Are you unable to think beyond your own tiny sense of self? Speed cameras aren't just put up as a revenue earner, or to piss you off. The pen pushers that make these choices do so do because, and you may find this surprising, they are thinking about preservation of not only your life, but the safety of millions of other people just like you. No fun to have someone you love killed because some retard wants to get home 2 seconds quicker.
Condoning violence is stupid. Being violent is equally as moronic. (Ex military, so I'd like to think I have a clue)
I usually concur with your comments on most subjects Doc and have modded you up a number of times, though in this case I'm no denial addict, though to me it would seem like you are inflating (or just making up counter claims to) the points that previous posters have made in favor of the current mass opinion of the day.
I live in Asia, and out of a few billion people in this region less than 200 people have died from avian bird flu. Source WHO. Am I concerned. No.
Mad Cow Disease, if the farmers stopped feeding their cows shitty food, maybe it wouldn't be such a problem.
Fully agree with you on overpopulation (in Asia, don't know anything about Africa), except for the part about millions dying. Plenty living under the poverty lines here, though in general for the majority they scrape by, just with a higher rate of illness than the norm.
SARS, WHO doesn't seem to have any data beyond 2004, though the total number appears to be less than 1000 deaths. While technically 'thousands of deaths' may be accurate, amongst the rational populace one might prefer to say one or two thousand total.
I think maybe you are being a little alarmist. Reading through all the documentation on DRM in vista, they are not about to outright block your $400 LCD panel from functioning, as you hinted, merely degrade the quality of the video only while playing high definition content, and even then only if certain conditions are present. Driver revocation one would assume, would only be for as long as it takes the drivers to get corrected. Don't get me wrong, it's still a shitty implementation, but not as bad as you make it sound.
American views on the goodness of the iPhone aside, if it is using anything even remotely like BB5 on Nokia, then you'll forever be at the whim of Apple for certificate signing. Nothing *useful* will run without a nod from the man.
Here in Asia the competition most definitely will have touch screen graphical awesomeness, all packaged up in a cheap knock off housing, and all within a few short months after release of the original from Apple. As an added bonus, the imitation item will also come complete with 283 more functions and features, but with a frustratingly slow user interface that lags 8 touches behind.
9 months later they'll turn up in US flea markets.
Foreign patents don't mean squat here, local patents come in just barely above that.
While I can understand that you are saying the same thing as me, you said it a little vague. Series 60 Version 3 has security features which can "not" be turned off. Period. What you are talking about is the ability to install self signed applications, this can be switched on and off, nothing else - python is not installed by default, so if you've got it on your handset, then it's already signed.
FExplorer for s60v3 is a good example of the whole certificate crap. I think the developer of sexplorer had the same problems, ended up paying a bunch of money only to be told 'no, not yours'
What are you talking about? If the phone implements the same protocols and transmission schemes that the telco is using, then where is the issue? The networks are not closed in the sense that each one speaks some unique proprietry language. Geek up on the acronyms and you'll have a better insight. Phone companies can only offer services that are already embedded into the phone - or could be with addtional software or firmware updates. Telco's don't make the handsets, they aren't even pushing for better tech, they want to stagnate innovation, it helps their bottom lines. Most GSM phones already have a bunch of features that the carriers are not set up for.
If I had mod points, I would have marked you as 'troll' So you can put two fingers on the screen at the same time - this is definitely not a new concept. Some of the touch screen kit I used in the military (electronic warfare) was doing this more than 10 years ago.
I had a logitech keyboard with built in touch pad that could handle two and three finger presses just fine (interpreted as middle or right mouse click) 8 years ago.
The phone pretty much does suck for very valid reasons. I have a nokia N80 (no touch screen) that is quite a bit more functional. What can't be done in the default software layout is available for download from third parties. I also have a P900 and P990 from sony ericsson which do everything the iPhone does, and more. The only thing they are not able to do is the multiple touch thing. Big deal.
What is really unfortunate is that the US audience lags a year or two behind the rest of the world. Your phones are crippled by service providers, and most people are not even aware that they could buy a cell phone outright without a contract.
No hilarity here at all, there are better phones already. Not sure about in the US, but the rest of the world are finding it strange that people like you think it's some kind of innovative new technology. This appears to be why people are 'going on and on about it' from where I set here in Asia.
Your point about the memory is odd as well. I have a 4 gig memory card in my N80, though 8 gig sticks will hit the shelves before the iPhone is released. You certainly could have your 16/32 gig memory card, but by todays standards it'd be more like a memory slab.
