Less Radiation

Want to know how World War III really starts?

The control centre for the remote UAV drones (that’s unmanned American surveillance planes that fly by remote control) has been hit by a virus!

Although not connected to the internet, someone has stuck a USB pen drive infected with a virus into one of the PCs that run the remote control system for the Predator planes. Seemingly they run Windows XP – see photo. (this really happened in the last month).

Hypothetically speaking of course, if these PCs were connected to the internet, they might now be under the control of a bot-master, for sale to the highest bidder on the internet crime forums. Got a dispute with a business associate? Don’t send round a bruiser with a baseball bat, instead bomb the f**k out of them!

Okay, it didn’t happen yet, but it might quite soon. Imagine, in the very near future, when China own all the infrastructure and buildings within the EU (because of our own financial stupidity) – World War III could be easily sparked by UAV drones under the control (seemingly) of some 3rd party hacker bombing Beijing. What a great get-out clause for the real culprits… and a release from all our financial obligations. (great James Bond movie plot, if nothing else)

These drones are obviously able to act autonomously when not in radio communication with HQ (think about your own smartphone that already has GPS, a gyroscope & inertia sensor), but they still depend on radio signals to operate remotely. Imagine someone in a cheap plane with an array of radio jammers… What is the UAV to do next?

These UAV’s are just turning war into a video game for the remote operators – would you want one of your children running this remote control killing room? If you’re brought up killing people successfully on-screen in video games, then it’s a very small leap to doing it for pay from the US military in some remote server room (Remember, champions of justice, your opponents have families & children, who also dream of a better world).

Follow the Drunken UAV on Twitter.

According to Thinq.co.uk they can:

“Newly-published research suggests that mobile phones can reduce the mineral content of the bones they hang out around.

Researchers at the the National University of Cuyo, in Mendoza, Argentina, looked at that strange breed – men who wear mobile phones on their hip. They discovered evidence to suggest that the proximity of the mobile phone caused a reduction in bone mineral content (BMC) and bone mineral density (BMD) in the men who wore the phones over a 12-month period, compared to a control group that didn’t.

According to an abstract from the study to be published in the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery, wearers of a mobile phone had “significantly lower right BMD at the trochanter and significantly lower right BMC at both trochanter and total hip”.

None of these differences were found in non users, the study notes.

Non users had a higher BMC at the right femoral neck (at the top of the thigh). The right-left difference in femoral neck BMD of non users was marginally non-significant. In users, there was no femoral neck right-left difference of BMC at the femoral neck. Right-left asymmetries in femoral neck BMC were significantly different between both groups, the study notes.

Study leader Dr Fernando D Sravi writes: “The different patterns of right-left asymmetry in femoral bone mineral found in mobile cell phone users and non users are consistent with a non-thermal effect of electromagnetic radio-frequency waves not previously described.”

The study measured BMC and BMD in the left and right hips of two groups of healthy men – 24 who did not use cell phones and 24 who carried their cell phone on their right hip, for at least 12 months.

According to the researchers, few studies have looked at whether electromagnetic fields emitted by cell phones could affect bone mineralisation. They suggest that with rapid uptake of mobile phones, any significant effect on BMD could have a substantial effect on the osteoporosis rate in the population.

Osteoporosis is a systemic skeletal disease characterised by low bone mass and microarchitectural deterioration that leads to increased bone fragility and increased risk of fracture .

Dr Sravi says more research is needed to follow up his study, particularly in women, who  generally have higher rates of osteoporosis, and children, who may have a long life of mobile phone use ahead of them.

Sravi writes that, while the actual energy emission by modern mobile cell phones is well below the limits set by current standards, precluding significant thermal effects, a growing body of evidence suggests that non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation in the frequency range of mobile cell phones may cause non-thermal biologic effects. Many of these non-thermal biologic effects “might be relevant for human health,” the study notes.

Read more:
 http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/3/28/mobile-phones-rot-your-bones/#ixzz1HvusYGtI.

A report in this week’s The Sunday Times warns that lots of car thieves are now using radio jammers to stop your car’s remote door-locking keyfob doing its job properly.

Radio jammers for all bands are available direct from China these days. The best sites accept Paypal and ship quickly to UK addresses, describing the consignments as test equipment, or something equally inconspicuous.

You can buy jammers for GPS, GSM, 3G, 433MHz. Anything you can think of, they’ll make – in a selection of power outputs and prices. You could take down GPS or Mobile phones on a city-wide basis if you were daft enough, but you’d be pretty easy to find (you’d be glowing!) and would spend a long time in jail!

