Posts by Barrie Shepherd

LI In Europe - and most of the 3GPP world

Dear US - Technical capability for Lawful Interception (LI) is standard on 3GPP network suppliers/operators regardless of race or skin colour.

Over 70 American organisations are members of ETSI - which sets the Standards. Your country has had plenty of opportunity to influence how LI works and what safeguards need to be implemented, and no doubt did.

Calling Huawei out for including a mandatory function in their equipment is very hypocritical. Perhaps you are too wrapped up in telephony history when LI capability was built into a "black box" sat in the corner of a telephone exchange - Now I guess you refer to it as a "yellow box".

For those suffering from insomnia you can read all about it here https://www.etsi.org/committee/1403-li

Speaking as a UK resident at a personal level I think I'd rather risk China sniffing all my data rather the the US.

I'm sure that in China my data will drop off the radar but with the US sharing with GCHQ how long before I get a speeding ticket because Google Maps detected me travelling on the A57 at 5.5 MPH above the speed limit? Or a Parking ticket for staying in the car park for 1 minute over the 45 minute 'free' allowance?

Great achievement

An astounding technical and engineering achievement for the US.

However how long before POTUS tweets it's all due to his Presidency, after all we all know Trump does the best probes, better than anyone else in fact.

"The information, including medical and genetic records that are said to be anonymised as necessary...."

Yeah right!

No names possibly but I bet postcodes will end up in the list, justified by the need for identifying "geographic" anomalies. Anyway if the NY Honours list is anything to go by names and addresses will be spread all over the Interwebs anyway.

Only GP's and hospitals need my data as part of my treatment all the other hangers on only want the data to make money out of it and they should not have it - anonymised or not - because it won't be.

So, along with a few thousand others, am I going to be prosecuted for using a SDR dongle and Raspberry Pi to monitor transmissions on 1090 MHz and sharing the content with a number of world wide networks distributing the information that I receive on very public web sites?

The law should be put back to where it used to be. Legal to listen to off air signals, illegal to rebroadcast or otherwise distribute the content, illegal to break encryption.

Kaspersky anti-drone toolkit

"Weary of the threat posed by quadcopter drones flying into unwanted areas, developers with Kaspersky says it is working on a software platform ...................."

Unless Kaspersky have some of Nigel Farage's Brexit dust no quantity of software will stop a drone without the associated radio transmission equipment.

The likelihood of Joe public, or any non government business, successfully being granted permissions to transmit GPS and similar jamming signals is (I sincerely hope) a little lower than the square root of naff all.

So who are Kaspersky aiming this product at? I suspect that the security and police services have access to appropriate equipment already.

All this talk from governments of secure back-doors "that only they can access - not the naughty people" reminds me of the various, very secret, Seats of Regional Government from the cold war era. These were in secret locations, highly secure and apparently protected against atomic bomb attack. That did not stop a number of their locations being discovered and the installations being vandalised by "naughty people".

Eventually all back-doors would be discovered, somehow, and everyone's security would then be compromised instead of just targeted individuals as now.

Governments seem to have forgotten to include the concept of unintended consequences considerations in their knee jerk responses and law making.

Companies hide behind "ID Verification" to delay the process and force-ably collect additional data about individuals.

So good Luck with Talk Talk. I have been fighting a financial institution who owe me £2000. Because I have changed my address in the last 5 years - once - and because my passport has been renewed so the old number is not valid ID they insist on;

An original Bank Statement for the current address and an old one from the old address

An original Utility bill for each address (given these now are electronic means not possible to give an original)

An original of my UK Tax coding or other Tax correspondence

An Certified copy of my driving license for the new address.

No way am I sending this much information to an organisation who 3 years ago had a major data leak.

Even more galling is that another branch of the same organisation are quite happy to deal with me at the new address for investments in excess of £2000.

My next action is probably Small Claims Court to teach the bu***rs a lesson.

"I wondered if Hacker House was some government building"

It is - Boris Johnson's safe house

BBC solution

The BBC had a cunning approach to the problem by publishing a list of BBC sites that Google had de-listed. Unfortunately it does not appear to have been updated since May 2015

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

There is a good model of how not to do it, as well as "if it can go wrong it will go wrong" lessons, over in the Australian National Broadband Network.

Don't do it the Aus way!

The Australian government set up a new government entity to do just this. The incumbent Telcos, Telstra & Optus, had to "sell" their cable network to the National Broadband Network (NBN) Co. to fibre up. Its been a disaster.