Don't know what you are using to convert video, though I can fit between 4 and 8 movies on a 4 gig card without trouble. A whole season of stargate atlantis fits nicely.
You miss one very key point. Perhaps not exactly DRM, though 3rd party applications will need to be signed and vetted by Apple before being allowed anywhere near the phone. Probably they'll be a tad like nokia where you can self-sign applications that don't need access to anything beyond display and audio, I'm positive you can understand the implications. You have a hand held computer (that includes a phone) capable of some potentially very cool things, but unless you pay the extortion fee to Apple, you can do nothing about it. That cuts out a huge chunk of the developer population right there.
Unfortunately changing sim cards every other week is only anonymous if all your contacts do so as well. SS7 can be used to map out call relationships incredably well, so it's easy to spot people doing this any time they call an old number. Changing your SIM isn't enough, you'll need to change your IMEI each time as well. (Not so easy on modern phones)
Browsing any number of GSM forums tends to show that Ebay is rampant with people selling locked phones but claiming them to be otherwise. YMMV I guess.
On a practical level the carriers of GSM make it easy to intercept signals in the clear. Between the handset and the cell station the signal is encrypted. (In most countries, and most of the time) Each handset uses a different key. Making decryption more difficult is that the keys can and do change frequently. In effect, as you state, it's usually too expensive to bother with man in the middle attacks at that point in the system. http://www.gsm-security.net/ has a good FAQ
The cell site is where the decryption takes place. From here the signal is (in the very vast majority of instances) microwaved either directly to the exchange, or via other cell sites. These signals are sometimes transmitted over a series of standard E1, or T1's. Usually this happens between 1 and 4 GHz. Telco's do get rather creative with their multiplexers though.
Equipment needed is not cheap, but is definitely available off the shelf. Spectrum Analyser. Downconverter. Modem. Antenna. Computer, and a digital capture card. From this point onward there isn't much software available to break out the mux so you might hear Joe Six Pack talking to his mother. If you get this far, you would likely have enough cash left over for programmers though.
I'm somewhat of the opinion that if a client is using an email server that waits 'days' to resend, then I'll do my best to inform them that their mail solution is stupid and does not obey RFC's like the vast majority of legit mail servers do. From experience these individuals usually get off their backsides and educate themselves about networking and end up better off for it by going to a different provider.
You can't honestly tell me you would write to microsoft (or any other random huge company) and expect them to respond within 15 minutes. If your staff are shitty because they didn't receive their sign-up-for-spam confirmation emails instantly, then educate them. Add a whitelist capability to your greylisting and teach your users to enter any contact domains or addresses that might be important enough to have reason to skip the initial reject.
If greylisting doesn't work for you, then switch it off and see how you prefer to receive the huge amounts of spam that it would otherwise prevent. Did you ever tweak your config files?
Some of the servers that I care for receive a few thousand junk messages per day, greylisting cuts that down to about 2 or 3 messages, if spamassassin doesn't get them after that, they are filtered through a few RBL's and tagged, postfix body checks usually do wonders for anything left.
I seriously doubt you are getting spammed with anything drastically different than I am.
The page you linked to when I looked did not have any 5 megapixel camera phones. The Nokia N95 isn't due to be released for a month or two (or 5). The N73 that was on the page is a 3.2 megapixel camera, not so bad, though I think the K800 gives visibly better results. Samsung and LG have released a couple of 5 megapixel camera's (and higher) that have a cell phone hacked in as a bit of an afterthought. Mostly these are only available in Korea or Japan, they do seem to trickle through to the Philippines pretty quickly though. You didn't say what model you had?
On the assumption that you were using sarcasm and trying to say that these features 'really' are innovative, I'd like to say no, the parent is correct, except I'd go a little further and say there is nothing innovative about it at all.
None of the things you list are new. The target audience for this phone is mostly limited to the US, a place where cutting edge cell phones are usually a year or two behind, and then crippled by service providers.
Lets replace the woman in this story with you, would it be ok to push the same line then? It's easy to respond with 'sure', but deep down, would you mean it with real conviction?
Here in the Philippines you can't buy a cell phone without a hundred people screaming at you to do software upgrades, unlock, debrand, add gigs of MP3's, video, tones, images, and games. There's a whole new class of joe sixpack here, they may not know how to do it, but they sure know that it can be done. People would not tolerate locked phones for any longer than it takes them to get to greenhills, or their favorite tiangge.
