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For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
by R. A. Hettinga 26 Jun '04

26 Jun '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/26/technology/26ALIB.html?th=&pagewanted=pri…> The New York Times June 26, 2004 For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi By MATT RICHTEL AN FRANCISCO, June 25 - Cellphones are chock-full of features like built-in cameras, personalized ring tones and text messaging. They also gave a real boost to Kenny Hall's effort to cheat on his girlfriend. Mr. Hall, a 20-year-old college student in Denver, decided in March to spend a weekend in nearby Boulder with another woman. He turned to his cellphone for help, sending out a text message to hundreds of other cellphone users in an "alibi and excuse club," a network of 3,400 strangers who help each other skip work, get out of dates or give a loved one the slip. Assistance came instantly. A club member, on receiving Mr. Hall's message, agreed to call the girlfriend. He pretended to be the soccer coach from the University of Colorado at Boulder and said that Mr. Hall was needed in town for a tryout. "It worked out pretty good," said Mr. Hall, who signed up for the network on www.sms.ac, a Web site that offers access to hundreds of mobile chat rooms. Cellphones are usually used to help people keep track of each other and stay in easy contact. But they are also starting to take on quite a different function - helping users hide their whereabouts, create alibis and generally excuse their bad behavior. There is nothing new about making excuses or telling fibs. But the lure of alibi networks, their members say, lies partly with the anonymity of the Internet, which lets people find collaborators who disappear as quickly as they appeared. Engaging a freelance deceiver is also less risky than dragging a friend into a ruse. Cellphone-based alibi clubs, which have sprung up in the United States, Europe and Asia, allow people to send out mass text messages to thousands of potential collaborators asking for help. When a willing helper responds, the sender and the helper devise a lie, and the helper then calls the victim with the excuse - not unlike having a friend forge a doctor's note for a teacher in the pre-digital age. Another new tactic is the use of audio recordings that can be played in the background during a phone conversation to falsify the caller's whereabouts. Phones can be equipped to play, at the press of a button, the sounds of honking horns, ambulance sirens or a dentist's drill. An employee who is actually sitting at the beach might be able to call his boss, play the blaring tones of a traffic jam, and explain why it has been impossible to get to work on time. "It lets you control your environment," said Harry Kargman, chief executive of Kargo, a New York company that plans to begin selling in July a variety of cellphone sounds for $2.99, including the rasp of a hacking cough to simulate lung infection. "It's not necessarily malicious or nefarious," Mr. Kargman said. Whatever the moral implications of these functions, they show that the cellphone, with its increasing computing power, is taking on complicated functions once associated with computers. And the advanced technology that makes it possible to keep closer tabs on people, said James E. Katz, a professor of communications at Rutgers University, also gives them a potent tool for deception. Mr. Katz said there was practically an arms race between the technology used to locate people and track behavior - global positioning systems, for instance, and caller ID on phones - and technologies intended to deflect surveillance, like audio for fake background noises. At the same time, constant surveillance may have increased the desire to get off the radar, even if that means using underhanded tricks. Text messaging, for example, a popular cellphone function that lets people send short e-mail messages to and from phones, has been adopted as the most efficient means of contacting potential alibi abettors. According to the Yankee Group, a market research firm, some 1.7 billion text messages were sent in the United States during the third quarter of 2003, up from 1.2 billion during the first quarter. Text messaging can be a major source of revenue for mobile phone companies, who charge up to 10 cents to send or receive a message, said Linda Barrabee, an analyst with the Yankee Group. Ms. Barrabee said the technology was particularly popular among teenagers and 20-somethings, like Michelle Logan, a 26-year-old San Diego resident who works for an airline. Ms. Logan was traveling in Europe last year when she learned about a network of several thousand mobile phone users who, through text messaging, help one another establish alibis and make excuses. In April, Ms. Logan returned to the United States and started an American version of the club, which Mr. Hall later used and which charges users for receiving e-mails. Through the site, phone users can sign on to mobile chat rooms to send messages to each other over the Internet or by phone. There are hundreds of such clubs focusing on subjects large and small, ranging from animal rights to the question of whether pirates or ninjas are tougher. In Ms. Logan's case, she promptly used the alibi club she had started to get out of a blind date. She sent out a text message asking for help, and in came a response from a stranger in San Jose, Calif., who agreed to call the blind date, pretend to be Ms. Logan's boss, and explain that she had to go to Europe for a training seminar. These days, Ms. Logan spends much of her time overseeing the e-mail traffic and watching her club grow. It now has 3,400 members, with hundreds of new members signing up each week. One member recently used the club to fool his wife so he could stay at a sports bar to watch the N.B.A. finals. Another member - the wife of a soldier stationed in Iraq - sent out a message asking for help to conjure up an excuse after becoming pregnant by another man. But in that case, many responders urged the woman to tell her husband the truth, according to club members. The European alibi club which inspired Ms. Logan grew to 4,000 members, but was shut down late last year by its founder, Kayle Hanson, 21. "I got a new girl and she wasn't too keen on it," said Mr. Hanson, who lives in Hamburg, Germany. "She thought it was immoral. Imagine that!" Ms. Logan said she was not terribly concerned about lying. Still, she said one reason she preferred counting on strangers to help her was that she did not want her friends to know what she was doing. "You wouldn't really want your friends to know you're sparing people's feelings with these white lies," she said, laughing. Another problem, which even alibi club members admit, is that other members may not be entirely trustworthy. Mr. Hall, the student in Denver, said that when he gave away his girlfriend's phone number to a stranger, he worried that the stranger might do more than make an excuse. "I didn't want him hitting on her or telling her what I was up to," Mr. Hall said. But now he is a believer in the power of the cellphone-assisted alibi. "It worked out good, actually." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[osint] Your License, Your Urine
by R. A. Hettinga 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

