[dave at farber.net: [IP] Request: Check your cell phone to see if it's always transmitting your location [priv]]

[sunder]

Tyler Durden wrote:

> Actually, depending on your App, this would seem to be th very 
> OPPOSITE of a moot point.
> -TD
>
Indeed!

I've been ignoring this list for a while, so sorry for the late posting.

I remember sometime in late 99, I had one of the early blackberry 
pagers, the small ones that ate a single AA battery which lasted about a 
week or so, and had email + a small web browser inside of it.  It wasn't 
the blackberry phone.  Anyway, long story short, one day, said pager 
crashed (it is a computer after all) and I was trying to figure out how 
to reboot it, so I thought, fuck it, and removed the battery, the fucker 
stayed ON!  For over 15 minutes!

Gee, I wonder why anyone would design a cell phone or pager to be able 
to stay on after its battery is pulled out.  Yeah, yeah, it's just a 
capacitor or an internal rechargeable battery, but why would you want 
such a feature?

Fast forward to 2005.  Most cell phones are after all small computers 
with a transceiver, microphone, and speaker, and recently GPS 
receivers.  And now we have reports of the GPS info being transmitted 
all the time, "oops! it's a bug, we meant to turn it off." uh huh.  Just 
how much work would it be to reprogram the soft power off key, so it 
shuts off all the lights, and display, but still transmits GPS info, 
just less often?  Or also transmit audio?  What are the odds that the 
code on the phone already comes with this feature built in?

Of course, if it was legal to scan on cell phone frequencies, you might 
be able to confirm what it's sending and when, but of course, it's not 
legal to do that.  Even to your own phone.

Of course some phones are more equal than others.  For example, T-Mobile 
SideKick, which if you write an email and decide to cancel it, but 
you're out of range, exposes its evil self with "Sorry, we can't let you 
delete the email you're composing, because it hasn't been sent to the 
server yet!"  Gee, I wonder what that means?  Nah, it's just a bug.  (Of 
course, this is a totally owned platform, where T-Mobile owns your data, 
not you, oops, make that the hackers of a few months ago..)
Oh and if said phone is running out of batteries, it starts to complain 
loudly until you recharge it.  Um, yeah, it likes being on at all 
times.  You can "hear" it transmit occasionally when it's near amplified 
computer speakers or your car radio. 

Fun that, but could be useful.  Especially if you "heard" it transmit 
while it's supposedly "off." (I've honestly not heard it transmit while 
it's off)

Are we just too paranoid?  Nah, that's just a bug in human firmware, 
we'll fix that in the next brainwashing session.

(BTW: what the fuck's up with all the weirdo subject lines?  There's a 
perfectly good "From: " line in all SMTP headers, we don't need this 
shit in the subject line for fuck's sake!  What's this, the return of 
Jim Choate?)