Fake and real ipods sell side by side, no trickery, they'll tell you outright which is which. Usually the fake ones are more functional than the real, though they do have pretty crappy displays.
The latest stuff from Nokia is the same. Wouldn't be surprised if SonyEricsson go that way too. Not sure if anyone has broken CID51 yet - recent BB5 iterations can only be unlocked by the service provider, short of outright replacement of the raz3g chip anyway. There was talk of using JTAG to do the dirty work for a while, though nothing has come of it yet.
At least with Nokia you can still debrand them I guess. NSS and Phoenix are easy to use.
Back when I was working for one of the 3 letter agencies swinging rather large satellite dishes around the sky, I can safely say from long experience that it's pretty damn hard at times to find a bird up in the clark belt when you know its location fairly precisely. Typical station keeping will have them moving about their allocated box by a few tens of kilometers which can often mean the difference between a strong lock on the telemetry beacon, or none at all - depending upon the size of the dish.
I think the odds are mostly against us on many fronts, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The Australian Defence Signals Directorate is also charted to undertake a similar role.
I'm not certain I follow your last sentence, though agencies that 'may' or 'may not' undertake active sigint would be wise (depending upon your moral guidance unit) to keep tabs on vulnerabilities. Not just in Microsoft products, but a very wide range of software and hardware systems. Including Linux. Yes, the NSA audits (just about) all external code before it is let loose inside. I say almost simply because viruses and the like have in the past been transported across the air gap.
There are many reasons to get chatty with commercial entities though.
Each cell within the network provides comprehensive parametric info, so billing addresses don't factor in, not directly anyway. If the carrier has an outage, it's not so difficult to figure a fairly accurate estimate of the numbers affected. Mostly it would come down to the honesty of the telco's.
Unfortunately a simpler phone wont have the desired effect either. CCITT 7 is a pretty complex little beast, used not only by GSM these days, but is also replacing older dialing methods for regular land line phones as well. SS7 is common, much the same way air is common, over time it does provide a detailed map of an individuals network of contacts - many layers deep.
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Are you unable to think beyond your own tiny sense of self? Speed cameras aren't just put up as a revenue earner, or to piss you off. The pen pushers that make these choices do so do because, and you may find this surprising, they are thinking about preservation of not only your life, but the safety of millions of other people just like you. No fun to have someone you love killed because some retard wants to get home 2 seconds quicker.
Condoning violence is stupid. Being violent is equally as moronic. (Ex military, so I'd like to think I have a clue)
I usually concur with your comments on most subjects Doc and have modded you up a number of times, though in this case I'm no denial addict, though to me it would seem like you are inflating (or just making up counter claims to) the points that previous posters have made in favor of the current mass opinion of the day.
I live in Asia, and out of a few billion people in this region less than 200 people have died from avian bird flu. Source WHO.
Am I concerned. No.
Mad Cow Disease, if the farmers stopped feeding their cows shitty food, maybe it wouldn't be such a problem.
Fully agree with you on overpopulation (in Asia, don't know anything about Africa), except for the part about millions dying. Plenty living under the poverty lines here, though in general for the majority they scrape by, just with a higher rate of illness than the norm.
SARS, WHO doesn't seem to have any data beyond 2004, though the total number appears to be less than 1000 deaths. While technically 'thousands of deaths' may be accurate, amongst the rational populace one might prefer to say one or two thousand total.
I think maybe you are being a little alarmist. Reading through all the documentation on DRM in vista, they are not about to outright block your $400 LCD panel from functioning, as you hinted, merely degrade the quality of the video only while playing high definition content, and even then only if certain conditions are present. Driver revocation one would assume, would only be for as long as it takes the drivers to get corrected. Don't get me wrong, it's still a shitty implementation, but not as bad as you make it sound.
He had a gold plaque made up to look like the others on the wall, very funny! That's got to be 7 or 8 years ago now though. Maybe more.
American views on the goodness of the iPhone aside, if it is using anything even remotely like BB5 on Nokia, then you'll forever be at the whim of Apple for certificate signing. Nothing *useful* will run without a nod from the man.
Here in Asia the competition most definitely will have touch screen graphical awesomeness, all packaged up in a cheap knock off housing, and all within a few short months after release of the original from Apple. As an added bonus, the imitation item will also come complete with 283 more functions and features, but with a frustratingly slow user interface that lags 8 touches behind.
9 months later they'll turn up in US flea markets.
