They claim it was brought down by electronic measures. Signal jammer anyone?

BBC story & video

more here

Three brand new innovative products, all coming out around the same time. All in limited supply, and all completely brilliant!

Ubertooth – Bluetooth sniffing for under £100.

Until now sniffing and injecting packets into Bluetooth communication hasn’t been possible for the man in the street.

The Ubertooth USB dongle will change this for under £100.

The USB adapter just grabs a chunk of 2.4GHz spectrum and your PC processes it. Makes passive detection of Bluetooth devices possible without shelling out £1000 for a USRP. It will be possible to predict Bluetooth hopping pattern. It will also be possible to do man-in-the-middle attacks using two Ubertooths.

UK Buyers can pre-order from RFIDIOt.org. US buyers can pre-order from HakShop

FUNcube Dongle Pro – all frequency audio scanner for under £100.

Another USB dongle featuring three SMD chips to perform a custom task. This dongle is very different from the Ubertooth, but in some ways more amazing.

It can grab up to a 80KHz chunk of radio spectrum from anywhere between 64MHz and 1700MHz (although there is a dead spot between 1100MHz and 1270MHz). It will basically do most things your fancy-pants £1000+ standalone radio scanner will do, for just £100. Basically good for speech & data, but not really video. Works with Windows. Mac OSX & Linux. Appears to PC as a USB audio device & a HID device. Plenty of open source software available to drive it. Interestingly the FUNcube Pro is mentioned on the Osmocom Tetra page.

The only downside is that each batch the designer has made are currently selling out in 2 minutes, when he releases them. Find out more at FUNcube Dongle

Sparkfun IOIO for Android – attach anything to your Android smartphone for under £50.

A really simple way to attach almost any electronic component to your Android Smartphone or Tablet. Thousands of uses will be found. Things will be invented!

This board consists of a USB to Everything adapter & a library of script & device drivers (a bit like an Arduino sketch but in Java). All the computing power & sensors in your Android smartphone available to motors, LEDs, weather stations, robots, PIRs, analog sensors, digital sensors. Just imagine the possibilities. Runs on Android 1.5 & up, so even all those sub-£50 used Android phones will work with it.

www.SparkFun.com

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!

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

I ordered up a 2nd  DUALSHOCK WIRELESS controller (which I use wired) and was puzzled by the document that comes with it. It states that the use of WLAN is governed in Italy & Norway. Wow, I think, this IS progress!

I didn’t investigate the Italy story yet, but the Norway angle is fascinating. The instructions state that the PS3 game controller is not to be used within a 20km area around the centre of Ny-Alesund, Svalbard. What possible harm can a controller with a range of maybe 3 metres do 20km away ?

I briefly imagined that this must be some kind of forward thinking eco-town. But it isn’t, it’s a research station of some kind. You can read more about it via WikiPedia

IT’S called an allergy to modern life and half of Scots in the next 10 years could be at risk from this crippling illness, according to scientific research.

Victims of the condition, which is triggered by electromagnetic waves from mobile phones, power lines, microwaves and computers, suffer headaches, crushing chest pains, nose bleeds and a loss of feeling in arms and legs.

Experts report that up to 1.5million people in the UK already have their lives blighted by electro-sensitivity, with symptoms that also include heart palpitations, tiredness, fainting, light sensitivity and skin problems.

Mike Bell, chairman of the Radiation Research Trust, said: “We are seeing a significant increase in enquiries from individuals suffering from these symptoms.

“We’re concerned that many people could be living with health-related electro-sensitivity symptoms without realising the cause.

“Doctors in the UK are not trained to recognise this condition. They could be misdiagnosing patients and treating them with drugs rather than investigating the cause.”

One victim has compared the condition with life as a human aerial – their body overreacting to electrical waves in the environment. Today, as a scientific conference opens in London, public health expert Dr Gerd Oberfeld will predict that if current trends continue, up to 50 per cent of people could suffer from electro sensitivity symptoms in the next 10 years.

