Less Radiation

In the past 12 months we’ve seen GSM pulled to bits by the hacker/security researcher community.

We now have software for the USRP radio peripheral that can make it behave just like a GSM cell phone tower – routing calls on cruise ships & 3rd world countries (or anywhere else you can get away without a proper licence) via Asterisk VOIP from regular GSM phones.

Also, we’ve now got the ability to snoop almost real-time on encrypted GSM phone calls, thanks to 2GB of Rainbow Lookup tables & the USRP peripheral.

The last piece of the puzzle is getting an open source OS onto a regular mobile phone and grabbing hold of the phone’s baseband firmware – so you can make it do what you want. This is a crucial step – it’s the difference between merely sniffing traffic & being able to inject your own malformed packets. Normally a phones baseband firmware is set in stone – a bit like sending fixed AT commands to a MODEM, but once you can build you own baseband OS, you can then make up your own commands – which is real progress.

To give you an idea of what can be done when you can grab a phone by its low-level-balls like this – at the CCC 2009 conference a phone was reprogrammed so it would constantly request that the cell phone tower open a channel for it. Flooded with enough requests this would stop anyone else using that mast.

Phones which are likely usable for this are hard to get hold of. Try looking for a Calypso C123 on eBay…. good luck. Alternatives available to UK readers are the J100i from Nokia and the V171 from Motorola. I counted a handful of each. The J100i sports a colour screen, but is otherwise about as sophisticated as an old Nokia 3310. You need old hardware like this for reverse engineering.

More here.

For quite some time we’ve insisted that WiFi routers & Dect cordless home phones are the big enemy in electrosmog terms – if you stay at home they’re both blasting you constantly.

We’ve always said that mobile phones only radiate when you’re actually speaking on them. A regular mobile will talk to the mast for maybe 10 seconds every 15 minutes in standby.

However, after playing around with a Google 3G smartphone for 6 months now (and owning an electrosmog detector), i’ve come to the conclusion that smartphones fully loaded with various apps are just about as bad as a WiFi router stuck in your pocket – this is bad, very bad.

On my own Google Nexus One that means Google Mail checking in every minute, and every other network aware application doing the same.

Our heartfelt advice is to make sure you’re on the network that gets the easiest signal. Compare Sims from different providers and then get a PAC code and switch as soon as you can. If your smartphone is constantly switching between GSM & 3G that’s no good for you, at all.

Once you’ve done that you need to turn off all the apps that are transmitting data in the background. Googlemail will constantly check for new mail – but on my Android OS phone it won’t if I turn off ‘Background Sync’.

Also, the latest versions of Android support setting up your phone as a portable WiFi hotspot. Please make sure this is turned off again, once you’ve finished using it, otherwise your leg will be getting full of unwanted RF signal. Better still, stick your phone in Aircraft mode.

If you don’t hold the phone next to your head to hold conversations – or keep it in a trouser pocket – this advice probably doesn’t matter too much.

Further away from your body the better. Every time the distance from your body doubles the absorbed signal halves.

According to Mast Sanity, the respected Swedish researcher Prof. Olle Johansson has been having problems finding lab space for his latest experiments. The labspace he planned to use, to replicate recent studies that led to the cancellation of city-wide WiFi in San Francisco, have been instead grabbed by very important ferret research. If ever you needed an indication that you were getting close to the truth, then this has to be it!

There’s loads of interesting stuff here, just read the
link.

Basically, you need to know that governments around the world are far more interested in how much money can be made from wireless services, than the well-being of their ill-informed populations!

There’s an interesting piece by Adam Higginbotham in this months US edition of Wired magazine.

It’s all about the US military’s escalating game of wits with insurgents in Iraq & Afganistan.

The biggest problem for the US isn’t AK47s or rocket launchers, it’s IEDs – Improvised Explosive Devices or roadside bombs. These cause more mayhem & carnage than anything else, and are built for peanuts.

