Less Radiation

According to Thinq.co.uk they can:

“Newly-published research suggests that mobile phones can reduce the mineral content of the bones they hang out around.

Researchers at the the National University of Cuyo, in Mendoza, Argentina, looked at that strange breed – men who wear mobile phones on their hip. They discovered evidence to suggest that the proximity of the mobile phone caused a reduction in bone mineral content (BMC) and bone mineral density (BMD) in the men who wore the phones over a 12-month period, compared to a control group that didn’t.

According to an abstract from the study to be published in the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, wearers of a mobile phone had “significantly lower right BMD at the trochanter and significantly lower right BMC at both trochanter and total hip”.

None of these differences were found in non users, the study notes.

Non users had a higher BMC at the right femoral neck (at the top of the thigh). The right-left difference in femoral neck BMD of non users was marginally non-significant. In users, there was no femoral neck right-left difference of BMC at the femoral neck. Right-left asymmetries in femoral neck BMC were significantly different between both groups, the study notes.

Study leader Dr Fernando D Sravi writes: “The different patterns of right-left asymmetry in femoral bone mineral found in mobile cell phone users and non users are consistent with a non-thermal effect of electromagnetic radio-frequency waves not previously described.”

The study measured BMC and BMD in the left and right hips of two groups of healthy men – 24 who did not use cell phones and 24 who carried their cell phone on their right hip, for at least 12 months.

According to the researchers, few studies have looked at whether electromagnetic fields emitted by cell phones could affect bone mineralisation. They suggest that with rapid uptake of mobile phones, any significant effect on BMD could have a substantial effect on the osteoporosis rate in the population.

Osteoporosis is a systemic skeletal disease characterised by low bone mass and microarchitectural deterioration that leads to increased bone fragility and increased risk of fracture .

Dr Sravi says more research is needed to follow up his study, particularly in women, who  generally have higher rates of osteoporosis, and children, who may have a long life of mobile phone use ahead of them.

Sravi writes that, while the actual energy emission by modern mobile cell phones is well below the limits set by current standards, precluding significant thermal effects, a growing body of evidence suggests that non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation in the frequency range of mobile cell phones may cause non-thermal biologic effects. Many of these non-thermal biologic effects “might be relevant for human health,” the study notes.

Read more:
 http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/3/28/mobile-phones-rot-your-bones/#ixzz1HvusYGtI.

Richard Stallman: iPhones and Androids are ‘Big Brother’ tracking devices

I was just looking at the Slashdot website and started reading a piece on Networkworld.com about Richard Stallman’s views on various topics.

Stallman (the open-source software movement is basically his idea) says he won’t own a mobile phone as they’re glorified tracking devices, which can also be used to eavesdrop on you remotely. This of course is all perfectly true, and if you’re of interest to the NSA or UK security services that might bother you (I’m thinking of Julian Assange or anyone who ever stood in a 5 meter perimeter of him). But if the only insight someone might gain into your personal life is that you’re using Sainsburys rather than Tescos for your shop this week, then who really cares?

I only use my Android smartphone for internet access, I don’t make any calls or send any texts. Stallman states that unless you remove the battery ( he actually says all batteries!) you don’t know what your phone is doing. Well I know what my phone is doing… I own an Electrosmog Detector (now sold out but available on eBay and other sites), which turns RF transmissions into audible noise – I’ve also got a couple of spare 9v rechargeable batteries, so I can leave it on whenever I want – and if my phone is transmitting I can hear it.

If you own an Electrosmog Detector & you’re remotely bothered about being monitored, you could just make fart noises every time the phone transmits when you aren’t talking on it! This is much more fun than being paranoid about what it is or maybe isn’t doing. Of course a smart phone with Facebook & Gmail installed will be transmitting regularly, so turn off all those auto-sync services if you want to know when it shouldn’t be transmitting.

