You don't even need to remove it from the board, just connect up some leads to the pins and you can read it without leaving a single scratch. That's what my solder-less Wii mod chip does, it's a socket that fits right over the chip and has contacts that touch the pins.
Except that the pins are not so easily accessible on an IC in a BGA package: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_grid_array
Now instead of a walmart tracphone. you buy a "clean" prepaid phone from vito that is registered to a 14 year old cheerleader in the hamptons.
See, you had me until you pointed out that under the status quo, walmart gets paid, and under this proposed law walmart won't be selling as much and some rich 14 year old bimbo loses her phone.
I call that "win-win!"
Who said she loses her phone? It would probably be a completely different phone which is also registered under her name.
Yes, and I'm certain that drug kingpins would buy the cellphone with their own, entirely legitimate photo ID. Aye, you touch on a good point. This will just create a demand among criminals for freshly stolen phones. Steal a phone, use it illegally for a day or two and toss it in a greyhound bus bound for opposite coast to fuck with gps surveillance attempts.
They could use a fake or stolen id. They could pay, or pressure, others to buy phones for them. They could buy from a store clerk who's sympathetic to their cause and willing to enter made up identity information. Their options are only limited by the combined creativity of those in their social network.
What I find more interesting is: "Number of traffic sources in the room: 21" Maybe I can't comprehend this properly but 22 AIM > 21 sources?
Maybe someone was logged into more than one AIM account from the same machine.
What I want is an inexpensive basic phone that I can use to tether my existing devices.
Use something like this to search for discontinued phones your carrier has offered which support the DUN bluetooth profile and whatever other criteria you are looking for. Then check eBay for that model. Even if you want to use it for internet access on a device that only supports wifi and not bluetooth or USB, then you should be able to find a phone for under $100 running WinCE where you can find custom software to use it as a wifi access point. I've never needed it myself, but I've heard the HTC Mogul/XV6800 is a pretty cheap device which can serve that purpose well.
edit those frames to remove any potential user payload data. I'm not aware of any functionality for doing this on-the-fly with any of the open-source tools for capturing traffic.
It's just too bad that those open-source tools are closed source, and in any case Google has no programmers on payroll to do the necessary changes
These changes would not only ensure that they are in the clear in terms of computer trespass, memmove() also would reduce the storage requirements. It is possible that nobody at Google was thinking ahead. Google is a company of young people, and those may not be sufficiently worried about legal stuff. And there was no oversight at all, even by Google's legal department. I'd think that when you send thousands of cars into foreign countries to record stuff you'd involve a lawyer or two... this looks like incompetence that flows from the very top.
You're right about the changes being trivial, but apparently whoever set this up didn't bother to make those changes. Maybe they weren't concerned with saving disk space. This really isn't anything new.
For anyone sending private or sensitive information unencrypted over open wifi networks, there are far greater threats than what little traffic Google may have captured in the short amount of time that one of their vehicles may have been in range of the network.
You're assuming that "thousands of Google coders, workers and managers" are auditing the parameters passed to tcpdump in some script or at least looking over the raw capture files rather than the output data.
If people in charge haven't had time even once in three years to look at what they collected, they are idiots by anyone's definition. Intercepting of other people's communications is a crime in many countries. It's perfectly legal to receive AP's broadcasts that advertise it, but once you start capturing packets that are sent to (or from) other computers, you are receiving "legally protected" (but not physically protected) data that is not for you. Lawyers in different jurisdictions may have different laws on this subject, but intercepting other people's data is amoral in most human societies.
What they were collecting were locations of access points.To collect that data, they had equipment in the vans capturing data broadcast by those access points and processing it to determine their location. When a vehicle is moving around, it is not within range of most networks for very long. You can only capture a limited number of frames in that time period. Then you use software to analyze the signal strength data from those frames, along with the gps log, to determine the locations of the access points. This only looks at lower layer segments of those frames, and the higher layer segments (including the payload) don't affect it.
Google failed to go back and delete the raw capture files. Maybe they wanted to keep the raw data in case there are future improvements in the analysis software. If that's the case, they failed to reprocess the captures and edit those frames to remove any potential user payload data. I'm not aware of any functionality for doing this on-the-fly with any of the open-source tools for capturing traffic. Ignoring all information from all non-beacon frames would have far less accuracy, especially in areas where wifi is heavily used. There isn't anything to indicate that they had any interest in any user payload data, or that any of it was collected anywhere outside of the raw capture files.
The whole purpose of using analysis software is so that you don't have to look over large amounts of meaningless raw unfiltered data... I'm willing to bet there are some sources of raw data that you have and fail to thoroughly review by hand. For someone who has a job to do, wasting that much time isn't usually an option. Even for someone who doesn't have a job, that still could require more time than they have depending on the amount of data.
Anything capturing data is going to inevitably collect some data that is not intended for it. For example, if you've ever typed around any audio recording device. That captured audio can be analyzed to determine what you typed, even if it was not intended for the person capturing the audio. Or if you've ever been to a tourist attraction you've probably been at least captured in the background of other people's home movies, whether or not you indented to be.
That assumes that thousands of Google coders, workers and managers are idiots. Far more likely is that Google, being in data mining business, were perfectly aware of every aspect of this collection. It costs money to run StreetView cars, so they packed the cars with everything they could think of, and collected everything that they could.
You're assuming that "thousands of Google coders, workers and managers" are auditing the parameters passed to tcpdump in some script or at least looking over the raw capture files rather than the output data.