--- begin forwarded text

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Fingerprint Scanners Still Easy to Fool (fwd from brian-slashdotnews@hyperreal.org)
by Eugen Leitl 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

----- Forwarded message from brian-slashdotnews(a)hyperreal.org -----

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Spam sender sentenced in Russia for the first time
by R. A. Hettinga 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

<http://english.pravda.ru/printed.html?news_id=13170> Spam sender sentenced in Russia for the first time - 06/23/2004 19:32 On June 22 student Dmitry Anosov from the city of Chelybinsk was sentenced forcreating software causing uncontrolled blocking computers and copying information?. His crime was about sending unsolicited messages to the owners of GSM-telephones, that is spam. The student was put on probation for one year and required to pay fine of 3,000 roubles ($100), the Kommersant reported. In the summer of 2003 the employees of cell operator companyUralsky GSM?, the subsidiary of Megafon company, complained to the police that more than 15,000 cell phone owners were receiving unquotable SMS-messages on May 23-24. The suspect was detected, his apartment was searched, and the police confiscated the material evidence the computer having the software for sending SMS-messages. According to the police, the student created the software for sending SMS-messages to the customers of Uralsky GSM company. In February, 2003 Androsov tested his software by sending several SMS-messages to a company customer. In the end of May, 2003 Androsov used somebody else?s data to connect to the Internet, and uploaded his software to the server hosted in St. Petersburg to avoid being detected, and started the software. As a result, the customers received unquotable SMS-message discrediting the image of cell phone operator Megafon company. SMS-spam sender pleaded guilty. This case can create precedent and help Russian law-enforcers and legal system to safeguard Russian society people from spam. There is a special law on spam in the USA, but Russia lacks such a law. The legal regulating of the Internet is only being discussed in Russia. Internet companies do not try to lobby special anti-spam laws. Therefore, this court verdict was unique for Russia. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Sites unseen
by R. A. Hettinga 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