Foreign patents don't mean squat here, local patents come in just barely above that.
While I can understand that you are saying the same thing as me, you said it a little vague. Series 60 Version 3 has security features which can "not" be turned off. Period. What you are talking about is the ability to install self signed applications, this can be switched on and off, nothing else - python is not installed by default, so if you've got it on your handset, then it's already signed.
FExplorer for s60v3 is a good example of the whole certificate crap. I think the developer of sexplorer had the same problems, ended up paying a bunch of money only to be told 'no, not yours'
You mean an application written for a particular version of series 60 *might* run on another handset with the same version. (Depending on moon phase)
Series 60 version 2 is incompatible with version 3.
What are you talking about? If the phone implements the same protocols and transmission schemes that the telco is using, then where is the issue? The networks are not closed in the sense that each one speaks some unique proprietry language. Geek up on the acronyms and you'll have a better insight. Phone companies can only offer services that are already embedded into the phone - or could be with addtional software or firmware updates. Telco's don't make the handsets, they aren't even pushing for better tech, they want to stagnate innovation, it helps their bottom lines. Most GSM phones already have a bunch of features that the carriers are not set up for.
No, the imagery is not public domain, they buy it from companies like digitalglobe.
If I had mod points, I would have marked you as 'troll' So you can put two fingers on the screen at the same time - this is definitely not a new concept. Some of the touch screen kit I used in the military (electronic warfare) was doing this more than 10 years ago.
I had a logitech keyboard with built in touch pad that could handle two and three finger presses just fine (interpreted as middle or right mouse click) 8 years ago.
The phone pretty much does suck for very valid reasons. I have a nokia N80 (no touch screen) that is quite a bit more functional. What can't be done in the default software layout is available for download from third parties. I also have a P900 and P990 from sony ericsson which do everything the iPhone does, and more. The only thing they are not able to do is the multiple touch thing. Big deal.
What is really unfortunate is that the US audience lags a year or two behind the rest of the world. Your phones are crippled by service providers, and most people are not even aware that they could buy a cell phone outright without a contract.
No hilarity here at all, there are better phones already. Not sure about in the US, but the rest of the world are finding it strange that people like you think it's some kind of innovative new technology. This appears to be why people are 'going on and on about it' from where I set here in Asia.
Your point about the memory is odd as well. I have a 4 gig memory card in my N80, though 8 gig sticks will hit the shelves before the iPhone is released. You certainly could have your 16/32 gig memory card, but by todays standards it'd be more like a memory slab.
Don't know what you are using to convert video, though I can fit between 4 and 8 movies on a 4 gig card without trouble. A whole season of stargate atlantis fits nicely.
You miss one very key point. Perhaps not exactly DRM, though 3rd party applications will need to be signed and vetted by Apple before being allowed anywhere near the phone. Probably they'll be a tad like nokia where you can self-sign applications that don't need access to anything beyond display and audio, I'm positive you can understand the implications. You have a hand held computer (that includes a phone) capable of some potentially very cool things, but unless you pay the extortion fee to Apple, you can do nothing about it. That cuts out a huge chunk of the developer population right there.
Unfortunately changing sim cards every other week is only anonymous if all your contacts do so as well. SS7 can be used to map out call relationships incredably well, so it's easy to spot people doing this any time they call an old number. Changing your SIM isn't enough, you'll need to change your IMEI each time as well. (Not so easy on modern phones)
Browsing any number of GSM forums tends to show that Ebay is rampant with people selling locked phones but claiming them to be otherwise. YMMV I guess.
On a practical level the carriers of GSM make it easy to intercept signals in the clear. Between the handset and the cell station the signal is encrypted. (In most countries, and most of the time) Each handset uses a different key. Making decryption more difficult is that the keys can and do change frequently. In effect, as you state, it's usually too expensive to bother with man in the middle attacks at that point in the system. http://www.gsm-security.net/ has a good FAQ
The cell site is where the decryption takes place. From here the signal is (in the very vast majority of instances) microwaved either directly to the exchange, or via other cell sites. These signals are sometimes transmitted over a series of standard E1, or T1's. Usually this happens between 1 and 4 GHz. Telco's do get rather creative with their multiplexers though.
Equipment needed is not cheap, but is definitely available off the shelf. Spectrum Analyser. Downconverter. Modem. Antenna. Computer, and a digital capture card. From this point onward there isn't much software available to break out the mux so you might hear Joe Six Pack talking to his mother. If you get this far, you would likely have enough cash left over for programmers though.
