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 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.

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!

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:

I’ve never bought an off-contract expensive smartphone before, but several things about this offering made it irresistible. Firstly, the display runs at twice the resolution of the iPhone, so web browsing is a much more pleasant experience.

Secondly, everything feels much more immediate than on an iPhone – no processor lag. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is a great consumer appliance. But the Nexus One really does bring your PC to your pocket. If you use Googlemail to filter out all your spam emails at home or office, then it’s simple to synchronise your mail account on your phone.

Something I’m personally quite interested in is being able to view CCTV cameras via my phone. With the Nexus One’s high resolution display this works much better than on the lower resolution iPhone.

Here are a few observations about unboxing & initial setup of the Nexus One:

I bought the Nexus One off-contract direct from Google USA. I was a little worried that it wouldn’t work with my ‘Three’ network Sim card, at various points while I waited for it to arrive. I know that the 3G networks in the UK work at 2100MHz, and i’d seen in Google’s FAQ that this was one of the supported bands, so I was hopeful.

When the Nexus One arrived I put in my ‘3′ Sim and was able to make and receive calls. I put my Electrosmog Detector next to it, and was able to tell from the noises it made that the phone was talking to the tower over proper 3G rather than GSM via Orange. Thing was, I couldn’t get a 3G connection to the net using a web browser.

After a little digging I realised that I needed to setup an APN for ‘3′ in the phone’s settings Menu. Here’s how to do it:

Go to Settings –> Wireless & Networks –> Mobile Networks –> Access Point Names –> Double-Click and hold the ‘four bars’ icon to the right of the back key at the base of the phone –> click New APN –> Name=3G –> APN=three.co.uk –> Proxy, Port, Username, Password, Server can be left as they are –> MMSC=http://mms.um.three.co.uk:10021/mmsc –> MMS Proxy=217.171.129.2 –> MMS Port=8799 –> MCC=234 –> Authentication Type and APN Type can be left blank.

Of course the real pull of this phone for hacker-types is the Linux Kernel. These Android OS phones can be ‘Rooted’ so you can take fully control of the device. before you know it you could have Snapdragon compiled versions of Kismet & Wireshark running on your phone.

First of all, a couple of years ago a story said that students who were exposed to GSM mobile phone signals for an hour performed better on exam test papers. An industry spokesman dismissed the result as ‘no worse than a cup of coffee’.

Last January researchers found that using a mobile an hour before bedtime wrecks sleep quality. (Full Story)

This January, mice with Alzheimer’s are cured by exposure to a regular mobile phone signal for two one-hour periods each day for seven to nine months. (Full Story)

The important thing to bear in mind here is that the World Health Organisation and the mobile phone industry have insisted for years that any phone that doesn’t heat tissue can’t have any biological effect on a human being – this is what they mean when they quote ICNIRP guidelines.

It’s become quite obvious, over the past two years, that subtle effects do occur in our bodies when exposed to quite low levels of RF – well under the levels given out by cordless Dect phones, WiFi routers & mobiles. Some people feel quite ill when exposed to pulsed RF, although most people don’t (think of photosensitive epileptics and strobing lights).

Here at Lessradiation.co.uk we believe the effects of RF on the body are cumulative, that’s to say, once you become electrosensitive it can take months or years of no exposure for you to get back to feeling your old self.

You can take action today. If you must use a Dect cordless phone, go for one of the Siemens Eco+ Dect models (£25) which only transmit when you are actually on a call. Also, you can turn off your WiFi router’s beacon signal too (£0). Doing just those two things will remove the permanent blanket of electrosmog that most homes are now cloaked in. Better still, go back to using a corded phone & router.

The start of this year saw studies that showed that exposure to EMFs can wreck your sleep. You can test this theory for yourself by plugging in your WiFi router & Dect Phone’s Main Base right next to your bed. About 10% of you should should suffer sleep deprivation, or perhaps just really weird dreams.

Next up, unplug your WiFi router and Dect base at night. Did you notice a difference? Are you sleeping better? is one of your kids now sleeping better? If you live near a Mobile/Tetra mast you might not be so lucky. Of course, a really close neighbour’s WiFi & Dect can cause Electrosmog in your home too. It could be a wheat intolerance or any one of a hundred different things that are suddenly making you feel s**t. But it really could be a source of pulsed EMF too.

Back to the original heading. Microwave News reports that the battle goes on. Mike Repacholi has taken wages from the Cellphones-cause-no-harm lobby for some years, and everyone out there knows that. Dozens of other scientists do also every day. It doesn’t matter one bit, the truth will eventually out. At worst i’ll just have been wrong, and have spent my time writing about something that I find interesting!

