Gyroscopes in Android phones can be turned into always-on microphones

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 02:37:35PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 10:02:55PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> > On 8/19/14, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> > > On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 01:33:25PM -0300, Gutem wrote:
> > >> FYI:
> > >> http://www.geek.com/android/gyroscopes-in-android-phones-can-be-turned-into-always-on-microphones-1602140/
> > >
> > > Mobile handsets are intrinsically untrusted. You can put up the
> > > baseband spyware into a MiFi, and only use WLAN from a trusted,
> > > blobless device, only with end to end encryption.
> > >
> > > Of course this means you have to tear down your neural-sourced
> > > MiFi puck first, to see what you can see.
> > >
> > > In unrelated vein, I've recently read that it was the spooks
> > > that killed the digital pulse radio star, by limiting licensend
> > > power to toy levels. Apparently they were very unhappy with a
> > > radio that's hard to look for.
> > 
> > Link please?
> 
> Caveat, speculation:
> 
> http://www.cringely.com/2014/05/15/nsa-help-kill-uwb/

UWB is a great idea in theory, until you build an antenna, or you 
avoid the antenna and the UWB noise floor ends up as a DDOS attack
on all your existing communications channels.

I'm an engineer and I'm very unhappy with the investor snake oil
that was sold as UWB.

Now if you run UWB over dedicated copper/fiber that might be quite
interesting, but only if you design it so the MAC address of the 
transmitter is basically being broadcast in the clear so you can 
find where your copper is being an antenna and fix it.

Maybe UWB should be the new standard for 10-gigabit over Cat5e