<http://www.townhall.com/columnists/jacobsullum/printjs20040625.shtml> Townhall.com Sites unseen Jacob Sullum (back to web version) | Send June 25, 2004 A few months ago, China Daily published a letter on its Web site from "D.H.," a reader who reported being both "extremely frustrated" and "pleasantly surprised" while surfing the Web in China. Although certain sites, such as Time magazine's, remained blocked, he said, others that seem at least as subversive, such as the online version of the pro-independence Taipei Times, were accessible. "Overall," D.H. said, "the general trend has been clear -- the list of websites blocked in China has been getting shorter and shorter." He concluded by offering "kudos to China for continuing to grant more and more freedom to the people within her borders!" I'm not sure "kudos," let alone exclamation points, are in order when a repressive government decides to be a little less repressive. But my experience during two weeks in Beijing, Changsha and Guangzhou jibes with D.H.'s impression in the sense that I encountered a puzzling mixture of sites that seemed to be blocked for political reasons and sites that were accessible even though they offered essentially the same information. Internet connections are notoriously unreliable in China, and you never see a screen that announces "This Page Blocked by the Bureau of Censorship," so caution is appropriate when discussing the government's filtering. A page that does not come up the first nine times you try to connect may finally load after the 10th attempt. But when you're unable to visit a site from different locations at different times on different days, even while other sites load with no problem, it's reasonable to surmise that the government is blocking it. Although D.H.'s letter claimed the government's BBC News block had been lifted, for instance, I was unable to open any pages from news.bbc.co.uk. Even when articles from that address showed up in Google searches, when I tried to read them all I got was "The page cannot be displayed." Likewise, as D.H. mentioned, Time was consistently inaccessible. Yet many other news sources were available, including CNN, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The New York Times. I suppose it's possible that the BBC and Time provide damning information about the Chinese regime you just can't get elsewhere, but it seems unlikely. Trying to understand the source of Chinese censors' grudges against the BBC and Time may be a fruitless endeavor. But it does seem that the government's choices about which sites to block are more a matter of retaliating for perceived offenses than limiting the flow of information in any meaningful way. Last year, the Web site of Reporters Sans Frontieres was blocked shortly after the group issued a statement criticizing the imprisonment of Chinese dissident Liu Di. Yet while in China, I was able to visit the sites of other organizations that support press freedom, including pages discussing the government's Internet censorship. Similarly, the Web sites of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Freedom House appeared to be blocked, although their pages were listed in Google results. At the same time, numerous less conspicuous critics, including blogs operated by people in China, were accessible. Google itself was at one time blocked, but I used it extensively in China, where it's available in Chinese as well as English. Then again, I had trouble with certain searches. I could never get results for "Falun Gong," the banned religious group, even when searches on less sensitive topics worked fine. This sort of censorship (assuming that's what it was) is more insidious than simply blocking a Web site. Even so, a Chinese Web-surfer could still get information about Falun Gong from one of the many news and commentary sites that have not met the hazy criteria for blocking. The strange, half-free condition of Chinese Internet-users was reflected in the response to D.H.'s China Daily letter. The comments included several supporting greater freedom and one saying the BBC and Time sites should be blocked, given these news outlets' "extreme right wing views." But the most interesting comment came from D.H. himself, who warned that his letter as published did not accurately reflect his views. "I wrote an article praising less censorship in China," he said, "and it got censored. I hereby retract my praise." Whether because China's censors are sloppy or because they want to feign openness, D.H.'s complaint is still available online, even in China. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[>Htech] Infoshop News: Surveillance and Domestication (fwd from checker@panix.com)
by Eugen Leitl 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

----- Forwarded message from Premise Checker <checker(a)panix.com> -----

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[p2p-hackers] The Fifth HOPE in NYC (fwd from vab@cryptnet.net)
by Eugen Leitl 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

----- Forwarded message from "V. Alex Brennen" <vab(a)cryptnet.net> -----

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My name is !
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

clicks are rare now but may have been common when humans hunted as they are more discrete. they are notated by modern linguists as !. Vietnamese has punctuation marks up the kazoo. Futurist types often pick new names for themselves. Is ESPN a name? Can I use unicode on my son's birth cert?

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tastes like...
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

At 11:05 AM 6/24/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: >Hum...perhaps some oregano needs to be laced with cy*n*de or something. Let >that piece of shit sniff THAT....he did, after all, literally ask for it. >You could even say, "Uh, you don't want to sniff that..." LD50 for KCN is about 3mg/Kg. Not only a good way to eliminate homeless people (leave a packet around) but if the cops still do gum-numbing tests you'd want to crush some Castor seeds and extract the water soluable protein. A few days later his ribosomes stop working, no more proteins mean no more fascism. Also a good plan if you are a vendor to the children of D.C. fascists.

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Re: my name is Doe, John Doe
by Major Variola (ret) 25 Jun '04

25 Jun '04

How about Mr. Null Void? That should be plenty of fun for data-entry clerks and the like..

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