Less Radiation

4G TV interference: Up to a million homes ‘need filters’

Read report at BBC here.

How to catch an IMSI catcher. Catchercatcher. Don’t get tracked by your GSM phone.

Using a £10 Motorola C115, a USB cable and a laptop running Linux.

For IMSI catchers to achieve their goals they will need to show behavior different from normal base stations. We distinguish between yellow, red, and black flags. Yellow flag are an indication that you might have been caught; red flags are a very strong indication; and black flags tell you: “You are being tracked down; throw away your phone and run.”

Read the CatcherCatcher tutorial.

List of speakers & talks

Links to live video streams

Iran have shown video of the downed drone which looks intact, suggesting they didn’t shoot it down.

They claim it was brought down by electronic measures. Signal jammer anyone?

BBC story & video

more here

OFCOM launches new maps site for 2G 3G Mobile Broadband signal coverage

Mobile coverage map and stats

OFCOM Sitefinder locate masts by postcode.

Want to know how World War III really starts?

The control centre for the remote UAV drones (that’s unmanned American surveillance planes that fly by remote control) has been hit by a virus!

Although not connected to the internet, someone has stuck a USB pen drive infected with a virus into one of the PCs that run the remote control system for the Predator planes. Seemingly they run Windows XP – see photo. (this really happened in the last month).

Hypothetically speaking of course, if these PCs were connected to the internet, they might now be under the control of a bot-master, for sale to the highest bidder on the internet crime forums. Got a dispute with a business associate? Don’t send round a bruiser with a baseball bat, instead bomb the f**k out of them!

Okay, it didn’t happen yet, but it might quite soon. Imagine, in the very near future, when China own all the infrastructure and buildings within the EU (because of our own financial stupidity) – World War III could be easily sparked by UAV drones under the control (seemingly) of some 3rd party hacker bombing Beijing. What a great get-out clause for the real culprits… and a release from all our financial obligations. (great James Bond movie plot, if nothing else)

These drones are obviously able to act autonomously when not in radio communication with HQ (think about your own smartphone that already has GPS, a gyroscope & inertia sensor), but they still depend on radio signals to operate remotely. Imagine someone in a cheap plane with an array of radio jammers… What is the UAV to do next?

These UAV’s are just turning war into a video game for the remote operators – would you want one of your children running this remote control killing room? If you’re brought up killing people successfully on-screen in video games, then it’s a very small leap to doing it for pay from the US military in some remote server room (Remember, champions of justice, your opponents have families & children, who also dream of a better world).

Follow the Drunken UAV on Twitter.

On day one of the recent 2011 Chaos Communication Camp – an annual summer computer security conference this year held in Germany – Karsten Nohl & Luca Melette demonstrated how to sniff unencrypted GPRS from the air using a £10 Motorola C123 mobile phone & a laptop running Linux.

Actually you need four £10 phones and serial to USB leads – the phones can be Motorola C115 or C118 or C123 or C139 or C140 or V171 models or Sony Ericsson J100i. Two of the phones need the internal filters replacing before you can sniff the uplink above 20 metres. With the filters replaced you can sniff the uplink up to 200 metres, with external antennas, probably. You need FTDI versions of the cables to be able to grab four timeslots from each of the four phones simultaneously. As you can tell, this is nowhere near the script kiddie level just yet. But just twelve months ago sniffing any GSM traffic without a £1000 USRP device wasn’t really possible.

The PDF slides from the talk are here.

The technique builds on work from the Osmocom-bb project – which uses the same £10 mobile phone to implement a free software GSM stack, when the phone is attached to a laptop, using a cheap USB to RS232 cable.

Some countries networks use encryption on their GPRS links, but some countries networks choose not to, so they can monitor traffic like Skype. Even if you use a 3G iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone it will always step down to GPRS when the 3G signal isn’t available (it might be someone running a UMTS 3G signal jammer).

More information can be found at srlabs.de

Yes, that headline is correct. One of the original authors of Elite for the BBC Micro, has started a non-profit company with the stated aim of bringing a $20 PC to every kid in the country.