It’s not the explosives aspect that caught my eye, rather the ingenious ways that they are triggered. Anything which can send a wireless signal is fair game: garage door openers, remote doorbells, cell phones, walkie-talkies, CB radios. The US’s answer to this was to buy radio jammers, 40,000 of them in fact for Iraq alone. Then the insurgents start to use Frequency Counters as triggering devices – because they detect the jammers. Then they move to using PIRs that pick up the heat signature of the Humvees. Then a US army officer decides to stick a toaster on a 10 foot pole on the front of his Humvee, to confuse the PIR. Then the insurgents set the IEDs to target back 10 feet from the heat signature. Any so it goes on… it’s almost comical… like Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote. Except of course, it’s not funny at all.

Page 138 of Wired’s August 2010 US edition.

Steve Jobs gave a video interview today with Sky News that admits that not all their products are perfect. This of course is all about the iPhone4. Apple have sold 3 million units in 22 days – which is a million a week.

Steve refers to the problem with iPhone 4 as ‘Antenna-Gate’. Apple have now said they’ll issue rubber iphone covers to anyone having a problem, or they can have their money back if they prefer.

The price gap between Apple smartphones and HTC Android phone is huge. A second hand iPhone 3G costs £250 from eBay, but a comparable and equally functional HTC G1 can be had for less than £100. Apple have a huge cash-cow franchise with the iPhone G4, and good luck to them, they deserve it all.

Just remember Steve J, it’s Woz that helped put you where you are today…

Reports on The Register & BBC websites suggest that early adopters of the latest iPhone 4 are having trouble with signal strength if they hold their phones.

The phones appear to suffer big drops in signal strength when held by human hand. Apparently, a small metal band on the outside of the chassis acts as the antenna – in most other phones that part is internal.

This might have something to do with skin resistance, as using a leather or plastic case seems to mitigate the effect. Previous versions of the iPhone didn’t use external metal parts of the case as an antenna – the antennas were inside behind plastic panels in the otherwise metal chassis.

Others have suggested that touching the iPhone 4 shorts the WiFi & 3G radio parts somehow – we don’t think so … it’s much more likely that your body is acting like a signal sink, try wearing rubber gloves… You’ll find big differences in natural skin conductivity between different people – if I touch a badly earthed piece of electrical equipment I can feel a buzzing where some others can’t. I’ll be surprised if this problem is fixed by a software upgrade!

The simple act of holding the phone appears to cause the user to absorb maybe half of the RF power output of the phone. Using it hands-free causes no such problem. Maybe Apple are trying to get us all to use phones several feet away from our heads – a highly commendable goal!

Others are moaning that the screens scratch easily and that edges of the screen suffer discolouration, allegedly.

Article from The Register

Article from the BBC

Pictures of queues for iPhone V4 in London.
(Reminds me of when Windows 95 launched… so very, very, long ago…)

The biggest study ever into whether cellphones give you brain tumours has finally published something. After 10 years and $25 million plus US dollars it’s a …. maybe.

Some interpretations of the data look like cellphones absolutely protect against cancer, some show a small increased risk.

A lot of in-fighting has gone on within the group of scientists drawing the conclusions. Originally the Interphone study was going to be more wide ranging, and research was carried out into areas other than just increased risk of  glioma & meningioma. So Interphone actually has much more information in its’ vaults than has been released now. It will just take some scientists to agree what it all says and then that could be published too.

Here’s our interpretation: if you talk on a mobile or Dect phone for more than an hour every day you may well increase you risk of something (poor sleep perhaps)… If you don’t then you are abiding by the precautionary principle advocated by The Stewart Report of 2000.

I just read an interesting article about office photocopiers. All the larger models made post-2002 have hard drives inside them. Each time you copy a document it saves a copy to the internal hard drive.

Researchers were able to recover all sorts of business, legal, medical & personal information from a random sample of machines. Even if a machine has a wipe button it often just wipes the index and not the actual file from the drive.

Using the free Testdisk forensic recovery software you can most likely retrieve documents the same way you would from a PC’s hard drive or camera’s SD memory card.

