Did he actually know how to unlock it or were we lucky or was the phone not locked from the beginning?
It's very likely he knew. Unlocking locked cellphones is a big graymarket business. Every self-respecting operator of a small cellphone service shop should know enough to unlock at least the major brands, at least the half-year-old-and-older models. Reverse engineering of the handsets and flashing the proper patches into their firmware is a way to achieve that. Long time ago (7+ years), when the config still was in 24C0x EEPROM chips and reflashing was rare, it was also common to desolder the configuration EEPROM, rewrite some fields in it, and solder it back. Today's methods vary; a vendor-specific SIM card may be used, or talking to the phone via its connector, or via a service connector under the battery... many possibilities.
So, yeah, the PATRIOT act shouldn't be applied here, but it's not an abuse of the PATRIOT act that's the cause, rather it's the way the system works. Fix the system. (Yeah, we need to get rid of the patriot act, but that's not the problem here)
That, and the guilty pleas. Even somebody quite innocent can be forced to accept couple months for nothing when facing a prolonged and expensive legal battle with the risk of getting a Patriotic sentence. And the drug-quagmire asset forfeitures. That's not a legal system, that's a feudal-grade farce.
Right. Kind of like when you meet a car with strong lights, or when a SWAT team swarms into your house in the middle of the night, flashlights on. This is a problem at the very final phases of touchdown; in other parts of the flight, the autopilot and the guidance from the Tower (you go temporarily blind but not deaf) should save the day, or more specifically, night.
Now, I'll grant that there are many reasons for owning laser pointers. Specifically, if you have a cat, it is a patented means of delivering exercise to the feline.
Ummm... you mean you bought the laser pointer to knowingly infringe on the intellectual property of the patent holder?
Green beam is much better visible than red beam - even for the same energy. A harmless looking dim red can be more dangerous than blinding-bright green. I don't even mention infrared - is it less concentrated when it is invisible?
All depends on the energy per time delivered into the eye. That depends on the angle the beam gets into the eye, the ratio of crossection of the beam (which grows with square of distance) vs the crossection of the pupil (which contracts rather quickly), and time (which is typically the shorter the beam is narrower - as a test try to hit a dot of the size of an eye pupil drawn on a car door, with a laser pointer, from considerable distance. Try both stopped and moving car, both from hand and from a tripod. It is not easy, even with the tripod.
There is a privacy worry here. So many things are illegal (and orders of magnitude more are plain suspicious), with more and more joining the ranks. In some jurisdictions, service technicians are required to rat on their customers if illegal content is found on the computers entrusted to them. (If I remember correctly, it was relevant to some sorts of porn, but when it will include even MP3s and DVD rips?) What is the chance the application providers won't be required by law to play police on their users? What about their potential to become the Thought Police - especially relevant in today's paranoid times where everything could be terrorism-related (so no more storing of the results of your research for the cyberpunk game you were going to gamemaster the next evening before they came for you (see the Steve Jackson Games case for a vaguely related precedens))? Or your correspondence related to extracting the recorded Sopranos from your set-top box for permanent storage, found during regular law-enforcement scan the ISP/ASP will be forced to do in order to avoid liability (WAY too tempting concept for some hardline politicians and law enforcers)? Or more garden-variety stuff, like local tax officers attempting to enforce eg. the "use tax" on imports from other states and sniffing in users' files?
and make sure we never see a non-oil-based economy established.
Don't worry. It just means that non-oil economy won't start in the US. US will be forced to follow, though. The oil megacorps will kick and scream while being dragged off the scene, maybe buy few more years of life, but that's about all they will be able to do.
Same like stem cell research. If the clerofascists ban/restrict it in the US, it only means Korea will become the biomed leader.
The world is too big to allow a comparatively small group to stop the progress. Slow down, perhaps - but not stop.
"Rich" may have several levels. The one I used wasn't "rich as having higher income than expenses" (which is not that impossible to attain even for mere mortals), but rather "rich as having enough money to buy the government".