David Braben believes that teaching of ICT is diverting focus away from learning all those real computer skills. Like hacking together your first script or Python program, or making an Arduino open your garage door from a smartphone. He’s right too.

The USB stick Raspberry Pi computer has a HDMI port on one end, so will connect to any recent HD ready TV. The other end attaches to a USB hub, which can have a keyboard, mouse, or USB ethernet port attached. The stick runs an ultra-cheap ARM processor & Ubuntu Linux. When you consider it will drive a 1080P TV at full HD resolution & surf the internet, that’s a pretty exciting proposition. I’d buy one just to play with – I’d donate one too, come to that, if they decide to mirror early attempts at spreading the cheap PCs to less well off countries.

This all makes running Ubuntu from a USB memory stick look pretty lame! Now the whole computer is on the stick.

David Braben thinks we’re about a year away from being able to own one. In the next 12 months prices of Android & Chrome tablets PCs are going to fall significantly, but I still love the idea of the £15 USB stick PC. If it could let you watch BBC iPlayer in HD on your TV, how great would that be!

If you want to read about how David Braben got his start with computers – aged 18 he received a £120 Acorn Atom kit for Christmas, which he soldered together himself (yes, these are the skills that helped him design a £15 USB PC, today) – then read the book ‘Backroom Boys’ by Francis Spufford, ISBN 0-571-21497-5. It’s also full of other great electronic engineering feats. You might have to settle for a used copy. Also contains the stories of the rise of Concorde, Vodafone/Cellnet & Mapping the human genome. Brilliant read.

If you don’t want to wait 12 months, you can start to learn a little Python programming today at KhanAcademy.org
Python lesson 1 – lesson 2 – lesson 3 – lesson 4

Vodafone Suresignal 3G hotspot is hacked.

The £50 Vodafone 3G Suresignal hotspot allows cell phone users with poor mast coverage to set up a mini mast in their own home, that routes 3G traffic through their home WiFi router.

The hardware runs on a standard Arm processor box running Linux. Some researchers have rooted the box and are able to bend it to their will. Allowing it to act like a 3G IMSI Catcher.

You can read all about it here : http://wiki.thc.org/vodafone

Update 15/07/2011 – According to The Register, Vodafone claim this security loophole was fixed a year ago, through an online update to all Suresignal boxes. Now that a mechanism exists for breaking into, and understanding the Suresignal, we think more exploits may yet be uncovered. Possibly.

Has your iPhone started displaying the message “This Accessory Is Not Optimised / Optimized For This iPhone”?

My wife’s iPhone 4 just started doing this over the weekend. Sound would come and go, and the error message would pop up frequently.

I looked around the forums and saw plenty of other people experiencing the same problem. Suggested remedies included removing your screen protector, plugging in and unplugging headphones ten times, etc, etc. Likely causes ranged from pairing up the iPhone with the car’s Bluetooth to buying a new speaker dock. Lots of people were blaming Apple & the latest software update…

In my wife’s case it was none of the above. If you think about this error message logically, then it’s telling you it thinks you have an accessory attached… Where do the accessories plug in? To the charging/USB adapter on the base of the iPhone, of course.

I inspected the connector on the base of the wife’s iPhone 4 with a magnifying glass, in good light, and could clearly see some green grunge across the contacts (likely caused by water contact – I see this all the time inside iPods I refurbish).

The solution is to get a can of ‘IPA Solvent’ (specially for cleaning electronic circuit boards) & a cotton bud. TURN OFF YOUR IPHONE. Pull & flatten both ends of the cotton bud, so they’re ‘Spatula shaped’, and then spray a little IPA solvent on one end. Clean the copper contacts carefully. Then use the dry end of the cotton bud to soak up any excess solvent. Inspect you handwork under a magnifying glass and they should be nice and clean. If the water damage was minimal your iPhone will be fine. (if you dropped it in the bath or toilet it probably won’t fix it).

http://cpc.farnell.com/pro-power/ppc103/ipa-cleaning-solvent/dp/SA01884