Allen B. Ethridge wrote:

The technology to reduce cellular fraud, through encryption and authentication, is easily implementable, but for some reason neither the operating companies nor the manufacturers want it.

In contrast, European cellular (GSM) products do implement encryption and authentication (at least as far as laws allow). GSM mobile phones can be equipped with a slot for a card that identifies the subscriber. Billing is based on the subscriber's identity, not the phone's.

Actually, all GSM phones use a smart card to ID the subscriber. There was at one point the idea that this card would be useful for other things, e.g. you could plug it into a fixed line phone and have that phone take on your personal number, or even use it as a payment card. However, the desire for ever smaller phones means that the credit card form factor is dying out for SIM cards, and one doesn't want to keep popping a 0.5" x 1" mini-SIM out of the bowels of the phone. GSM uses less than strong encryption, by the way. I forget the technical details, but it is of the level that governments can fairly readily crack, but beyond the reach of most private organisations. (So no more 'Squidgy-gate'). It would, however, be quite feasible to add additional second stage encryption to phones (since the dataflow is digital point-point). I wonder if Nokia, a Finnish company well outside the scope of COCOM, might offer a feature like this. Incidentally, is there likely to be any adoption of GSM in the US in the near future? -- Richard Parratt