Maybe someday you will need some help from your government, and they will be able to help you because of the money they received from the Dog Tax (or some other tax).
More likely perspective: Maybe someday you manage to get rich and buy a senator and become rich on some pork project you "win" the realization of. *Then* you really appreciate the benefits of the Dog Tax.
All internet connections, phone lines and satellite communications with the USA should be shut down.
Fine. We still can bounce long-wave connections against the ionosphere. Ask any HAM. We can also bounce microwaves against the Moon.
Also don't forget that where are the walls there is a black market with stuff tunneled through the walls - being it tangible goods or informaitons. Given the decent number of geeks on both sides of the projected wall, many of whom despise the idea of nations and borders, I can guarantee the wall will have more holes than Microsoft Windows.
Another idea along this line, perhaps better: Use something like LCD shutters, like the auto-darkening goggles for welding. When too much light is detected, the thing goes dark. After the light intensity lowers, the glass gets transparent again. Will cause some temporary problems with visibility, but won't leave the pilots dazzled for prolonged time.
If done as electrochromic glass in the cockpit windows, can automatically switch some of the screens to visual mode (cams looking out). Could be combined with an image projected to the inner side of the cockpit windows, possibly as thermal imaging, which would also help with visibility in the night and in clouds and fog.
Or they could just put cardboard over the windows until the aforementioned laser detector stopped alarming, if it was a visible spectrum laser.
Or they could just put a notch-filter coating on the cockpit windows. Filter out the few wavelengths the mainstream lasers (freq-doubled IR semiconductor ("green laser pointer"), argon, and that's mostly all the potentially dangerous ones. Infrared coating could be "wideband" (from 10,000 nm of CO2 lasers to the start of visible spectrum), as it won't worsen the visibility (the visible wavelengths filters will dim the glass a bit). Also, the last phases of the landing maneuvers are already pretty much automated, at least with the more modern planes (A340 being an example where the computer-controlled landing is AFAIK smoother than what a human pilot can do), so even both pilots blinded could theoretically land. Besides, a landing maneuver can be aborted and the plane lifted to higher altitude even with vision-impaired pilot, and held there for couple minutes before the pilots recover enough to kick off an instrument landing (other planes in the area will make them space - that's what the Tower is there for).
So many safety levels, and people still freak out.
Whether Fox News is generally a good network or not is less important than Fox News' right to exist independent of government, which is the real issue.
There is an important difference here. Government loves Fox "News".
It *would* be a failure, a failure of truly gargantuan proportions.
Any attempt of "protection" on the ADC level will be something between simple and trivial to swiftly cut through - just add a reversible analog transformation to the signal that wrecks the watermarks. The result doesn't have to be perceivable by humans (which is typically the transformation set watermarks are designed to withstand), but has to be reversible - just perform the inverted operation on the digitized data stream. Voila - reconstructed stream, and the "cop in the ADC" is not any wiser.
For the beginning, I'd start with an off-the-shelf analog phone scrambler, maybe with construction modified to perform better on full 20-20,000 Hz range instead of only on 30-3000 Hz, and a math model of the descrambler.
If you can get some data from/to the box, you can get any data from/to the box.
We live in Orwellian times, that's true. But the temperature of the tip of the soldering iron does not depend on the political climate. (Those nitwits who want to mandate lead-free solders that fall apart in couple years and have higher melting point are subject for a different discussion.)
RFID is too bulky and costly for this application. Better steganographically embed the serial number into the graphics of the stamp design, the way color laser printers and copiers encode their serial numbers to the printouts.
I reckon 6 megapixels should be enough for anyone;)
Objection: What about zoom? If I get a film, I can take only a part and magnify it to a photograph. An image with "too many" megapixels contains many images with "just enough" megapixels.
Postprocessing. Human eye has an abysmal-quality optical system. All the chromatic aberrations and inaccuracies are however handled by the processing power of neural networks attached to the sensor matrix in retina.
