Less Radiation

Weak magnetic fields alter number of chromosomes in cancer cells research.

This is really interesting

Research that’s easy to replicate elsewhere, or not, that could change the game forever…

Video of Motorla C123 Calypso mobile phone acting as a GSM base station.

I missed this when it was first released, but here’s Sylvain Munaut demonstrating a cheap Motorola Calypso phone (C115, C118, C123 etc) acting like a GSM base station.

Doesn’t have enough bandwidth for voice calls, but can send control signals & SMS. Amazing piece of hacking.

 
Watch the video

Article in the New Scientist today – 1 September 2012 on page 18.

‘Joined-up power people’ advocates using the latent power of smartphones to power cluster computing tasks, but then points out that the combined processing power is piss-poor compared to a regular desktop PC. The problem with this superb hypothesis is that processor cycles used on a phone eat battery power, and idle time doesn’t. DUH!

They do mention that all the phones in a train carriage could combine over WiFi to perform a useful task. Presumably this useful task is to annoy an electro-sensitive person?

If you’re going to use your phone/laptop over free WiFi on a train, make sure you also use a secure proxy (hidemyass) or use a 3G Modem dongle instead – that way your Facebook account won’t get vandalised!

My Acard x9 to 1 standalone DVD duplicator had started turning too many blank CD-Rs into coasters.

By a process of elimination, I figured out the oldest & most used units at the top of the duplicator were behaving the worst. The original drive in position 9 still burned a CD okay. The original drives in my duplicator are the Sony Optiarc IDE units, which you’ll only ever read good things about online.

The drives in this unit are IDE. I know it’s best to replace all 9 writing drives with the same model, but a quick look on eBuyer.com made it obvious that you can’t buy cheap PATA IDE DVD writers any more, everything is now SATA based.

There’s no point buying used DVD drives to go in a DVD duplicator, so I was thinking I might have to buy a new unit. I’d already had great value for money from this Acard unit.

I could see on eBay you could buy a new 9 to 1 Acard unit with SATA drives inside for £350. But I’d always prefer to fix what I already have.

I purchased a £13 SATA DVD writer from eBuyer & a £3.50 Sata to IDE converter from eBay, and they seemed to work okay when I swopped out the first failing IDE DVD drive. So I bit the bullet and ordered another 10 units of each (so I’d have some spares).

I attached the IDE to SATA adapters to the SATA DVD drives using a hot glue gun, 5 blobs on each, so they wouldn’t work loose or short-out on the back of the DVD drives.

When I put everything back together the drives all appeared to burn perfect CDs from my master discs. I burned several hundred CDs, just to be sure.

I’ve still got two spare DVD writers , in case either the DVD drives or controller board fail. I’ve also saved almost £200 on the cost of a new DVD duplicator.

I used these Samsung SH-222BB SATA DVD writer drives from Ebuyer at £12.99 each and these SATA to IDE adapters at £3.50 each. from eBay.

Apple 1 motherboard sells for almost a quarter of a million pounds at Sothebys

Only 200 were ever made. Only 50 are known to remain. Only 6 are known to still work.

A rare functioning Apple 1 computer – the company’s first product – has been sold at an auction for $374,500 (£240,929)

BBC online story is here.

Geohot was the first to Jailbreak the iPhone & the first to break into a PS3.

Read all about his exploits, highs & lows in this New Yorker article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/07/120507fa_fact_kushner?currentPage=all

Geohot loves electronics, but hates the 9-5 grind, just like us.

That’s right folks. Software radio just became mainstream. Up until last summer you paid £1000+ for a USRP, then came along the £120 Funcube dongle. Now you can learn all about SDR for £20.

You can now use a £20 USB DVB-TV Stick to receive any frequency from 64-1700MHz at a high bandwidth sample rate of 2.8MS/s. Required chipset is RTL2832U & Elonics E4000 tuner combo. Known good units are EzCapTV 668 & 666 units, along with a host of similar boards.

sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr

What has been successfully tested so far is the reception of FM/AM radio, TETRA (police, ambulance, fire), GMR (sat phones), GSM (mobile phones), ADS-B (aircraft data) and POCSAG (pagers).

Go and type RTL-SDR into Youtube and you’ll find loads of great demo videos – like these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0hEquzLsWU

Here’s another good page : http://www.rtlsdr.com/

Some useful Windows SDR# software here

Interesting stuff on the Guardian website today about ONDigital.

Once upon a time there were two pay TV systems in the UK, Sky & ONDigital. Sky worked through a dish and ONDigital through your TV aerial.
One day pirate viewing cards for ONDigital appeared, long after Sky had eradicated hacking of their own cards with the launch of the series 10 card from NDS.

ONDigital couldn’t build a real service if they couldn’t raise subscriptions, and they couldn’t raise any money when everyone in the UK was watching all their pay content for free.

Rumblings on the web today alleged that NDS (Israeli company who provide card technology to Sky) may have paid hackers to research the vulnerability of the systems used by ONDigital, and that the research may have found its way outside NDS, again allegedly.

Read the full story from The Guardian here and here.

Watch the BBC Panorama documentary here

Read all about NDS here

It’s possible to read out the details of a recent Barclaycard without making a physical connection to it – according to Channel4 News.

The latest Barclaycard includes a contactless RFID type chip, which works in a similar way to an Oyster card (UK London Underground Travel Card). Some of the latest mobiles can read these chips too. It’s now been shown that the card number, expiry date & card holders name can be read just by holding a smartphone against someones wallet. Those details can then be used to order something through Amazon, even though you still don’t have the 3 digit security code.

Full article is here.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/19513

Fibre optic network for Smart Meters

Responsible department: Department for Energy and Climate Change

To protect the long term health and security of UK citizens, and particularly the health of our children, we the undersigned demand the Government adopt a wired fibre-optic network for Smart Meters. Consumers should have the option of wired Home Area Networks at no additional cost. Provision must also be made for people with Electro-Sensitivity to keep their analog meters and be supplied with shielding materials where necessary.