Less Radiation

I’m now into my second week as a Nexus One owner. The phone still works great and I intend to keep it , rather than sell it on for a little profit.

Last week I was looking at some of the Garmin Trek devices and seeing if they do a bike computer for keeping logs of my rides. Now I own a Nexus One there’s no need to waste money on such a device. As you’ll know the Nexus One has GPS built-in and full integration with Google Maps.

If you visit Android Market on your phone and search for My Tracks you’ll be able to download a very capable walking, running & cycling trip computer – best of all, it’s free.

Using My Tracks I’ve been able to verify that my much less capable handlebar-mounted trip computer is set correctly. My Tracks records my average speed, fastest speed, and a chart showing the elevation. Also, because My Tracks interfaces so easily with your whole Google account, it’s a doddle to upload your tracks from the phone to their server.

Screengrab below is from my PC:

Earlier this week I took delivery of a new Google Nexus One phone.

I’ve never bought an off-contract expensive smartphone before, but several things about this offering made it irresistible. Firstly, the display runs at twice the resolution of the iPhone, so web browsing is a much more pleasant experience.

Secondly, everything feels much more immediate than on an iPhone – no processor lag. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is a great consumer appliance. But the Nexus One really does bring your PC to your pocket. If you use Googlemail to filter out all your spam emails at home or office, then it’s simple to synchronise your mail account on your phone.

Something I’m personally quite interested in is being able to view CCTV cameras via my phone. With the Nexus One’s high resolution display this works much better than on the lower resolution iPhone.

Here are a few observations about unboxing & initial setup of the Nexus One:

I bought the Nexus One off-contract direct from Google USA. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t work with my ‘Three’ network Sim card, at various points while I waited for it to arrive. I know that the 3G networks in the UK work at 2100MHz, and i’d seen in Google’s FAQ that this was one of the supported bands, so I was hopeful.

When the Nexus One arrived I put in my ‘3’ Sim and was able to make and receive calls. I put my Electrosmog Detector next to it, and was able to tell from the noises it made that the phone was talking to the tower over proper 3G rather than GSM via Orange. Thing was, I couldn’t get a 3G connection to the net using a web browser.

After a little digging I realised that I needed to setup an APN for ‘3’ in the phone’s settings Menu. Here’s how to do it:

Go to Settings –> Wireless & Networks –> Mobile Networks –> Access Point Names –> Double-Click and hold the ‘four bars’ icon to the right of the back key at the base of the phone –> click New APN –> Name=3G –> APN=three.co.uk –> Proxy, Port, Username, Password, Server can be left as they are –> MMSC=http://mms.um.three.co.uk:10021/mmsc –> MMS Proxy=217.171.129.2 –> MMS Port=8799 –> MCC=234 –> Authentication Type and APN Type can be left blank.

Of course the real pull of this phone for hacker-types is the Linux Kernel. These Android OS phones can be ‘Rooted’ so you can take fully control of the device. before you know it you could have Snapdragon compiled versions of Kismet & Wireshark running on your phone.

Headline says it all…

First of all, a couple of years ago a story said that students who were exposed to GSM mobile phone signals for an hour performed better on exam test papers. An industry spokesman dismissed the result as ‘no worse than a cup of coffee’.

Last January researchers found that using a mobile an hour before bedtime wrecks sleep quality. (Full Story)

This January, mice with Alzheimer’s are cured by exposure to a regular mobile phone signal for two one-hour periods each day for seven to nine months. (Full Story)

The important thing to bear in mind here is that the World Health Organisation and the mobile phone industry have insisted for years that any phone that doesn’t heat tissue can’t have any biological effect on a human being – this is what they mean when they quote ICNIRP guidelines.

It’s become quite obvious, over the past two years, that subtle effects do occur in our bodies when exposed to quite low levels of RF – well under the levels given out by cordless Dect phones, WiFi routers & mobiles. Some people feel quite ill when exposed to pulsed RF, although most people don’t (think of photosensitive epileptics and strobing lights).