Links:
CBS News Story & Testdisk

On page 20 of the New Scientist’s 3rd April 2010 edition you’ll see an article entitled ‘Search’s dirty secret’ by James Clarage – it’s all about how much power each Google search uses. The same as leaving a 100-watt light bulb on for an hour, according to James. I just hope this isn’t an April-Fools joke…

I was sat up reading the article in bed, when a little 100-watt light bulb came on in my own head! That can’t be right, I thought…

According to the article, ‘IT research firm Gartner estimates that Google’s data centres contain nearly a million servers, each drawing about 1 kilowatt of electricity. So every hour Google’s engine burns through 1 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. Google serves up approximately 10 million search results per hour, so one search has the same energy cost as turning on a 100-watt light bulb for an hour’… Sure!

That would mean that each of those servers only does 10 searches per hour, or 240 searches in 24 hours, times 1 million servers. That’s just silly.

In fact, I found that Google process 87.8 billion searches a month (see links below), which is about 2.88 billion-a-day. So that means the number of searches quoted in the article is less than 10% of the real total – so now we’re down to a 10 watt light bulb on for an hour. But wait , there’s more…

I remembered from previous reading (might be the Google biography) that Google use regular PC boxes for each of those servers. In fact they’re even tighter with their money than that. The article states that each Google server uses 1000 watts per hour, when in fact each server only has a 300 watt PSU in it (see links below), and can only supply a maximum load of 280W. The Google servers feature a Magnatek 300W PSU with only a 12V supply (the 5v stepdown being done by the mainboard or a separate inverter circuit, instead of the PSU), that is supplemented by a 12V battery (not a UPS, just a battery). This makes each PC very efficient. Each of the PCs has a custom Gigabyte motherboard with twin Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, and 2x 1TB SATA Hard Drives – this server can easily process 240 searches a second, never mind a day.

Also, these servers are each 3 inches high and stored in regular racks. Each of these racks is housed in a standard ‘1AAA’ shipping container. Each container holds 1160 PCs. They can be moved around by crane. Google have thoroughly researched how to make each server as energy efficient as possible – after all, it’s in their financial interest if they have a million of them.

Anyway, the upshot of the 300W PSU and various other calculations is that each PC is really only using only 250 watts of power per hour. So our 100-watt lighbulb, that became a 10-watt lightbulb, now becomes a hypothetical 2.5-watt lightbulb.

It’s even better than that because Google aren’t really using a million servers all for search. Those servers are crunching through uploaded YouTube videos and all sorts of other really processor-intensive work. Spewing out a page of text-based search results is easy for these boxes. It’s also worth mentioning that these boxes are running a highly tweaked version of Linux, so there’s very little OS-bloat, it isn’t like they’re running Windows.

So, back to the original 100-watt light bulb for an hour claim. How much electricity would that be? Well, in the UK right now a kWh of electricty costs about 10p, which is enough to run that light bulb for 10 hours – or 1p per hour. But as we already pointed out that light bulb is really 2.5 watt and not 100 watt. Plus, when you factor in how many searches each server can really run it’s loads less. If they say a server can run 10 searches an hour and it can actually run 10 searches every second, then that’s 3600 times more searches per hour.

How about Google’s electricity bill? Well, if each server uses 250 watts of electricity per hour (including external cooling), then that’s 10p every four hours (at 10p per kWh). So in a day a Google server will use 60p worth of electricity, at most. Lets assume they’re on a bulk-user tariff and not stuck with a domestic Manweb tariff. Let’s round it down to 50p and apply that to one million servers. That’s £500,000 per day in electricity costs, or £182 million per year to keep a million servers running. But don’t feel too sorry for them. Advertising revenue in 2009 was almost $23 billion US dollars (a billion being one thousand million).

Google Facts & Figures:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/24/google-facts-and-figures-massive-infographic/

Inside a Google server:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

Close up photo of a server:
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20090401/GoogleServerLarge.jpg?tag=mncol;txt

Here’s another interesting page about Google, although I think it’s all 20x bigger now…
http://www.linesave.co.uk/google_search_engine.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627546.700-search-engines-dirty-secret.html