Most car keyfobs operate in the unlicensed 433MHz band. If you don’t actually watch your lights flash and you doors lock you may be coming back to an empty car.

Police around the country have noticed a rise in this type of crime around big cities – often dozens of cars in one street will have been done-over without a single window being smashed.

According to The Sunday Times, all the car thieves need do is leave a suitable jammer hidden in a prime spot with a decent extra battery pack attached, it could then run for hours, or they can just trigger the jammer when you go for your keyfob – if they started using decent antennas they could be watching through binoculars.

Imagine the haul of satnavs, iPods, laptops and phones from that lot!

Worryingly, a lot of the wireless burglar alarms in peoples homes use the same frequency bands to receive signals from PIRs dotted around the home…

Another great reason to remove all the electrosmog generating devices from your home & go back to being Wired. If you didn’t realise yet, we love being Wired…

Lots of interesting posts on The Register and other sites about Google’s collection of WiFi Router info while out taking photos of your road for their Street View project.

A couple of things need clearing up. Google have absolutely no use for your data traffic. They only want to know the unique MAC address in your router and the corresponding GPS position it was spotted at.

Whether you have an Open Network, WEP, WPA, WPA2 or any other more impressive encryption system in place is completely irrelevant to them for the purposes of this project. WiFi routers tend to sit in a static location.

Unless you turned Beacon Frames off, your router is announcing its presence to the world between 1 and 100 times a second (a great reason not to have that router next to your bed or office desk BTW).

They aren’t really interested in your PC’s MAC address, because it could be a laptop and they move around.

You could easily perform your own version of this experiment by driving around your local neighborhood with a laptop running Kismet and a GPS USB module attached. (Wardrive for the Google Nexus One smartphone does exactly the same thing & can be downloaded from the Android Market on your phone for free) There’s nothing overly clever about it and it certainly isn’t evil…

But when you take the unique MAC address of each WiFi router and it’s GPS position you do have a useful location marker, where a smartphone’s GPS is turned off but WiFi is available.

Google never need to show you the WiFi router address they spotted at a certain location – they just show you where you are.

I did read something today that suggested that Google never really authorised this and it was a lone engineer that fitted the project to the Street View car. That’s complete rubbish. The information they collected is freely available to anyone and doesn’t invade anyones privacy. Collecting it isn’t illegal and politicians are getting hot & bothered about it to fit their own political ends. The UK data registrar doesn’t have anything to be concerned about, and if he did then all the cell mast sites in the UK should be closed down immediately too!

Hope that clears up all the confusion. Google really have no interest in your home WiFi traffic, just the GPS position of your router.

Of course, people move house & also change their routers when they move internet providers, so the information they collected is only useful for a couple of years.

UPDATE
On the 19th Sergey Brin went on record as saying that they did collect some traffic data from open networks, but that it would be destroyed. The extra traffic gives them nothing tangible for the project, only the Mac address of the router & GPS location are useful.

I stand by my comments about the mobile phone networks being far more intrusive: the physical location of your mobile phone (and by default you) is recorded every 20 minutes & kept in a database for at least 12 months – great if you need an alibi, but if you’re that smart maybe you sent your phone out with someone else, doh!

There was an interesting feature this week on BBC’s Watchdog programme about mobile phone text message spoofing. Two American researchers demonstrated how they are able to send fake MMS/Text messages that look like they’ve come from your bank to a smartphone.

This is a variation on phishing emails, but now on mobiles. All mobile network operators responded by saying that they weren’t aware of any real world use of this exploit that had so far left a single customer out of pocket – and they’re quite probably right. This seems like an awful lot of effort to go to if you want to get your hands on someones bank details & security passphrases.

I detailed on this site about 16 months ago that Dect cordless phones were now completely insecure. Anyone with a laptop, PCMCIA Com-On-Air Dect card & a decent antenna can record all you household phone calls from anywhere within a 200 metre radius of your home. Lots of older people now do home banking by telephone and over a series of calls you’ll be handing over full pins & security details. Even if you don’t give them to the bank you’ll be reusing them when you’re confirming your identity to insurance, utility & credit card providers – maybe you use that same 4 digit pin code for your home alarm & cashcard. Maybe you’re just paying for stuff with your credit card over the phone. If you live in a block of flats where tenants come and go every 6 months you’d be an easy target.