Here at Lessradiation.co.uk we believe the effects of RF on the body are cumulative, that’s to say, once you become electrosensitive it can take months or years of no exposure for you to get back to feeling your old self.

You can take action today. If you must use a Dect cordless phone, go for one of the Siemens Eco+ Dect models (£25) which only transmit when you are actually on a call. Also, you can turn off your WiFi router’s beacon signal too (£0). Doing just those two things will remove the permanent blanket of electrosmog that most homes are now cloaked in. Better still, go back to using a corded phone & router.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to best sum up the state of play regarding mobile phones, Dect, Wifi & human health at the close of 2009.

The start of this year saw studies that showed that exposure to EMFs can wreck your sleep. You can test this theory for yourself by plugging in your WiFi router & Dect Phone’s Main Base right next to your bed. About 10% of you should should suffer sleep deprivation, or perhaps just really weird dreams.

Next up, unplug your WiFi router and Dect base at night. Did you notice a difference? Are you sleeping better? is one of your kids now sleeping better? If you live near a Mobile/Tetra mast you might not be so lucky. Of course, a really close neighbour’s WiFi & Dect can cause Electrosmog in your home too. It could be a wheat intolerance or any one of a hundred different things that are suddenly making you feel s**t. But it really could be a source of pulsed EMF too.

Back to the original heading. Microwave News reports that the battle goes on. Mike Repacholi has taken wages from the Cellphones-cause-no-harm lobby for some years, and everyone out there knows that. Dozens of other scientists do also every day. It doesn’t matter one bit, the truth will eventually out. At worst i’ll just have been wrong, and have spent my time writing about something that I find interesting!

For years scientists struggled against entrenched money interests to bring down BIG-Tobacco. Some would say they still haven’t. But most people now agree that smoking tobacco will shorten your life. For many years the Power companies insisted that living under power lines didn’t give you Leukemia. Most people now believe they do…

My argument is not that cellphones give you cancer. My argument is that daily exposure to excessive EMFs (mostly from Dect cordless phones & WiFi routers) will leave you fuzzy minded and ruin your mood. Ultimately sending you to your GP asking for Antidepressants – which might make you feel better in the short-term , but won’t fix the cause of your low serotonin long-term. Also, you could end up at your GP asking them to medicate your kids with Ritalin or some other lovely concoction. Turn off all your EMF crap and get them outside in the fresh air! Now!

I even see the proliferation of EMF emitting gadgets as the possible cause for the obesity epidemic. Not that EMF’s contain any calories, obviously they don’t. But if being in a situatiuon that leads you to feel not quite yourself and mildly uncomfortable, could lead you to comfort eat without really understanding why. All experiments that need to be done by truly independent scientists at some point in the near future. In the mean time just turn off all your Wireless gadgets… For your childrens sake.

Peace & Love. Roll On 2010.

It’s only just two years ago now since Asus grabbed the PC market by the balls with the launch of the Asus Eee 701.

This was the first complete mini-laptop for under £200. It ran Linux and gave you everything you needed for 90% of your PC work. The only downsides were the fiddly keyboard and the 7″ 800×480 display. New versions quickly followed, and the second Eee featured a more usable 10″ 1024×600 display. Microsoft saw the huge numbers of these Netbooks being sold and realised that if they didn’t supply a cheap OEM netbook version of Windows XP, and bloody quickly, then Linux would take over the world!

I’ve still got my original 701 Eee, and a 901, and also an Acer Aspire One, and also a Advent 4211 / MSI Wind. They are all great machines. I only bought so many because I spotted a niche in the market for a custom build of Ubuntu for each of them. The standard Linux that came with most of them wasn’t very flexible, or at least didn’t seem flexible to someone only used to a Windows PC. I made a build of Ubuntu that was built on the un-swoppy EXT2 format, came with ability to play YouTube & iPlayer video content, working WiFi drivers etc, 3G broadband USB support, and a VOIP client that people wanted to use. I’m still selling these today (on Kingston 8GB USB sticks for £29), mainly to people who don’t have the spare time or inclination to figure everything out for themselves. (see spystore-uk on eBay).