Is there a reason why a digital image postprocessing shouldn't take care of at least the chromatic problems?
...meaning they won't abandon windows media, subscription radio, on-line music stores, etc., for a Linux distro that doesn't support these services out of the box.
Well... not everybody is an FOSS purist. Not even within the rank of coders and admins.
I, for one, can easily imagine a P2P-based update system, as easy to use as "emerge", for safe and simple installing of "unofficial" components. Or an "upgrade" CD, custom-tailored for the given distro.
Don't worry, you will still be able to watch whatever you want on any mainstream architecture. You will just have to use software from a coder known only by his handle and of unknown nationality, downloaded from servers in China or Bangladesh, or from an anonymized network of your preference. (Or got on a physical medium from your local dealer.)
And not talking about it to people you don't know.
If Linux codecs are outlawed, we will just have to remember DeCSS and its "unavailability".
A passive packet wiretap is a passive packet wiretap, regardless if it is called Echelon or Carnivore. The politics and box size and tap hardware and organization names are different, but the principle and the technical modes of defense (link-layer encryption, traffic pattern jamming) are the same for both.
Even better: put a small switch between the speaker and the board. When questioned, claim it is a solution to quickly switch the phone to silent mode in the situations where ring would be annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very likely he knew. Unlocking locked cellphones is a big graymarket business. Every self-respecting operator of a small cellphone service shop should know enough to unlock at least the major brands, at least the half-year-old-and-older models. Reverse engineering of the handsets and flashing the proper patches into their firmware is a way to achieve that. Long time ago (7+ years), when the config still was in 24C0x EEPROM chips and reflashing was rare, it was also common to desolder the configuration EEPROM, rewrite some fields in it, and solder it back. Today's methods vary; a vendor-specific SIM card may be used, or talking to the phone via its connector, or via a service connector under the battery... many possibilities.
That, and the guilty pleas. Even somebody quite innocent can be forced to accept couple months for nothing when facing a prolonged and expensive legal battle with the risk of getting a Patriotic sentence. And the drug-quagmire asset forfeitures. That's not a legal system, that's a feudal-grade farce.
Right. Kind of like when you meet a car with strong lights, or when a SWAT team swarms into your house in the middle of the night, flashlights on. This is a problem at the very final phases of touchdown; in other parts of the flight, the autopilot and the guidance from the Tower (you go temporarily blind but not deaf) should save the day, or more specifically, night.
Well... even asking about buying a flight simulator game can get a cop to be sent to question you. Happened already.
Ummm... you mean you bought the laser pointer to knowingly infringe on the intellectual property of the patent holder?
To the slammer with you!
Next!
Green beam is much better visible than red beam - even for the same energy. A harmless looking dim red can be more dangerous than blinding-bright green. I don't even mention infrared - is it less concentrated when it is invisible?
"Tower to the plane! You are descending too fast!"
The pilots aren't alone Up There.
All depends on the energy per time delivered into the eye. That depends on the angle the beam gets into the eye, the ratio of crossection of the beam (which grows with square of distance) vs the crossection of the pupil (which contracts rather quickly), and time (which is typically the shorter the beam is narrower - as a test try to hit a dot of the size of an eye pupil drawn on a car door, with a laser pointer, from considerable distance. Try both stopped and moving car, both from hand and from a tripod. It is not easy, even with the tripod.
Or am I too paranoid?
Don't worry. It just means that non-oil economy won't start in the US. US will be forced to follow, though. The oil megacorps will kick and scream while being dragged off the scene, maybe buy few more years of life, but that's about all they will be able to do.
Same like stem cell research. If the clerofascists ban/restrict it in the US, it only means Korea will become the biomed leader.
The world is too big to allow a comparatively small group to stop the progress. Slow down, perhaps - but not stop.
"Rich" may have several levels. The one I used wasn't "rich as having higher income than expenses" (which is not that impossible to attain even for mere mortals), but rather "rich as having enough money to buy the government".