For years scientists struggled against entrenched money interests to bring down BIG-Tobacco. Some would say they still haven’t. But most people now agree that smoking tobacco will shorten your life. For many years the Power companies insisted that living under power lines didn’t give you Leukemia. Most people now believe they do…

My argument is not that cellphones give you cancer. My argument is that daily exposure to excessive EMFs (mostly from Dect cordless phones & WiFi routers) will leave you fuzzy minded and ruin your mood. Ultimately sending you to your GP asking for Antidepressants – which might make you feel better in the short-term , but won’t fix the cause of your low serotonin long-term. Also, you could end up at your GP asking them to medicate your kids with Ritalin or some other lovely concoction. Turn off all your EMF crap and get them outside in the fresh air! Now!

I even see the proliferation of EMF emitting gadgets as the possible cause for the obesity epidemic. Not that EMF’s contain any calories, obviously they don’t. But if being in a situatiuon that leads you to feel not quite yourself and mildly uncomfortable, could lead you to comfort eat without really understanding why. All experiments that need to be done by truly independent scientists at some point in the near future. In the mean time just turn off all your Wireless gadgets… For your childrens sake.

Peace & Love. Roll On 2010.

This was the first complete mini-laptop for under £200. It ran Linux and gave you everything you needed for 90% of your PC work. The only downsides were the fiddly keyboard and the 7″ 800×480 display. New versions quickly followed, and the second Eee featured a more usable 10″ 1024×600 display. Microsoft saw the huge numbers of these Netbooks being sold and realised that if they didn’t supply a cheap OEM netbook version of Windows XP, and bloody quickly, then Linux would take over the world!

I’ve still got my original 701 Eee, and a 901, and also an Acer Aspire One, and also a Advent 4211 / MSI Wind. They are all great machines. I only bought so many because I spotted a niche in the market for a custom build of Ubuntu for each of them. The standard Linux that came with most of them wasn’t very flexible, or at least didn’t seem flexible to someone only used to a Windows PC. I made a build of Ubuntu that was built on the un-swoppy EXT2 format, came with ability to play YouTube & iPlayer video content, working WiFi drivers etc, 3G broadband USB support, and a VOIP client that people wanted to use. I’m still selling these today (on Kingston 8GB USB sticks for £29), mainly to people who don’t have the spare time or inclination to figure everything out for themselves. (see spystore-uk on eBay).

Anyway, I’ve digressed. While looking on eBay last night I spotted a new Netbook running Windows for £75 including UPS shipping to the UK. At first I think this must be a scam, but there are lots of them, and the vendors have good feedback. Of course I ordered one immediately, now I just have to wait for it to show up.

The $100 netbook really is the next step on from that original Eee 701. It’s less powerful in terms of processor power, memory & storage – but the price point is a truly compelling feature.

Right now these $100 netbooks are keeping the cost down by using 7″ 800×480 displays and a low power 300MHz ARM processor. The downside is that the lack of an x86 style Intel processor means you won’t be running Windows XP or an Intel compatible build of Ubuntu anytime soon.

On the horizon though is a promised firmware upgrade to Google’s Android operating system, which should give users the Flash/Firefox combination they need to use iPlayer & YouTube – for now they ship with Windows CE.

New versions of the ARM processor promise extra grunt quite soon. So the next couple of iterations of this device really will shake everything up – sorry Intel.

Think of it this way – right now you have Apple iPhones with similar processing power and smaller screens for £500; you have proprietry eBook readers (Kindle, Sony, etc) with mono display for £150+. Yes these devices are beautifully designed, have very appealing interfaces, and will continue to sell by the bucket load. But it will be the $100 netbook that causes a quantum shift towards the always-connected world of cloud computing – with WiFI & 3G everywhere – where everything sits on a server (an example of this being the Promptu voice-recognition software for the iPhone that uploads a voice file to a server, which the server converts to text, and sends back to the phone – because the iPhone doesn’t have the raw processing power for speech to text, but the server does).

Reading what others have said about the $100 netbooks out there right now, it’s not yet possible to boot an alternative OS from a USB stick or SD card. These machines are pre-programmed at the factory with the OS on-board, and the Bios doesn’t supply an alternative boot menu right now. The manufacturers talk about them being able to run Android (linux) sometime soon via a Flash upgrade, so in the near future it should be possible to ‘jailbreak’ (sorry) them to run another OS – although that mechanism doesn’t seem to be known just yet.

So what can you reasonably expect from a $100 laptop? Don’t expect to be watching HD video content anytime soon. Better to splurge out on a £200 Intel Atom based netbook if you want; your kids to look grateful on Christmas day, a real hard drive, Windows XP (and therefore any real Windows applications), lots of Youtube content, iPlayer, etc. But for basic website surfing & email a $100 PC that comes with WiFi is hard to beat!