Anyway, I’ve digressed. While looking on eBay last night I spotted a new Netbook running Windows for £75 including UPS shipping to the UK. At first I think this must be a scam, but there are lots of them, and the vendors have good feedback. Of course I ordered one immediately, now I just have to wait for it to show up.

The $100 netbook really is the next step on from that original Eee 701. It’s less powerful in terms of processor power, memory & storage – but the price point is a truly compelling feature.

Right now these $100 netbooks are keeping the cost down by using 7″ 800×480 displays and a low power 300MHz ARM processor. The downside is that the lack of an x86 style Intel processor means you won’t be running Windows XP or an Intel compatible build of Ubuntu anytime soon.

On the horizon though is a promised firmware upgrade to Google’s Android operating system, which should give users the Flash/Firefox combination they need to use iPlayer & YouTube – for now they ship with Windows CE.

New versions of the ARM processor promise extra grunt quite soon. So the next couple of iterations of this device really will shake everything up – sorry Intel.

Think of it this way – right now you have Apple iPhones with similar processing power and smaller screens for £500; you have proprietry eBook readers (Kindle, Sony, etc) with mono display for £150+. Yes these devices are beautifully designed, have very appealing interfaces, and will continue to sell by the bucket load. But it will be the $100 netbook that causes a quantum shift towards the always-connected world of cloud computing – with WiFI & 3G everywhere – where everything sits on a server (an example of this being the Promptu voice-recognition software for the iPhone that uploads a voice file to a server, which the server converts to text, and sends back to the phone – because the iPhone doesn’t have the raw processing power for speech to text, but the server does).

Reading what others have said about the $100 netbooks out there right now, it’s not yet possible to boot an alternative OS from a USB stick or SD card. These machines are pre-programmed at the factory with the OS on-board, and the Bios doesn’t supply an alternative boot menu right now. The manufacturers talk about them being able to run Android (linux) sometime soon via a Flash upgrade, so in the near future it should be possible to ‘jailbreak’ (sorry) them to run another OS – although that mechanism doesn’t seem to be known just yet.

So what can you reasonably expect from a $100 laptop? Don’t expect to be watching HD video content anytime soon. Better to splurge out on a £200 Intel Atom based netbook if you want; your kids to look grateful on Christmas day, a real hard drive, Windows XP (and therefore any real Windows applications), lots of Youtube content, iPlayer, etc. But for basic website surfing & email a $100 PC that comes with WiFi is hard to beat!

The last thing I can remember being so revolutionary was when the Sinclair ZX81 launched, and if you wanted the cheapest version you had to solder that together yourself!

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UPDATE 6/2/10 : $100 netbook packed up last week. MORAL: you get what you pay for!

The Register reports that Iraqi insurgents have had their laptops searched and that the video feeds from unmanned US Predator drone aircraft have been found on them.

The drones provide video reconnaissance to remote viewers/pilots, and are good for showing enemy troop movements, etc.

However, if Johnny Terrorist can intercept your supposedly private video feed with a laptop, card & dish and a $26 piece of software called SkyGrabber, then they probably know more than you.

SkyGrabber is normally used for snatching satellite internet traffic out of the air. Say you live in the Highlands of Scotland and can’t get regular wired or wireless internet, you can get satellite internet – at a price.

The files you download over satellite internet can be seen & recorded by anyone with the right equipment – so that’s POP3 email accounts, FTP uploads to your server, music files you download, videos you download.

Anyone running SkyGrabber can get all the movies and music you download for free. Presumably the drone planes were sending their data over a standard network IP link, with simple encryption at best – this technology is now ten years old.

You can get software to do a similar thing for Linux. Spotting sporadic satellite feeds is almost a complete self-contained hobby for a certain type of geek. There’s certainly lots of interesting stuff out there.

