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back to article ITU thought bubble ponders mass mobe-tracking to kill fake IT

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will next week meet to consider the issue of “counterfeit and substandard ICT products” and what can be done about them, but some of the proposals on the table look more than a little worrying. Notice of the meeting was posted in late September, when the ITU announced next week' …

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  1. Denarius
    Flame

    has the ITU

    hired some copper PHBs lately ? Or do its lowerarchy attend the same country clubs as the PHBs from the spook TLAs ? IOT was always about snooping, just for different reasons. How much longer before not being an obedient consumer becomes a crime ? See ElReg a year ago for Frog simple lifestyle citizens who were suspicious for not having mobiles. That the hamlet they lurked in had no coverage was not something the plods considered.

    2 1 Reply
  2. Mark 85

    I find it fascinating...

    That China, of all places, would take a stand against counterfeiting. Or is it that their stand is only about things coming into China and not out of China?

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I find it fascinating...

      If you recall China has experienced some problems with supply chain contamination. Given the recent growth slowdown and how that poses an existential threat to those in charge, it's no surprise here that they are taking any threats seriously no matter internal or external. (Which goes a long way toward explaining some other behaviors recently. It's always fascinating watching the Middle Kingdom. Okay, it is here.)

      1 0 Reply
    2. David Pollard
      Reply Icon

      Re: I find it fascinating...

      My interest is more like horror than fascination. As the article notes, "the technologies mentioned hinted at a desire to identify and track [all] devices that touch a network."

      Maybe counterfeits don't provide such easy access for the system controllers.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Trigonoceps occipitalis
        Reply Icon

        Re: I find it fascinating...

        I recall a case where a PHB declined to buy expensive NICs and insisted on the cheapest. These were Chinese copies of one of the market leaders. A jolly good job they had done too, fully functional and each one identical - even down to the MAC.

        1 0 Reply
  3. Ole Juul

    Who has ITU been sleeping with?

    ITU and piracy sounds like a marriage made in heaven.

    “A focus of the event will be to examine the role of ICT . . . in tracing counterfeit goods and identifying their origins.”

    0 0 Reply
  4. JetSetJim

    Too late...

    You can already track anything with an IMEI - products are already in place within the UMTS/LTE operators operations centres which do that so that they can easily see where network congestion is happening, or track VIPs, or a variety of other use-cases for performance monitoring and optimisation. Assuming the IMEI has been correctly registered (and not spoofed), you'll be quickly able to see which are your problem devices with a simple filtering of the data against your TAC-list database (operators can get one from these folks, for example: http://www.tuv-sud.co.uk/uk-en/about-tuev-sued/tuev-sued-in-the-uk/tuev-sued-babt/other-services/imei-number-allocation/imei-database).

    Even if the IMEI is spoofed to say "I'm an iPhone 6+", it would still be possible to detect the general performance of such phones and look for outliers in the data - either highlighting a faulty device, or a fake device.

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