Perfectly good POTS and ADSL turned off area by area, customers forced to higher cost lower performance internet packages from retailers forced to buy wholesale service, from NBN Co., at prices unreasonably structured causing retailers to not provide adequate thu-put capacity to their customers - so busy period slowdowns.. Phones delivered by VoIP requiring households to maintain battery support units. The original fibre to the home promise now includes a mixture of, lower performing, fibre to the basement/street satellite or direct radio.

Third party players banned from installing their own infrastructure to avoid competition to NBN Co.

Hideously over budget and behind time and many report under performing, unless you buy the top range packages and are one of the lucky ones with fibre to the home.

Plenty of info on line to research.

The publicity has been good for Ebuygumm.

They have just signed a lucrative deal with Yorkshire Airlines for low cost air fares.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoIn9hkxbbI

Thanks to The Reg. for bringing this 'survey' to the more general public's attention. I was seriously concerned by the supporting documents inferences that firearms licensing is currently inconsistent and, worse, that the absence of medical certificates has historically not be an obstacle to gaining a firearms license.

As for the structure of the survey I doubt if any government employed civil servant put it together. It was most likely constructed by a favoured 'expert' contractor (Crapita?). The brief would have been get a few observations that confirm we are on the right track and don't upset the County set who don't believe in firearms licensing at all (I do know some of those 'good citizens') . The 'Expert' organisation probably then handed the task to the last intern through the door, as evidenced by the failures.

If Google summarily dismissed employees refusing to explain why they would be dragged though the Courts (well at least in the UK while it's in the EU) and their excuse that AI cannot be wrong, and "we cannot disclose the 'infringement' as it would let other employees 'game' the system", would land them with big time damages and fines.

Same should be for people who are working for them at arms length or using their systems as a tool of employment.

The Do No Evil company should start to adopt a Natural Justice approach to business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_justice

"Ofcom said at the time "It did not want to set the wrong incentives by making access to BT's existing network a more attractive commercial proposition than building new networks where this is feasible."

I would hazard a guess that it is not "feasible" in over 60 of the country.

This proposal can only increase the cost and/or reduce competition for the majority of the country as it will never be cost effective for multiple carriers to all build their own physical links in low density areas.

OFCOM should focus on getting the fastest, lowest cost, reliable communications to end users not worry about how the players in the middle arrange their back-hauls or some misplaced view that they should force individual players to spend money on costly infrastructure that in all probability will be underused - particularly as the nice 5G elevated masts will allow a lot of traffic to be moved to the ether rather than the fibre.

Can we get one of these trackers over to the Isle of Man and get BigClive to pull it apart and reverse engineer it please!

I'd be really interested to know how they really work, what powers them, what back-haul they use and are they really GPS devices or do they use a more covert but reliable (i.e. not subject to screening) technology.

How long before AI 'translation' morphs into transcription and textual copies of conversations get sent off to 5 eyes? I suspect it's far easier for text to be analysed at high speed than audio.

I thought Sype was supposed to be encrypted anyway so how are they listening in? Or is it that they are conveniently in the middle? Now we know why Skype peer to peer had to be killed.

(puts tin-foil hat back on)

"Thus, it is possible for a miscreant to join a nearby wireless network, seek out a vulnerable.................."

All this talk of miscreants - the cynic in me thinks more likely five eyes would be making more use of this than some low life thinking they can run some scam.

I wonder if Qualcomm let the NSA / FBI / CIA know of this 'vulnerability' some years ago.

No need to worry it was just the ASIO 'patch' being installed, it took some time to populate around the server farm and out to target mobiles.

Could this work;

a) login to website and select ticket

b) pay with Credit Card

c) website sends confirmation SMS to credit card companies pre-authorised mobile phone

d) enter SMS authority number to website to confirm ticket purchase.

e) website checks that no other (or agreed low number of ticket purchases) have been made with the particular Credit Card and also confirms mobile number not used for other purchase. Ticket issued with Credit Card and mobile number printed for venue confirmation check is required

Would require Credit Card companies to co-operate with regard to mobile number - but many already do.

Scalpers would have to have a considerable number of credit cards and associated mobile phone accounts to be able purchase high numbers of tickets.

"......no opportunity to root your phone or even to install an alternative message app."

"......I wonder if this is something the EU insist on."

I think it's more a case of don't want people poking around in the phone and finding the code that calls back to China and the extra code they were forced to implant by the Australian Government.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-46463029

"Under Australia's legislation, police can force companies to create a technical function that would give them access to encrypted messages without the user's knowledge."

...following on

(Sorry for typo in previous post - ANPL = APNR)

So how long before we hear that the National ANPR camera network is to be upgraded to include facial recognition?