The last thing I can remember being so revolutionary was when the Sinclair ZX81 launched, and if you wanted the cheapest version you had to solder that together yourself!

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UPDATE 6/2/10 : $100 netbook packed up last week. MORAL: you get what you pay for!

The drones provide video reconnaissance to remote viewers/pilots, and are good for showing enemy troop movements, etc.

However, if Johnny Terrorist can intercept your supposedly private video feed with a laptop, card & dish and a $26 piece of software called SkyGrabber, then they probably know more than you.

SkyGrabber is normally used for snatching satellite internet traffic out of the air. Say you live in the Highlands of Scotland and can’t get regular wired or wireless internet, you can get satellite internet – at a price.

The files you download over satellite internet can be seen & recorded by anyone with the right equipment – so that’s POP3 email accounts, FTP uploads to your server, music files you download, videos you download.

Anyone running SkyGrabber can get all the movies and music you download for free. Presumably the drone planes were sending their data over a standard network IP link, with simple encryption at best – this technology is now ten years old.

You can get software to do a similar thing for Linux. Spotting sporadic satellite feeds is almost a complete self-contained hobby for a certain type of geek. There’s certainly lots of interesting stuff out there.

I remember reading about one guy who’d seen unedited live satellite feeds from Paris the night Lady Diana died. Very often an ad-hoc satellite feed will contain off-the-record comments from reporters on the ground, and the studio will then edit the whole thing down into the report you eventually see on TV. These satellite hunters get to see the whole shebang.

Interesting video here

26C3 hacker conference 27th-30th December (C3 stands for Chaos Computer Club of Germany).

In December 2007 we saw Bluetooth hacked at 24C3.
In December 2008 we saw Dect hacked at 25C3.
This years it’s GSM’s turn.

Here are the interesting GSM talks to look out for. I’m sure they’ll appear on Youtube after the event.

27th Dec 21:45 – Chris Paget & Karsten Nohl

“The worlds most popular radio system has over 3 billion handsets in 212 countries and not even strong encryption. Perhaps due to cold-war era laws, GSM’s security hasn’t received the scrutiny it deserves given its popularity. This bothered us enough to take a look; the results were surprising.

From the total lack of network to handset authentication, to the “Of course I’ll give you my IMSI” message, to the iPhone that really wanted to talk to us. It all came as a surprise – stunning to see what $1500 of USRP can do. Add a weak cipher trivially breakable after a few months of distributed table generation and you get the most widely deployed privacy threat on the planet.

Cloning, spoofing, man-in-the-middle, decrypting, sniffing, crashing, DoS’ing, or just plain having fun. If you can work a BitTorrent client and a standard GNU build process then you can do it all, too. Prepare to change the way you look at your cell phone, forever.”

29th Dec 16:00 – Dieter Spaar

Playing with the GSM RF Interface

Doing tricks with a mobile phone

This talk will show what can be done by taking control of the GSM RF part of a mobile phone, for example performing a DoS attack to the GSM network or using the phone as a sniffing device.

If the RF hardware of a mobile phone can be controlled, lots of things are possible, for example:

* Sending continuous Channel Request which can lead to a huge load for a GSM cell and could be considered as a DoS attack to the GSM network.
* Use a mobile phone as a cheap GSM receiver for sniffing the air traffic somehow similar to what can be done with the USRP.

29th Dec 17:15 – Harald Welte

Using OpenBSC for fuzzing of GSM handsets

With the recent availability of more Free Software for GSM protocols such as OpenBSC, GSM protocol hacking is no longer off-limits. Everyone can play with the lower levels of GSM communications.

It’s time to bring the decades of TCP/IP security research into the GSM world, sending packets incompatible with the state machine, sending wrong length fields and actually go all the way to fuzz the various layers of the GSM protocol stack.

The GSM protocol stack is a communications protocol stack like any other. There are many layers of protocols, headers, TLV’s, length fields that can “accidentially” be longer or shorter than the actual content. There are timers and state machines. Wrong messages can trigger invalid state transitions.

This protocol stack inside the telephone is implemented in C language on the baseband processor on a real-time operating system without any memory protection.

There are only very few commercial GSM protocol stack implementations, which are licensed by the baseband chipset companies. Thus, vulnerabilities discovered in one phone will likely exist in many other phones, even of completely different handset manufacturers.

Does that sound like the preamble to a security nightmare? It might well be! Those protocol stacks never have received the scrutiny of thousands of hackers and attack tools like the TCP/IP protocol suite on the Internet.

It’s about time we change that.