What do you think inspired Locke to bother writing a manifesto in favor of something else? Had it already been what he wanted, why go to the trouble?

We are obviously going back and forth on a joke here(though there have been a few cases over the years of some poor sucker in a coastal city accidentally roaming onto a cruise ship's $10/min cellular-to-satellite tower and getting a bit of sticker shock, though not often enough to suggest anything other than occasional incompetence); but at least on CDMA(in the broad sense of 'what Verizon and Sprint do', not necessarily the one particular generation that was actually called that) the carrier can initiate a PRL push, silently, at their discretion. Sometimes it's just an update, since towers and signal landscape changes over time, sometimes it's them assisting the feds in moving you over to a stingray...

There may have to be rules; but I am less than convinced as to why those 'rules' include getting to use deauth attacks against other people's Part 15 devices with your own just because their presence annoys you.

They can have whatever rules they want about who connects to their network and what they do on it; but 'there must be rules' is a pretty thin justification for tearing down the usual rules of precedence for part 15 devices and the ISM band. It's also a recipe for setting off a nice little arms race, which is about the last thing you want happening on a slice of spectrum that only remains useful if the devices on it manage to cooperate a bit.

They aren't exactly advertized in the glossy consumer stuff section; but there are cellular providers that cater to embedded sensors, distributed system control, and that sort of thing, who will sell data-only, SMS-only, or data/SMS SIMs designed to be used by assorted sensors and traffic lights and things that need to swap bits but can't justify dedicated hardlines. Getting reasonable prices at quantity 1 might be tricky, though.

The trouble with voice mail is that it painstakingly offers almost all the vices of the other options and few of the virtues. All of the inaccessibility of voice (yeah, you could cut and paste part of a VM into your reply, with some effort; but that would be highly unusual...) without any of the conversational or interactive qualities. All of the one-side's-rambling-monologue of email; but without any of the easy access, search, categorization, exchange of information where formatting or spelling count (Who doesn't love resorting to NATO phonetic alphabet just to get a serial number across a phone line?).

Then include the fact that most systems for retrieving them are so awful that somebody using an email client 25 years ago would assume that you were fucking with them, and it's just icing on the cake.

Hey, at least it won't be a dirty deed done dirt cheap, since it requires a malicious thunderbolt device to carry out...

Sounds like somebody was cargo-culting it on that design decision: systems that are intent on using cryptographic lockdown to resist tampering usually don't store the blessed key in rewriteable memory, for reasons made obvious here. Depending on the hardware, it gets some sort of more aggressively write-once/locked/burned in at the factory and read only/whatever storage, with the data to be cryptographically verified going in the rewritable part. I suppose it still functions as a sort of checksum; but not really a security measure.

It has to be unsafe by design. How else can Thunderbolt be even more insanely great than Firewire's "Hey, sure, here's DMA access to the bottom 4GB of my memory space! Don't do anything naughty or nothing, ok?" security model?

I'm frankly surprised to hear that Apple still manufactures a device that will boot after you tinker with its boot ROM. The notion that a device that is, for most purposes, right on the PCIe bus can scribble all over the place isn't exactly a shock; but it doesn't seem much like Apple to build hardware that would still boot if the cryptographic signatures didn't check out.

Plus, thunderbolt daisy-chains, so (if you are handy with rework tools or Intel ever gets the stick out of their ass about selling the chips) the malicious device could either be a (subverted) normal looking peripheral or a surprisingly small lump lurking within a thunderbolt cable or somewhere within the chain.

The proof of concept is probably a big hairy bundle of prototype that would get you arrested if you brought it to an airport; but a slightly more polished variant could be squirreled away in quite a few places. The volume and power required to implement an entire single-purpose attacker device is already fairly small, getting into "eh, probably just one of those EMI ferrite things" territory, and not going to get any larger; plus the options available in either embedding the attacker device in the case of a legitimate device or modifying a legitimate device's firmware.

The truly paranoid user might not be vulnerable; but few users are paranoid enough to qualify.

Nor in this one(though, barring exemplary tactlessness on your part, customs isn't going to catch you importing all kinds of crazy stuff), that's why the hotels are whining to get a regulation changed. At present, ISM band devices are specifically supposed to avoid interfering with one another. They want the right to explicitly attempt to interfere with others. That will work really well on a shared area of spectrum...

Fair enough, I certainly deal with the ghastly little things more on the inside than as a user. I assumed that 'RSA dongle' implied that the grandparent poster was using the same, didn't actually check to see what the companies mentioned issued to customers. They are usuriously priced; but that didn't seem implausible for a brokerage account that might easily have actual money in it.

That said, aren't all non-connected tokens(like the Symantec one you link to) going to have the same fundamental limitation that you need to know enough to clone the token in order to authenticate the token? In the case of the Symantec offering, it appears that the model is "Company B needs to pass every auth request to Company A for processing". It's Symantec: Neutral Trusted Party, rather than Bank A vs. Bank B; but same basic system.

The nice thing about smartcards (and USB dongles or contactless systems that implement equivalent functions) is that, while they do need a communication channel, they can perform a proof of identity(via public/private keypair) without ever needing to expose their private key, and without the remote host needing to know anything except the public key. The extra channel is a huge pain in the ass, compared to the time-based ones(which really are a cute trick, even if RSA are awful to deal with), especially if users expect to log in on something where you can't just install a card reader; but something with access to keypair auth is fundamentally better suited to multi-institution verification.

I really wish that we'd just bitten the bullet 10 years ago and actually rolled out a CAC-style keypair/smartcard system, with accompanying hardware and software ecosystem) in a big way. Trying to add it on after the fact is pretty hopeless; but if baked in it's a pretty cheap interface, and more capable than the disconnected tokens by a fair margin. Ah well.

Aside from the hotels, fuck Cisco on this one:

"The hotel group found support from Cisco Systems. “Unlicensed spectrum generally should be open and available to all who wish to make use of it, but access to unlicensed spectrum resources can and should be balanced against the need to protect networks, data and devices from security threats and potentially other limited network management concerns,” Mary Brown, Cisco’s director of government affairs, wrote.

While personal hotspots should be allowed in public places, the “balance shifts in enterprise locations, where many entities use their Wi-Fi networks to convey company confidential information [and] trade secrets,” she added."

So, because some people might not be competent enough to set up a network where you can't spoof an AP just by using a similar name (because 802.11x is totally exotic and stuff) we should just trash the ISM band in order to protect trade secrets and the children. I wonder if Cisco happens to sell a nifty WLAN management console that would let me identify those 'rogue' APs and knock them out, by any chance?

Goodness no! Go to the trouble of maintaining a stock of handsets for you to get your grubby fingers on, and a staff to hand them out and get them back? We'll just knock the handset you have onto our private tower, where you'll pay roaming fees that would make you think you were staying on a Kupier Belt object with a state telcom monopoly. Your telco will get their cut of the charges, so they'll pass the bill along, don't worry.

Even if you do approve of what jammers are designed to do(in this case, deliberately fuck up one user's use of the ISM band for somebody else's profit), there's also the danger that (as with everything else) jammers have a nasty habit of being built down to price; and, when the objective is 'knock out wireless communication', some seriously ghastly products end up fitting the bill.

Yes, there are the rather more sophisticated ones, usually with interfaces that refer to 'rogue APs', that actively exploit weaknesses in the protocol for fairly precise knockouts; but there are also just screaming heaps of RF noise.