I remember reading about one guy who’d seen unedited live satellite feeds from Paris the night Lady Diana died. Very often an ad-hoc satellite feed will contain off-the-record comments from reporters on the ground, and the studio will then edit the whole thing down into the report you eventually see on TV. These satellite hunters get to see the whole shebang.

Interesting video here

After the 27th of December GSM won’t be the same again.

26C3 hacker conference 27th-30th December (C3 stands for Chaos Computer Club of Germany).

In December 2007 we saw Bluetooth hacked at 24C3.
In December 2008 we saw Dect hacked at 25C3.
This years it’s GSM’s turn.

Here are the interesting GSM talks to look out for. I’m sure they’ll appear on Youtube after the event.

27th Dec 21:45 – Chris Paget & Karsten Nohl

“The worlds most popular radio system has over 3 billion handsets in 212 countries and not even strong encryption. Perhaps due to cold-war era laws, GSM’s security hasn’t received the scrutiny it deserves given its popularity. This bothered us enough to take a look; the results were surprising.

From the total lack of network to handset authentication, to the “Of course I’ll give you my IMSI” message, to the iPhone that really wanted to talk to us. It all came as a surprise – stunning to see what $1500 of USRP can do. Add a weak cipher trivially breakable after a few months of distributed table generation and you get the most widely deployed privacy threat on the planet.

Cloning, spoofing, man-in-the-middle, decrypting, sniffing, crashing, DoS’ing, or just plain having fun. If you can work a BitTorrent client and a standard GNU build process then you can do it all, too. Prepare to change the way you look at your cell phone, forever.”

29th Dec 16:00 – Dieter Spaar

Playing with the GSM RF Interface

Doing tricks with a mobile phone

This talk will show what can be done by taking control of the GSM RF part of a mobile phone, for example performing a DoS attack to the GSM network or using the phone as a sniffing device.

If the RF hardware of a mobile phone can be controlled, lots of things are possible, for example:

* Sending continuous Channel Request which can lead to a huge load for a GSM cell and could be considered as a DoS attack to the GSM network.
* Use a mobile phone as a cheap GSM receiver for sniffing the air traffic somehow similar to what can be done with the USRP.

29th Dec 17:15 – Harald Welte

Using OpenBSC for fuzzing of GSM handsets

With the recent availability of more Free Software for GSM protocols such as OpenBSC, GSM protocol hacking is no longer off-limits. Everyone can play with the lower levels of GSM communications.

It’s time to bring the decades of TCP/IP security research into the GSM world, sending packets incompatible with the state machine, sending wrong length fields and actually go all the way to fuzz the various layers of the GSM protocol stack.

The GSM protocol stack is a communications protocol stack like any other. There are many layers of protocols, headers, TLV’s, length fields that can “accidentially” be longer or shorter than the actual content. There are timers and state machines. Wrong messages can trigger invalid state transitions.

This protocol stack inside the telephone is implemented in C language on the baseband processor on a real-time operating system without any memory protection.

There are only very few commercial GSM protocol stack implementations, which are licensed by the baseband chipset companies. Thus, vulnerabilities discovered in one phone will likely exist in many other phones, even of completely different handset manufacturers.

Does that sound like the preamble to a security nightmare? It might well be! Those protocol stacks never have received the scrutiny of thousands of hackers and attack tools like the TCP/IP protocol suite on the Internet.

It’s about time we change that.

In the next two weeks the Winter Hill transmitter (up north) will start to transmit HD content over the terrestrial TV network.

The really amazing thing is that the UK will be pioneering the new DVB-T2 standard, but the really annoying thing is that there is no hardware available yet. Humax are going to demo a set top box capable of receiving the signal, in December, but it won’t be available to buy in the shops until early 2010. Humax lead the way in set top boxes – the last two I bought were both Humax.

I just moved house and have had a dish put up for BBC HD over Freesat. I waited a while before buying my Freesat box, and I waited a whole while longer before getting a 1080P TV – my 3 years sat on the fence meant I avoided being seduced by a 720P set.

Pundits on the Digital TV forums reckon that the first DVB-T2 boxes and decoders will cost £300+, although by Christmas 2010 they’ll be more reasonably priced.