If you don’t want to be tracked, then just leave your phone at home half the time, or swop with a big group of friends if you’re a member of any kind of protest group, or just don’t use one. Remember that swoping Sim cards isn’t enough, your mobile also contains a unique IMEI number, and either of those will let you be tracked. You need a new PAYG phone & sim to vanish. (and as soon as you use it to contact an old target you’ll re-appear again).

If you use the internet look into using Tor, or signing up for a secure VPN.

And another thing… I own several laptops & an iMac. I was looking at them recently and must have pre-empted Richard Stallman’s views. I took a big blob of blu-tak and stuck it over each built-in webcam & mic… Well you never know who might have been listening or watching, and they bloody well aren’t now! And one final thing, assume everything you do and look at on the internet is monitored, because it is…

Peace & Love

There’s an interesting article on GPS in the New Scientist this week – issue 12th March 2011, page 44.

The crux of the article is this: while we’re all using GPS in Smartphones & TomToms to find out where we are, it’s also being used in lots of mission-critical infrastructure hardware these days to get accurate atomic clock time & date stamps. Some of these other uses: GSM cell towers to synchronise clocks, signing stock market financial transactions, bank ATM timestamps, the United States power grid to sync 5000 suppliers, some airports use GPS-based landing systems to assist in poor visibility. In the future the US Federal Railroad Administration plans to rely on GPS for smart management of rail traffic. GPS is also used to locate cars, boats & cargo.

Jammers for GPS are now being manufactured in large numbers in Chinese factories, and can be bought over the internet using Paypal direct from the Far East – along with jammers for every other radio system you can imagine – just Google it. Like all these other jammers they are illegal to use. So who uses them? They are used by truckers to hide from their snooping bosses, criminals who steal cars with trackers fitted and people who want to avoid some GPS enabled road toll systems.

The problem is that GPS signals are derived from satellites in space that only transmit on low power. If you turn on a GPS jammer you not only block your own device, but also all GPS devices for hundreds of metres around you. The article mentions a trucker who used to drive past Newark Liberty International Airport, and his jammer shut down their new GPS assisted landing system, sometimes twice a day. It took them several months to discover the trucker in question.

Potentially far worse though, it’s also possible to spoof a GPS system, making it think it’s somewhere it isn’t. It’s also theoretically possibly to spoof the atomic clock timings that Stockbrokers and ATMs depend upon. If you could manipulate the time-stamp on stock market buy & sell orders you could make millions. Professor Todd Humphreys at the University of Texas has done a lot of research into GPS spoofing.

GPS is one of the few systems that security researchers armed with USRP software radios have yet to turn their attention to. The USRP radio peripheral can be made to mimic almost any radio system. So far they’ve gone after Bluetooth, WiFi, Dect & GSM. This year they’ve started a project to build a fully functioning Tetra radio (albeit without the encryption the Police use). GPS is a next logical target for man-in-the-middle spoofing attacks using USRP & other custom transceivers.

The article goes on to mention the development of eLORAN, which is a ground based GPS type navigation system, which can use higher power transmitters to overcome some of GPS’s limitations. Also, as Atomic Clocks become cheaper, any appliance will be able to figure out where it is (relative to a known starting point) using just digital compasses, accelerometers & gyroscopes. In fact, some of these sensors are already in iPhone & Android smartphones.

Another possible way of knowing if your GPS is being spoofed is to cross-reference using a 2nd technology. This could be the WiFi router MAC address database that Google compiled while mapping our roads for Streetview – useful on smartphones that have GPS & WiFi built in. Or you could make a database of all the cellphone sites in the UK using a laptop running OsmocomBB Cell_Log, a £10 Motorola C115 phone & a GPS receiver – accuracy is good to 100 metres, and any cellphone that can issue a RACH request can use the answers to locate itself from the Timing Advance value returned from multiple cell sites – this would be useful on a laptop only. I think Holland may have produced a similar map already.

Ettus Research, the maker of the USRP, announced on February 14th their own GPSDO add-on board ($750 each) for the USRP N200/N210. This will allow USRP radios at different sites to sync with each other accurately, just like the aforementioned cell towers do.