Remember the great Vodafone Greece/Ericsson AXE hack? We blogged it and some of its freakish consequences. Now, the IEEE Spectrum has published a detailed analysis of the hack, here. It’s fascinating stuff, but if anything it deepens the mystery. What essentially happened; well, somebody who probably had physical access to the switch used a rare…
Read More Damn Strange “Teenagers”No beheadings in this story, though. Congolese radio station aims to give a microphone to those whose voices have never been heard before. I liked this line: The show’s technicians – after getting caught in Army-militia crossfire twice – finally managed to put up antennas in the region’s more remote rain forest areas. So now…
Read More Just to make a living and help out the CongoleseOK, so this guy’s designed a little program that is intended to provide access to pay-for-play wireless LANs. The idea is simple – one host actually pays up, and connects to the WLAN, and then acts as a proxy for other users, who treat the “WiFi Liberator” as a WLAN router. My initial thought was…
Read More This is Radio Clash on pirate WLANIt didn’t take me long to find out how to make one of those IEDs that supposedly have to come from Iran. After all, there’s always Wikipedia. Wiki has a neat short introduction here, with an even better photo of one. The idea is simplicity itself. Using the Misznay-Schardin effect, which states that as an…
Read More So how do you build an EFP anyway?Does “Paleoprog” contribute anything to the otherwise indispensable American Footprints at all? Consider this thread, where he is defending the Iranian-IED stories on the grounds that i base it on what the president, rice, gates and others are now saying. If I had decided to disbelieve any statement from any of these people out of…
Read More I talk, and talk, say nothingA sinister tale from Iraq. But does anyone else find the scariest bit that the mystery voice who threatened her identified itself as the “Kata’eb al-Jihad”? Yes, that’s Kata’eb as in the Lebanese Phalange’s Arabic name. Not that the originals would have had any truck with jihad, but it strikes me that it’s a great…
Read More We are the goonsquad and we’re coming to townYou may recall the incident off Somalia where a cruise ship beat off pirates using a LRAD, a long-range audio device – essentially a weapon that produces a very loud noise in the direction of a target. Here is a civilian version, with a standard MIDI interface. Now we make beats with computer technology, indeed.
Read More ..with diesel power!The Bath University RepRap project (to build a rapid-prototyping tool that can make copies of itself) is coming on with all due speed, and I especially like their latest test part, a natty Linux penguin. Which is fitting for a project that’s all open-source. Back when they got started, Phil Hunt of Cabalamat Journal posed…
Read More The Hunt questionI’m currently at the Royal Society’s “Privacy: A Fine Balance” conference, a DTI-sponsored shindig for eggheads, ubergeeks, cash grabbers and Home Office/defence industry control bureaucrats to thrash out digital rights issues. First speaker is Stephen Hailes of UCL, who’s talking about embedded computing. He says that we need to realise that statistically, most multicellular life…
Read More Privacy: A Fine BalanceEveryone is talking about this New Statesman story in which so-and-so visits Westminster Council’s CCTV surveillance control centre, which rather wonderfully turns out to be situated in the bowels of the dire Trocadero on Wardour Street. Apparently we have 20 per cent of world CCTV capability in Britain. But it was this response at Spyblog…
Read More User 64