More likely perspective: Maybe someday you manage to get rich and buy a senator and become rich on some pork project you "win" the realization of. *Then* you really appreciate the benefits of the Dog Tax.
Fine. We still can bounce long-wave connections against the ionosphere. Ask any HAM. We can also bounce microwaves against the Moon.
Also don't forget that where are the walls there is a black market with stuff tunneled through the walls - being it tangible goods or informaitons. Given the decent number of geeks on both sides of the projected wall, many of whom despise the idea of nations and borders, I can guarantee the wall will have more holes than Microsoft Windows.
If done as electrochromic glass in the cockpit windows, can automatically switch some of the screens to visual mode (cams looking out). Could be combined with an image projected to the inner side of the cockpit windows, possibly as thermal imaging, which would also help with visibility in the night and in clouds and fog.
Or they could just put a notch-filter coating on the cockpit windows. Filter out the few wavelengths the mainstream lasers (freq-doubled IR semiconductor ("green laser pointer"), argon, and that's mostly all the potentially dangerous ones. Infrared coating could be "wideband" (from 10,000 nm of CO2 lasers to the start of visible spectrum), as it won't worsen the visibility (the visible wavelengths filters will dim the glass a bit). Also, the last phases of the landing maneuvers are already pretty much automated, at least with the more modern planes (A340 being an example where the computer-controlled landing is AFAIK smoother than what a human pilot can do), so even both pilots blinded could theoretically land. Besides, a landing maneuver can be aborted and the plane lifted to higher altitude even with vision-impaired pilot, and held there for couple minutes before the pilots recover enough to kick off an instrument landing (other planes in the area will make them space - that's what the Tower is there for).
So many safety levels, and people still freak out.
There is an important difference here. Government loves Fox "News".
Any attempt of "protection" on the ADC level will be something between simple and trivial to swiftly cut through - just add a reversible analog transformation to the signal that wrecks the watermarks. The result doesn't have to be perceivable by humans (which is typically the transformation set watermarks are designed to withstand), but has to be reversible - just perform the inverted operation on the digitized data stream. Voila - reconstructed stream, and the "cop in the ADC" is not any wiser.
For the beginning, I'd start with an off-the-shelf analog phone scrambler, maybe with construction modified to perform better on full 20-20,000 Hz range instead of only on 30-3000 Hz, and a math model of the descrambler.
If you can get some data from/to the box, you can get any data from/to the box.
We live in Orwellian times, that's true. But the temperature of the tip of the soldering iron does not depend on the political climate. (Those nitwits who want to mandate lead-free solders that fall apart in couple years and have higher melting point are subject for a different discussion.)
RFID is too bulky and costly for this application. Better steganographically embed the serial number into the graphics of the stamp design, the way color laser printers and copiers encode their serial numbers to the printouts.
Objection: What about zoom? If I get a film, I can take only a part and magnify it to a photograph. An image with "too many" megapixels contains many images with "just enough" megapixels.
Is there a reason why a digital image postprocessing shouldn't take care of at least the chromatic problems?
Well... not everybody is an FOSS purist. Not even within the rank of coders and admins.
I, for one, can easily imagine a P2P-based update system, as easy to use as "emerge", for safe and simple installing of "unofficial" components. Or an "upgrade" CD, custom-tailored for the given distro.
If Linux codecs are outlawed, we will just have to remember DeCSS and its "unavailability".
Don't worry. Have friends.
A passive packet wiretap is a passive packet wiretap, regardless if it is called Echelon or Carnivore. The politics and box size and tap hardware and organization names are different, but the principle and the technical modes of defense (link-layer encryption, traffic pattern jamming) are the same for both.
What country? Can you try to ask their customer service dept in a different country where they won't be subject to this regulation?
Even better: put a small switch between the speaker and the board. When questioned, claim it is a solution to quickly switch the phone to silent mode in the situations where ring would be annoying.