Ten years ago criminals could use an analogue radio scanner to record all the traffic on the old fashioned cordless home phones, perhaps to a computer for later analysis. They could use a DTFM decoder to figure out which number you’d called, and build up a profile that would leave them knowing you better than your best friend. Well now with the supposedly secure Dect phones they can take this further. Because each Dect phone has its own unique identifier – like the MAC address in your PC or the OUI number in a Bluetooth chip – it’s easy to zone out all the people you don’t want to listen to. Okay, only about half the Dect phones in use are insecure, but which half are you in? It’s not very reassuring is it? We’re nearly all using these Dect cordless phones at home these days.

Anyway, I saw not one article 16 months ago in the UK press or on TV about the Dect threat (although lots appeared in the German media), but now we need to worry about spoof texts. Go figure. If you really care about your health and security use a wired home phone.

As regards unusual text messages from your bank, apply some common sense – if it looks wrong, it’s because it is wrong. Wait until you get home and log onto your account there. Don’t ring numbers or use web links in these messages. Open a new browser window & check your balance from your 3G phone that way.

Pop into the bank and ask them about the real state of your account. If money diasappears from your account by a fraud that’s not your fault they’ll be giving you that money back anyway.

Smartphones are like mini PCs and they can get infected with malware and other nastiness, just like your home PC (for instance it’s now quite common for untrusting partners to secretly install tracking software on their partners smartphones to keep tabs on your whereabouts with GPS accuracy).

BBC Watchdog Story

Security researchers unveiled a $100 hardware & software package capable of reading traffic from the wireless data stream generated by Nordic Semiconductor chipset devices. This chipset is used by Microsoft’s wireless keyboards and they are now believed to be vulnerable to attack.

No need to go inside a building to plant an old fashioned keylogger, just point a yagi antenna at the building you’re interested in. If our own experience with low-power Bluetooth devices is anything to go by, then you could easily be reading keystrokes from several hundred metres away with the right directional antenna.

It’s thought that Logitech keyboards are safe for now as they use AES encryption. The Microsoft keyboards use a simpler XOR encryption scheme. You should also be wary of those cheap £20 wireless keyboard and mouse packs too.

The project has been christened ‘Keykeriki’, apparently it’s German for ‘Cock-a-Doodle-Do’.

There’s talk of a software version for owners of the USRP. Otherwise circuit diagrams and download firmware are available from the links below.

http://www.remote-exploit.org/?page_id=187

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/26/open_source_wireless_sniffer/

http://www.remote-exploit.org/

https://www.dreamlab.net/files/press/Dreamlab-Technologies_Pressrelease_Wireless-Keyboard_en.pdf

The Register.co.uk reports that Linus Torvalds has finally found a Linux phone that he likes.

Previously, he’d tried earlier versions of Android phones and hadn’t really got along with them. Like me, he finds using them for just calls annoying.

A bit like me, he thinks that the Googlephone is the first real practical pocket-sized PC. At last you can do all your computer stuff on the move without lugging around a laptop. Of course Linus has more reason to be proud, because the Googlephone is running the very software he pioneered. I can’t make any such claim, but it’s nice to know that he too can see what’s really revolutionary amongst all the hype & tripe!

If the Nexus One is going to conquer the world it’s got to start with computer nerds like Linus. These are the people that will build all the cool open-source stuff that will drag in all the sheep that currently can’t imagine anything more exciting than an iPhone.

I read on the internet that Google would be releasing a software update for the Nexus One. Sure enough when I checked my phone this morning the update was available. All applied without any problems.

I now have working voice-2-text, iPhone-style browser pinch controls, and no more wandering off 3′s 3G service onto Orange’s 2G GSM network. Hurrah!

If you’ve ever wondered how the screen resolutions of the Nexus One N1 & the iPhone 3G compare, when viewing the same site, now you can see. I know the iPhone looks a little smaller in the photos, but in reality they’re almost the same size. The screen resolution of the iPhone 3G is 480×320 pixels and the N1 is 800×480.

Today I hear that a study has found a link between depression & excessive internet usage.

The researchers aren’t really sure whether depressed people seek to spend all their spare time on the internet or whether using the internet obsessively gives you depression.

If you’ve read previous posts on this site, you’ll have seen studies that have showed that using wireless gadgets an hour before bedtime can ruin your sleep quality. It’s hardly a big jump to conclude that most of the young generation will be doing that surfing over a WiFi router from their laptop or netbook. After all, it’s only a tin-foil-hat-wearing 40 year old like myself that would use a wired router! For the record, I spend hours on the internet using my wired router and I feel excellent!