If you want subscription-free HD channels at the moment I’d stick with FreeSat. You can get a Humax HD Freesat receiver at Amazon.co.uk for £122 or a PVR version with a 320GB hard drive for £243. Both boxes connect by HDMI and give great results on SD & HD channels.

I noticed the other day that Rowtex have updated their Orchid Low Radiation Cordless phone website. It still proudly boasts that theirs is still the only low radiation phone available in the UK. Wrong!

They’ve known it’s wrong since at least April, when we started getting posts on this site from the proprietor. We’d upset him by suggesting that in fact the Siemens C385 was a better and cheaper alternative to his product (in our opinion).

The Siemens C385 costs as little as £25 (rather than £80+) and emits no radiation when you aren’t on a call (in Eco+ mode), it’s prettier too. We still think you should use a corded (and cheaper) home phone, as many cordless Dect calls can now be ‘sniffed’ using a laptop.

Our advice is: don’t order stuff using your credit card over a cordless phone. Don’t do telephone banking over a cordless phone. Don’t ring any service where you give a password or keyphrase or date of birth over a cordless phone. About 50% of cordless Dect phones aren’t secured properly. If you don’t know anything about Ubuntu or Com-On-air PCMCIA cards or Dect-Cli software, then you can’t reasonably know which 50% you might fall into.

Both the Siemens C385 & C475 low radiation cordless Gigaset phones properly encrypt a call – we’ve tested them. Does the Orchid…?
All wired phones don’t need to encrypt a call, because they aren’t transmitting 100 metres down the street! Used a wired phone, please..

You can buy a wired desktop phone from Argos for about £5. It won’t ruin your sleep (partly proved); it won’t give you a tumour (not proved); and it won’t help a hacker empty your bank account (absolute reality)…You Decide!

What upsets me most about the Rowtex site is the way they quote scientific reports about the effects of radiation, in an attempt to differentiate their product from every other Dect phone. If you want to act on these reports you use a corded phone, not a Dect phone, not a low power Dect phone, not even an old analogue cordless phone (which is undoubtedly safer than both, given that it’s not pulsed like Dect). It’s now well known that low tar cigarettes just give you a different kind of cancer, lower in the lung. I see low power phones as a similar beast – trying to make something that is still basically stupid appear more acceptable, therefore prolonging Dect’s lifespan (whilst possibly reducing yours).

You are far better off using your mobile phone as your main phone, than allowing any kind of Dect cordless phone in your home (assuming you keep calls short). Here’s why: your mobile will contact the local mast every 15 minutes, for maybe 10 seconds, whereas most Dect phone’s Base stations transmit a constant carrier (like a WiFi router does) 24 hours a day. Use your mobile phone on hands free to minimise exposure to your head, regardless of Mobile or Dect. Also, if using a regular mobile phone, always stand near a window when talking on it, that way the RF transmitting power should be lower (mobile phones automatically reduce their power output to the minimum needed, mostly to conserve battery power).

Unplug your WiFi Router and Dect phones from the mains power when you go to bed. Even better, never plug them back in!

I recycle ipods and recently an insurance company sent me an iPhone 3G with a smashed screen – in amongst several ipod touchs. I’ve wanted one for ages, but couldn’t bear to pay the true cost. This one has come to me for peanuts, plus the cost of a £20 screen from eBay.

When I first looked into Jailbreaking it, it still had the older firmware and baseband, which I could have upgraded. Foolishly, I let it connect to iTunes and upadate to the latest versions. It still worked with an O2 Sim, but I really wanted to get it unlocked for any carrier. I had to wait patiently for six weeks for the latest hack to arrive.

Now it has , and it’s free from www.blackra1n.com (that’s a ‘1 one’ not an ‘I eye’). Download and donate a small sum if you’re truly grateful. My unit that was locked firmly to O2 is now working fine with my ‘3’ Sim. Super!

Don’t get ripped off paying for this hack from other sites that advertise on Google Adwords.