This idea may seem harmful but I believe it is not. In fact a very similar thing is done now to hunt bugs in the commercial software. What if to launch several open-source projects aimed at making software to penetrate privacy. I mean, for example, developing toolkits and application for massive e-mail filtering, keystroke sniffing, instant messages interception and blah-blah-blah. I am sure that there are lots of people on/. who have ideas on what to do in technical terms. These should be classical open-source projects under least restrictive licenses and with good docs. As a result almost anybody will get an ability to penetrate privacy of almost anybody. But then counter-action will follow and various anti-eavesdropping software and hardware will be developed both by the open-source, commercial and government communities. And it will be much easier to do it than now because many of the attack methods will be known and well studied. Obviously, protection software will be able to fight not only open penetrating methods but also ones that are used now. This scenario can be extended to hardware specifications too. To avoid legal hassle the projects can be based in countries that would not preculed such activities (like in case with the encryption software).
Here is a potential problem for this type of the devices: As you know all cellphones has to be switched off while the airplane is in the air. I remember that not long ago there was an articles about one guy in UK who had got a year in prison for typing an e-mail message on his cellphone. The story was smth like this: a flight attendant asked that guy to switch off his phone but he refused saying that he is not using a phone but is just entering a message. In fact airplane is a very logical place to use a PDA. Isn't it a problem? Does Qualcomm pdQ allows to switch off transmitter/reciever while running a PDA? Will flight personnel understand that you are NOT using a phone? Is pdQ worth of its money if you cannot use it in flight? It seems that buying a PDA and a cellphone separately will be simply cheaper.
As a former employee of the Russian Academy Sciences (RAS) I strongly doubt that now it is capable of carrying out of anything like this attack. After the collapse of the Soviet Union RAS is in extremely poor condition with most capable people gone either abroad or to commercial companies. Younger people do not join RAS because of very poor working conditions and low wages. It is hard to find anybody younger that 30 there. The monthly salary at RAS is something about US$100 that even in Russia is almost nothing for a computer professional. In fact, I am just waiting when Russian government will openly admit that it does not see any need for science and technology and will close RAS bringing suffering of its employees to the end. And another issue is that very few people in the West understand what RAS is (or was), and RAS name taken alone always leads to some overexpectations. The only thing that RAS has now is its past.
Of course, there is a chance that may be some script kiddy has gotten stuck in RAS but it is quite slim, IMHO. Also in many cases RAS poses simply as an ISP (e.g. domain relarn.ru) that is used by some private and government organization. Some descendants of the Soviet KGB are certainly experienced and capable of cyber attacks.
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This idea may seem harmful but I believe it is not. In fact a very similar thing is done now to hunt bugs in the commercial software. What if to launch several open-source projects aimed at making software to penetrate privacy. I mean, for example, developing toolkits and application for massive e-mail filtering, keystroke sniffing, instant messages interception and blah-blah-blah. I am sure that there are lots of people on /. who have ideas on what to do in technical terms. These should be classical open-source projects under least restrictive licenses and with good docs. As a result almost anybody will get an ability to penetrate privacy of almost anybody. But then counter-action will follow and various anti-eavesdropping software and hardware will be developed both by the open-source, commercial and government communities. And it will be much easier to do it than now because many of the attack methods will be known and well studied. Obviously, protection software will be able to fight not only open penetrating methods but also ones that are used now. This scenario can be extended to hardware specifications too. To avoid legal hassle the projects can be based in countries that would not preculed such activities (like in case with the encryption software).
Here is a potential problem for this type of the devices: As you know all cellphones has to be switched off while the airplane is in the air. I remember that not long ago there was an articles about one guy in UK who had got a year in prison for typing an e-mail message on his cellphone. The story was smth like this: a flight attendant asked that guy to switch off his phone but he refused saying that he is not using a phone but is just entering a message. In fact airplane is a very logical place to use a PDA. Isn't it a problem? Does Qualcomm pdQ allows to switch off transmitter/reciever while running a PDA? Will flight personnel understand that you are NOT using a phone? Is pdQ worth of its money if you cannot use it in flight? It seems that buying a PDA and a cellphone separately will be simply cheaper.
As a former employee of the Russian Academy Sciences (RAS) I strongly doubt that now it is capable of carrying out of anything like this attack. After the collapse of the Soviet Union RAS is in extremely poor condition with most capable people gone either abroad or to commercial companies. Younger people do not join RAS because of very poor working conditions and low wages. It is hard to find anybody younger that 30 there. The monthly salary at RAS is something about US$100 that even in Russia is almost nothing for a computer professional. In fact, I am just waiting when Russian government will openly admit that it does not see any need for science and technology and will close RAS bringing suffering of its employees to the end. And another issue is that very few people in the West understand what RAS is (or was), and RAS name taken alone always leads to some overexpectations. The only thing that RAS has now is its past.
Of course, there is a chance that may be some script kiddy has gotten stuck in RAS but it is quite slim, IMHO. Also in many cases RAS poses simply as an ISP (e.g. domain relarn.ru) that is used by some private and government organization. Some descendants of the Soviet KGB are certainly experienced and capable of cyber attacks.