From Ye Old Blogge: Thursday, March 11, 2004

Melon my ear!

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

SPOILER ALERT: I do in fact now have a phone that has a camera and MMS, despite how nowadays 10,000,000 tech companies can probably access every last thing on it - funny how things change over time while staying the same.

Thursday, March 11, 2004

They Can Do This?

A mobile phone theft has got me thinking. Go read the article, it's good. See if you pick what has me worried.

I know that mobile phones have an IMEI number that uniquely identifies it. I'm used to that idea, I run a network of computers that each have a network card with a globally unique MAC address, the machines have an IP address which can uniquely localise the machine and with the advent of IPV6 will enable a machine to be located precisely on a map. Each of the users on the network has a SID which is globally unique too.

I'm over the idea of privacy as far as being trackable by my IP addresses or mobile phone IMEI numbers, and over the idea of privacy on the Internet (hehehehe anyone who isn't, has already been ripped off) but there was one paragraph which rang the alarm bells...

To be extra safe, Mossad ordered the phone company to remotely erase the memory on Dagan's handset.

I'm hoping in a rather hopeless way that the Mossad use special "Maxwell Smart" mobile handsets which have a remote erase facility especially for this particular circumstance. But I doubt it. I'd say it's a standard issue Nokia or Sony-Ericcson.

Then I hoped in desultory fashion that a mobile phone system where the telco can erase a mobile phone's memory isn't also a mobile phone system where the telco can *read* your mobile phone's memory - all of it - when ordered to do so by your local "Mossad" - but again, the cynic in me can't quite sustain that hope either...

This has quite turned me against sending (or at least retaining) SMS messages, and I know I'll never send MMS messages or get a camera phone now that I know this...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

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