I'm somewhat of the opinion that if a client is using an email server that waits 'days' to resend, then I'll do my best to inform them that their mail solution is stupid and does not obey RFC's like the vast majority of legit mail servers do. From experience these individuals usually get off their backsides and educate themselves about networking and end up better off for it by going to a different provider.
You can't honestly tell me you would write to microsoft (or any other random huge company) and expect them to respond within 15 minutes. If your staff are shitty because they didn't receive their sign-up-for-spam confirmation emails instantly, then educate them. Add a whitelist capability to your greylisting and teach your users to enter any contact domains or addresses that might be important enough to have reason to skip the initial reject.
If greylisting doesn't work for you, then switch it off and see how you prefer to receive the huge amounts of spam that it would otherwise prevent. Did you ever tweak your config files?
Some of the servers that I care for receive a few thousand junk messages per day, greylisting cuts that down to about 2 or 3 messages, if spamassassin doesn't get them after that, they are filtered through a few RBL's and tagged, postfix body checks usually do wonders for anything left.
I seriously doubt you are getting spammed with anything drastically different than I am.
The page you linked to when I looked did not have any 5 megapixel camera phones. The Nokia N95 isn't due to be released for a month or two (or 5). The N73 that was on the page is a 3.2 megapixel camera, not so bad, though I think the K800 gives visibly better results. Samsung and LG have released a couple of 5 megapixel camera's (and higher) that have a cell phone hacked in as a bit of an afterthought. Mostly these are only available in Korea or Japan, they do seem to trickle through to the Philippines pretty quickly though. You didn't say what model you had?
On the assumption that you were using sarcasm and trying to say that these features 'really' are innovative, I'd like to say no, the parent is correct, except I'd go a little further and say there is nothing innovative about it at all.
None of the things you list are new. The target audience for this phone is mostly limited to the US, a place where cutting edge cell phones are usually a year or two behind, and then crippled by service providers.
Lets replace the woman in this story with you, would it be ok to push the same line then? It's easy to respond with 'sure', but deep down, would you mean it with real conviction?
Here in the Philippines you can't buy a cell phone without a hundred people screaming at you to do software upgrades, unlock, debrand, add gigs of MP3's, video, tones, images, and games. There's a whole new class of joe sixpack here, they may not know how to do it, but they sure know that it can be done. People would not tolerate locked phones for any longer than it takes them to get to greenhills, or their favorite tiangge.
Fake and real ipods sell side by side, no trickery, they'll tell you outright which is which. Usually the fake ones are more functional than the real, though they do have pretty crappy displays.
The latest stuff from Nokia is the same. Wouldn't be surprised if SonyEricsson go that way too. Not sure if anyone has broken CID51 yet - recent BB5 iterations can only be unlocked by the service provider, short of outright replacement of the raz3g chip anyway. There was talk of using JTAG to do the dirty work for a while, though nothing has come of it yet.
At least with Nokia you can still debrand them I guess. NSS and Phoenix are easy to use.
Back when I was working for one of the 3 letter agencies swinging rather large satellite dishes around the sky, I can safely say from long experience that it's pretty damn hard at times to find a bird up in the clark belt when you know its location fairly precisely. Typical station keeping will have them moving about their allocated box by a few tens of kilometers which can often mean the difference between a strong lock on the telemetry beacon, or none at all - depending upon the size of the dish.
I think the odds are mostly against us on many fronts, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The Australian Defence Signals Directorate is also charted to undertake a similar role.
I'm not certain I follow your last sentence, though agencies that 'may' or 'may not' undertake active sigint would be wise (depending upon your moral guidance unit) to keep tabs on vulnerabilities. Not just in Microsoft products, but a very wide range of software and hardware systems. Including Linux. Yes, the NSA audits (just about) all external code before it is let loose inside. I say almost simply because viruses and the like have in the past been transported across the air gap.
There are many reasons to get chatty with commercial entities though.
Each cell within the network provides comprehensive parametric info, so billing addresses don't factor in, not directly anyway. If the carrier has an outage, it's not so difficult to figure a fairly accurate estimate of the numbers affected. Mostly it would come down to the honesty of the telco's.
Unfortunately a simpler phone wont have the desired effect either. CCITT 7 is a pretty complex little beast, used not only by GSM these days, but is also replacing older dialing methods for regular land line phones as well. SS7 is common, much the same way air is common, over time it does provide a detailed map of an individuals network of contacts - many layers deep.