Less Radiation

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.

Here’s a screen-grab showing people who search our site by country. See which non-English speaking nations are most interested in RF issues (UK is awful at best).

I just moved house and had rung BT to move my two lines over to the new address. BT’s website said I could expect 8MB broadband from them at my new address. O2’s website said I could get 20MB broadband, although i’d have to wait until my BT line was actually installed before I could apply – and then i’d have to wait at least another 10 days for my broadband to be operational.

I had already charged up the Sim in my ‘3’ mobile USB broadband dongle and knew i’d at least have slow internet access while things got setup. Then I remembered that broadband over glass fibre always beats copper for speed, so a quick search for cable broadband turned up Virgin Media. Imagine the big smile that crossed my face when their site said I could have a 50MB link at my new address – all for not much more that I was paying BT for line rental & packages, and Orange for 8MB broadband.

The installation all went more or less as planned. The engineers setup the Wireless Router for me , ran a few speed tests, and left.

This site is all about less radiation, so i’d already bought a DSL 4 port wired router from eBay for £13.99 (search for ‘virgin media wired cable router’ and you’ll see the TP-LINK model). I asked whether this model would get the most out of the 50MB account, and was told it would. The wired router was a doddle to setup and the wireless router’s now back in its original box – if the router didn’t remain Virgin’s property, i’d sell it. The TP-Link model seems to have all the functionality of my old ADSL DG834 Netgear, maybe more.

I tried to turn off the Wireless features of the Dlink DIR-615 they supplied, but all you could do was drop the signal strength to 12.5% of max power and the Beacon down to once every second – this isn’t enough for me, sorry guys.

My Powerline ethernet-over-mains adapters work fine, and my son now has the PS3 running Little Big Planet on the big TV downstairs. He can happily download new levels and characters from the Net. I can also use BBC’s iPlayer on it, to catch up when they occasionally put something worth watching on TV.

My Speedtest screengrab is below:

I managed to download the DVD of the latest OpenSuse Linux in about 15 minutes – about 4.6MB a second, where on my old 8MB link i’d top out at 700k.

The only bugbears about the service are with the phone line. For all their 50MB magicness, my local cabinet doesn’t support Caller ID on the phone line! You don’t realise how much you take caller ID for granted.

Invomo’s ‘customer support’ staff have given me a headache!

It’s a long story, has very little to do with electrosmog, but should at least land this cautionary tale near the front page of a well known search engine.

If you don’t know, Invomo supply 0844 & 0870 telephone numbers to businesses. The idea being that you can divert this number to another landline, and your customers only see a non-geographic. I used to work from two sites and used to use it to divert my calls from one landline to another. I’d not used it for a while and decided i’d remove the 0870 number from my websites & invoices and cancel next time the renewal came up.

My invoice from them arrived on the 19th of September and I called them the following week to tell them I may cancel the direct debit and stop using the number. At this stage nobody gave me an indication I couldn’t do that.

Their invoice gives you 7 days notice that they will take the direct debit from your account, so I simply cancelled the direct debit before they got chance to take it – remember, I’m paying for this service in advance – at this point they’re sending me a bill for something I won’t start using until the 26th of September, and which will last a year.

Call me old-fashioned if you will. I run my own web-hosting company, and if someone wants to leave my service for another provider they can at any time (no charge). If they pay a little late or want to cancel I don’t penalise them. If they want to cancel their relationship with me and forget to tell me straight away, I don’t hold them to ‘contractual ransom’ for 12 months. I like to think I’m a gentleman, and many customers tell me I am. The customer is always king.

So, with my over-developed sense of right & wrong you can imagine how I feel when Invomo tell me I have to pay another whole years charges because they didn’t get my cancellation email until the 28th. I initially believe that I missed the date by two days, both of which were the weekend days – so they probably wouldn’t have opened a cancellation letter until the Monday anyway.

Anyway, after a few more emails it becomes clear that they actually wanted me to cancel my agreement with them a month BEFORE the renewal. Let’s be honest, most businessmen are busy making money and decide to continue or cancel a service when they receive the bill. With Invomo you can’t work like this, you have to remember to cancel your agreement before the bill arrives, otherwise you’re in for another 12 months. And you know you’ll only forget next time too. They will of course keep your cancellation request on file for 12 months, if you request it – but by that time you’d have forgot and might have started re-using the number. If they cared about customer satisfaction they’d send a letter six weeks before the 12 months contract is up, stating that you have two weeks to cancel. I guess that’s not going to happen though…

My real bugbear is that I’ve had this number since 2002, and when I took the contract out they weren’t even called Invomo – they were PNC Telecom. My question to any lawyers reading this is how can you be held to such an agreement when the company has been sold and changed names? (I bet any staff they retained had to sign new employment contracts!) I never signed a new contract. They only thing they have my signature on is a piece of paper from 2002, for a one year contract with PNC Telecom.

Contrast this treatment with what an average non-business consumer could expect. You have distance selling regulations, 7 day cooling off periods. Does any of that apply to me? It seems not. How about decent honest behaviour, do you think that’s what I’ve received from Invomo? I’m struggling to see how they’ve ‘put the customer first’.

The Invomo2go.com website’s FAQ section states that ‘all contracts are for a minimum of 12 months, after this we require a months notice to cancel a number’. Note their use of the term ‘after this’ and not ‘before this’. I had an email yesterday (30/09/09) from them signed ‘On behalf of Nick Wiley, CEO’ telling me they still want £184.69 for 4 days service that I don’t want or need. That email started ‘Without Prejudice’, but surely charging me more for less is prejudice!

Everything above is fact. I’m very disappointed!

(sorry this piece had nothing to do with electrosmog)

Update: In the end Invomo agreed that I only owed them one months cancellation fee, which amounted to about £15. It seems that they – in my case at least – try to make it seem like it’s as costly to cancel as it is to continue your contract. If they did this to every customer wishing to cancel it might make a big difference to their bottom-line. I thought about taking this page down now the issue got resolved. But stuff them! The Internet is forever: not like an article in a newspaper, which is just tomorrow’s chip-paper… If they’d treated me (a customer) better this rant wouldn’t be here.

Update 02-05-2012 : Ignore this, Rowtex seem to have stopped selling the Orchid, leaving the field clear for the Low Radiation Siemens Gigaset phones. They now sell airtube earsets for mobile phones, and we wholeheartedly agree that you should buy one!
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Orchid Low Radiation Digital Cordless Phone from Rowtex Ltd.

The site you’ll find at http://www.lowradiation.co.uk/ states that the Orchid phone is the UK’s only Low Radiation Cordless Phone. Misleading.

In 2008 this may have been true. However, as we mention elsewhere on this site, you can now buy a Dect cordless phone for your home from Siemens that includes Low Radiation features for half the price.

You can buy a Siemens Gigaset C385 right now at Argos.co.uk for £33.95, order code 552/5683 – then just set it in Eco+ mode when it arrives. Then you’ll only be filling your home with electrosmog when you talk on the phone, not while you sleep. (In ECO+ mode the Siemens C385 handset & base stop emitting radiation within 35 seconds of you ending a call, regardless of whether you place the handset back in the base or not. Fact.)

Or you can pay £79.99 plus P&P for an Orchid – which absolutely ISN’T the UK’s only low radiation cordless phone. Fact.

If you really care about eliminating electrosmog from your home, then you really shouldn’t buy either of these products. You should use a regular wired phone instead.

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