The comic-book guide to SIM hacking The Citizen Engineer project has released its first publication: a comic book guide to building a SIM reader and then hacking your SIM for fun and profit. Citizen Engineer is intended to encourage everyone to have a go at hacking stuff - in the old sense of the word - and is dedicated to releasing accessible videos and …
"in the old sense of the word" meaning that you delve into the secret internals of a device or computer not for any devious aims or financial gains but simply to see what goes on behind the scenes or to learn what makes it tick. "Hacking" in the old sense of the word is strictly for exploration and learning.
Looks like an interesting idea but I detest the 'spoon-fed', heavily edited style of presentation they use. This is the kind of thing you expect to see on a children's programme where the kids are in control and act like miniature adults. Yeah, go kids! We'll show them pesky adults we can think like them!
Far from encouraging people to think, I think it encourages them to switch off and wait for the presentation to entertain them. I watched the first few minutes and got bored with being patronised with baby talk and distracted by the use of projector light. If someone is curious and wants to hack a SIM, they've already been reading about it and already know all of that basic detail.
I thought that GSM was European (hence the French name) and thre handsets are made is Eastern Europe, or Eastern Empire, so why does it matter about American export laws? or was Team America, World Police a documentary?
Besides, wasn't the cryptography was chosen to be deliberately weak to help the boys & girls in Cheltenham?
As for cloaning chip'n'pin, I thought a white-hat showed that you didn't need to. You just have a chip in a card that outputs a signal "the pin was correct"? problem is that someone with influence didn't like it so he disappeared?
That said, this sounds like a better deal than a buy it monthly, get one resistor and a line of code a month; takes 10 years and £1000000 of subscription to complete - First issue only 10 pence!
Hmm I think horse riding came before computer 'hacking' but hey i might be wrong.
That a side, it is a shame that hacking has now completely been taken over by (illegal) commercial activities some of that real excitement of exploring computers seems to have gone (or am I just getting old?). But then again, back in the early eighties you where the envy of your class if you just managed to write a program to get a cube bounce around on your Vic20 computer screen, at least in my somewhat geeky class.
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