the location of the caller.
- Yes, but only if the information was provided free of charge to me.
- No, I would not be interested in this.
. Would you allow the release of you current location to a caller who is calling you?- No, I would not want my location released at all.
- No, Normally not released, but I would be able to release it by selecting an option.
- Yes, but only to services approved by (My network operator).
- Yes, released on all calls, except when I specifically specify not to release when answering the call.
- Yes, released on all calls.
.
Would you allow the tracking of your phone to enable (My network operator) and other companies to extract statistical information on your movements for providing information on traffic congestion and other services. All identification information would me masked so it would not be possible to identify you from this data?- Yes. I would trust (My network operator) to manage this information securely.
- Yes, Only if I then had access to the traffic information.
- Yes, but I would want to select who received the information about me.
- No, I would want to opt out of this sort of service.
- No, I don't think (My network operator) should collect or release this information..
Would you want (My network operator) and other companies to send you information messages about events happening near to you?- Yes, only when I requested them.
- Yes, as soon as they happen and I am in the area.
- Yes, but I would want to select which companies information I receive.
- No, I would want to opt out of this sort of service.
- No, I don't think (My network operator) should collect or release this information..
Would you be interested in a find a friend service. The network would look thorough a list of your friends numbers to see if any of them were near you. Only friends on your list would be able to find you?The power of a basestation is not that much more than that of a mobile. In engineering a mobile system it is critical to tune the reception of the up-link signal. So transmitting at high powers is useless, just increases interference and reduces frequency reuse. There are much larger sources of non-ionising radiation around, eg power lines.
The only area that has been raised that MAY be a concern is the pulsed nature of TDMA transmissions. This is not an issue with basestations as they transmit continuously. At the moment nothing has been proved, nor any mechanism shown for how this could work..
Here are a few links for further reading:
The World Health Organizations agenda for EMF research priorities The WHO International EMF Project list of research priorities needed in advance of the formal health risk assessments in 2003 and 2004. EMF research being supported by the GSM Association and the MMF The Association and the Mobile Manufacturers Forum are working to address EMF research priorities identified by the WHO. Report of the UK Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones In May 2000, an expert panel led by Professor Sir William Stewart released its report with extensive recommendations that need careful review. Study in Journal of American Medical Association - 20/12/2000 Dr Muscat et al conclude that "the use of handheld cellular telephones was unrelated to the risk of brain cancer in the current study." Study in New England Journal of Medicine - 19/12/2000 The authors conclude that "These data do not support the hypothesis that the recent use of hand-held cellular telephones causes brain tumors, but they are not sufficient to evaluate the risks among long-term, heavy users and for potentially long induction periods."
The warming effect is NOT a problem standing in the sun you will absorb many times the thermal energy given off by a mobile even transmitting at maximum power of 0.25 Watts
Perhaps this is behind another interesting development, AT&T seem to be going down the GSM route to 3G according to this article in Communications Week (Registration required) Here is a summary for those who can't get there:
This is one market where the US tendency to ignore world standards has seriously backfired and the future is also bleak as they have set up their own standard for UMTS (3GPP2) rather than participate in 3GPP
The obvious diffulcty is that you are then provideing detailed information to the Crackers as well as the white hats.
I have just come back from Japan, and talking to some colleges from NTT DoCoMo they said that 60% of the traffic on I-Mode (the Jap equivalent of WAP) was games. Everyone in Europe and the US is talking about m-Commerce at the big thing on WAP and games don't even figure on the development plans. I think this could be the killer app for WAP even if it is only half as big as it is in Japan.
The usage of data services (and hence the revenue) is only 1% even in Japan. So any solution has got to pay for itself on something other than data. Maby in 10 years time we will have 50% of usage being data but for the vast majority that isn't happening yet.
It's too slow, I here you say, well GSM is the world standard, you poor backwards in the US may catch with the rest of the world in the next few years. 9.6K is availabe everywhere, 28.8k is available on a few networks, and GPRS is just starting to roll.
I personally find that 9.6k is adequate for collecting emails and some moderate surfing such as /.
A lot of these systems are about mesuring the progress on developing a system and thus provideing the information to enable management. This is generally not valued by the programmers at the sharp end as they see little benefit, just more form filling.