Seriously, if you don't think there is something wrong with collecting local and transient data and putting them into a big permanent database correlating with other data, by a private corporation that is best known to profit from large scale datamining, you just haven't thought deeply about the issue.
In the articles I read (linked in the story), there is only mention of capturing unnecessary data. Where did you hear anything about putting that data into a database and correlating it with other data? If something as innocuous as simply failing to filter out unnecessary captured data causes so much concern, then anything along the lines of what you described would be huge.
The article indicates that the original software was expressly written with logging capability. They somehow "forgot" to remove it. And nobody noticed. For three years!?!
Yes, they were capturing wireless traffic to look for access points. What they failed to do was take the time to make sure that it was written to filter out the irrelevant information. This really isn't that complicated. If you want to see what kind of data they were logging, put your wireless interface in monitor mode and start capturing traffic with wireshark. If anyone is transmitting anything on the same channel as your wireless interface and within range of being received by your antenna, it will end up in your capture file. Anything unencrypted will be, well, unencrypted.
Maybe I know my neighbors, so I trust them/know they're not that talented.
I know and trust my neighbors as well, but I still would not knowingly broadcast personal or sensitive information to the entire neighborhood. How can you possibly know that the only people who will hear are your neighbors? Keep in mind that interested parties could listen from much further away depending on their equipment.
That begs the question: Is the value of an operating system the programs that are built for it? Certainly that is the reason why a lot of people use Windows, but does that make it a better OS, or a better marketed OS?
That begs the question: Is the value of an operating system the programs that are built for it? Certainly that is the reason why a lot of people use Windows, but does that make it a better OS, or a better marketed OS?
Many people do value an OS based on whether or not it'll run the software they want to use. Windows is also a better marketed OS. However, I think the main reason why it has more software is simply due to it having the largest install base. Keep in mind that when IBM (the largest and most influential corporation in the computer industry at the time) started mass marketing personal computers, those machines ran Microsoft's OS. Then came the surge of IBM clones, further reducing hardware costs through competition and improving availability, which also ran Microsoft's OS so that people could use all the same software.
Microsoft's success in the early 80's, during the beginning of the personal computing boom, gave it the influence and name recognition that allowed it to grow into what it is today. It had more to do with very effective business practices than any technical superiority of their software. For free/open source software, there is no comparison. By the mid 80's, Microsoft already had staff working full time developing Windows. It wasn't until the mid 90s that a GNU/Linux OS even came into existence in an experimental/proof-of-concept form among a relatively small group of hobbyist programmers. It was never mass marketed to your average consumer as an OS for personal computing, especially not during a time when the PC market was so new there didn't already exist such a wide array of incompatible software that the average consumer would be expecting to run on it.
If it were the case that the software could not have be easily written to work on another OS, then the answer would be easy. Anybody who has tried to do socket programming in Windows knows what a pain that can be. However, is that the case with these Windows only programs? I'm skeptical because I've personally never seen a FOSS project that couldn't be ported outside of Windows. I would appreciate insight from somebody who works on Windows only software.
I do not develop windows-only software, but my theory is that this is due to there being much more demand for software to run on Windows than any other OS. Porting software that was designed to only run under Windows may also be more time consuming, depending on how it was written. Especially if it extensively relies on closed-source libraries that are only available for Windows. On the side of the spectrum, porting open source software written to run on an open source operating system using open source libraries won't necessarily require you to make as many fundamental changes to the design of the software. Of course, you may still choose to make further changes, for one reason or another, and use libraries that are native to your target environment (Windows, in this example).
Firstly, thank you for your well-worded and intelligent response. Unfortunately, it was the "transmitting copyrighted material over a computer network is not necessarily copyright infringement" part that I was getting at there. Isn't that just making a copy, regardless of what the specific protocol is?
Yeah, technically portions of the network traffic being reproduced on network interfaces between every node in the route would be derived from the copyrighted material. However, if something as trivial as that were considered copyright infringement then anyone who owns any network infrastructure would be guilty of infringing upon everyone else's copyrights. Technically, any electronic device that does anything with copyrighted material has to make copies of some form of it within it's circuitry to function.
I'm not a lawyer and my understanding of copyright law is pretty slim, but I'd imagine there are plenty of persuable instances of copyright infringement that occur all of the time. I frequently see TVs displaying copyrighted content, and hear people playing or singing copyrighted songs, outside of their homes. In the majority of these instances, I would bet that the person responsible is not actually licensed for that public performance by the copyright holder.
Here's a thought experiment:
If I invent a replicator and make an exact, atom by atom copy (yes, this would be impossible space magic, just go with me here) of something with a copyright on it, is that copyright infringement?
If yes, then how can an exact digital copy of a series of 1's and 0's with a copyright on them not be copyright infringement?
Note: this wasn't really the conclusion I was aiming for... stupid thought experiment...
Both would be copyright infringement. I don't know who said it wouldn't be. It doesn't even have to be an exact duplicate to be copyright infringement. The GP was simply pointing out that copyright infringement is not theft. Theft is when the item is removed from its original owner's possession.
Here's a couple side by side examples:
If you walk into a shop, grab a DVD, and sneak it out without paying for it, then you have committed theft. You have stolen the item from the shop.
If someone goes into the shop and purchases that DVD, creates an ISO of it on their home computer, and sends it to you over the internet, then you have committed copyright infringement. You have infringed upon the rights of whoever holds the copyright over it. They are in control of how copies of the item are allowed to be produced, and you disobeyed them.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