The World Health Organisation is also backing research, stating that: “Electrical hypersensitivity is a real and sometimes disabling condition.”

Sufferers are particularly vulnerable to the £2.5billion police communication system Tetra – Terrestrial Trunked Radio – which has been introduced throughout the UK. In the past three years, more than 1000 masts have been erected in Scotland. They pulse at 17.6hertz – above the 16Hz frequency the Government’s Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones warns might affect brain activity.

Experts say radio waves at this frequency can cause calcium to leak from the brain, causing damage to the nervous and immune systems. If the masts are less than 15 metres high, they don’t need planning permission.

Former Norwegian Prime Minister Harlem Brundtland suffers from electro-sensitivity.

She said: “I felt a local warmth around my ear. But the agony got worse. It turned to discomfort and headaches every time I used a mobile phone.

“Some people develop sensitivity to electricity and radiation from equipment such as mobile phones or PCs.

“If this can lead to adverse health effects such as cancer or other diseases, we do not know yet. But I think we should follow the precautionary principle.”

Maybe you’ve got kids and they love their DS’s too?

Okay, I have a question for you. Would you let your six year old child sit 12 inches away from a constantly transmitting wireless access point for 1 hour?

Would you let them sit 1 metre away from three full-on data swapping access points for an hour?

It’s a kind of sick question really. We know there may be a risk and it’s sensible to adopt the ‘precautionary principle’ advocated by the Stewart Report of 2000 (They said kids under 8 shouldn’t have mobiles, full-stop. WiFi & mobiles are exactly the same at this level).

Okay, here’s the thing. When a Nintendo DS is being played by a kid on his own it gives out no WiFi signal at all. But when you have two or more children playing against each other, in multi-player games – they turn into ad-hoc wireless access points. One DS becomes the pseudo access point, and the other clients. Large amounts of data are being transferred – much more than an average little-used regular WiFi point would emit. In multi-player mode the Nintendo DS can be a source of potentially dangerous Electrosmog.

Studies carried out in 2008 have conclusively revealed that mobile phone radiation wrecks the quality of sleep in adults an hour before bedtime. The WiFi in the DS will produce the same effect in your kids.

By all means let your kids use their DS before bedtime, but don’t let them play multi-player games against their siblings!

If you’re really concerned, don’t let them use the wireless features of the DS at all.

If your children are having trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating at school & showing unexplained signs of Autism, then this is one more thing you could try eliminating for a short time, while hunting for the solution.

Of course, if you live in a home jam-packed full of DECT phones, DECT baby alarms, WiFi routers & PCs, Video Senders, you can safely ignore our advice, as it will make very little difference…

Yes, another mainstream magazine dares to link Mobiles, Wifi routers and other electronic devices with poor sleep. In the article Dr Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre, says that, ‘ There’s more than sufficient evidence that mobile phone exposure an hour before bedtime adversely affects deep sleep ‘.

Others in the article report the classic fuzzy-mindedness that over-use of RF emitting gadgets can bring on. The article suggests that you turn off your mobile at bedtime.

While this is good advice, not a single mention is made of the danger from DECT cordless phones. The article states that a Mobile left on the bedside table will talk to the cell tower every ten minutes or so – well in our experience it’s more like every half an hour, for a five second burst. That isn’t going to disrupt your sleep. However, having a DECT cordless phone near your bed almost certainly will.

If you didn’t already know: the DECT cordless phone’s base station – the main docking point, if you have several handsets – gives out a constant pulse of RF, all the time. Even when you’re not talking on the handset. Keeping it a few feet from your head, while trying to sleep, is not such a good idea. Nor should you have a DECT base unit next to the home PC you use for hours at a time. All those hours you spend feet from a DECT cordless docking station really could leave you feeling completely ‘Spaced Out’.

So, while the article in the Sunday Mail is undoubtedly well intentioned, it could have payed more attention to DECT.