So, my clarion call to all you internet junkies who are feeling low is this: buy a cheap wired ADSL router (for around a £1 on eBay) and use a wired connection to your laptop. If your existing wireless router can have its WiFi beacon turned off (in its setup menu) you could just use it in wired mode instead. Of course it could be your Dect wireless phone that’s making you feel rubbish, or your mobile phone if you spend hours with it jammed up to your head.

If you use your mobile a lot, try sticking to just texting. If talking on your phone use it near a window, in handsfree mode – because the mobile transmits on lower power near a window and every time you double the distance of the handset from your head you halve the absorbed radiation (inverse square law – assuming it’s the power output and not other signal characteristics that could trouble electrosensitives).

A lot of people say that the really bad thing is to have your mobile in your pocket – kills sperm etc etc. Generally speaking this is complete rubbish. A regular mobile phone that is sitting waiting for calls will only contact the mast every 20 minutes or so for a 10 second burst. Compare that against holding it next to your head for an hour while talking on it.

Far, far worse in my opinion is a situation where you have your desk at home with a laptop, WiFi router and a Dect phone all sat just a few feet away from your head. That WiFi router is constantly beaming out 2.4GHz beacon frames ten times a second, whether you’re using the network or not – even if you’re connected via a wired RJ45 patch cable. That Dect base station (which plugs into the BT wall socket) phone is also beaming out a 1.9GHz carrier signal 24/7 – again, often just feet away from your head. Of course you can’t ‘hear’ this, or ‘see’ it, but there’s now plenty of proper scientific evidence that it has a real effect on biological tissue (compare this to say god or homeopathy, millions believe in both of those) It makes you wonder how anybody can concentrate on anything anymore, without resort to anti-depressants, cigarettes, alcohol or class A narcotics.

So many nice middle class families seem to feel that the height of sophistication is having a BT Home Hub. That’s a Dect phone & a WiFi router in one, if you didn’t know. I feel really sorry for them.

The author of this site does use some wireless gadgets (and has been playing about with breadboard electronics since he was 9 years old), but he’s very aware of what they put out and won’t entertain his home being cloaked in a constant blanket of electrosmog – which is what that precious WiFi router & Dect phone give you.

Ask yourself why the latest models of Dect phones feature Eco modes that only transmit when they’re in use… Ask yourself why they’re marketed on their power-saving abilities… Ask yourself, could they market that same phone on the low-radiation angle? Of course they can’t, that’s like saying “Our old model Dect made you feel ill, but this one won’t, quite as much…”. Never going to happen. The power savings over a year probably amount to £1. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Eco Dect phones are a great idea for people I like, but if you still spend hours talking on one (having read all of this) you’re beyond help!

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Here’s some maths for you Eco Dect phone lovers who want to reduce your carbon footprints. The power supply that comes with my Siemens C385 Gigaset Eco Dect phone is rated at 6.5V and 600mA. So if we multiply the Voltage by Ampage we get Watts 6.5 X 0.6 = 3.9 watts per hour. A 1KW/h unit of electricity costs about 11p. So 11p runs the phone in full power mode for 256 hours, which is 10.68 days. Lets assume it costs 1p per day to run the phone in non-Eco Mode. It costs about £3.75 to power the phone for a year using just the ratings from the power supply.

Come back in the next few days and i’ll compare current drawn in regular and Eco Plus modes. Remember though, even if the phone uses no electricity in Eco+ mode the maximum you can save is £3.75!

I’m now into my second week as a Nexus One owner. The phone still works great and I intend to keep it , rather than sell it on for a little profit.

Last week I was looking at some of the Garmin Trek devices and seeing if they do a bike computer for keeping logs of my rides. Now I own a Nexus One there’s no need to waste money on such a device. As you’ll know the Nexus One has GPS built-in and full integration with Google Maps.

If you visit Android Market on your phone and search for My Tracks you’ll be able to download a very capable walking, running & cycling trip computer – best of all, it’s free.

Using My Tracks I’ve been able to verify that my much less capable handlebar-mounted trip computer is set correctly. My Tracks records my average speed, fastest speed, and a chart showing the elevation. Also, because My Tracks interfaces so easily with your whole Google account, it’s a doddle to upload your tracks from the phone to their server.

Screengrab below is from my PC: