Posts tagged General

Every cell phone is supposed to have a unique factory-set electronic serial number (ESN) and telephone number (MIN). A cloned cell phone is one that has been reprogrammed to transmit the ESN and MIN belonging to another (legitimate) cell phone. Unscrupulous people can obtain valid ESN/MIN combinations by illegally monitoring the radio wave transmissions from the cell phones of legitimate subscribers. After cloning, both the legitimate and the fraudulent cell phones have the same ESN/MIN combination and cellular systems cannot distinguish the cloned cell phone from the legitimate one. The legitimate phone user then gets billed for the cloned phone’s calls. Call your carrier if you think you have been a victim of cloning fraud. The fraudster can make calls on your behalf or send messages etc and it would be easy to tarnish your reputation in this manner. For cell phone cloning fraud, the cellular equipment manufacturing industry has deployed authentication systems that have proven to be a very effective countermeasure to cloning, however it still does happen.
There is another interesting method. There are chips available which can be set into a cell phone, you can then gift this cell phone to an unsuspecting victim, provided you know him. Perhaps you can make him win a contest of some sort. The cell phone now becomes your bug, something that the user is sure to carry around with him. You activate it by simply calling this fellow from a preset number. What happens is that he get no inkling that a call is being received, the phone automatically picks it u, there is no change in the display or any indication that the cell phone is now transmitting everything to the person at the other end. So if you are paranoid enough, it makes sense to not accept such gifts from people. If you don’t have any security threat then chances are no ones going to gift you one either! Of course to counter the threat of electronic eavesdropping there are counter measures available such as encryption. Again its not for the usual people, wont be cost effective that way, but you can always find more details. It is an entirely different topic per se and would make material for another article. So keep coming back!

Cell phones have become omnipresent ; no one even spares another glance at someone hurrying along the sidewalk and seems to be talking to his own self. Of course he is using the handsfree and chatting to his contact who may be on the other side of the globe for all we care.

Considering that we use a cell phone even in the presence of a land line now that call rates are mostly on par, perhaps we should be evaluating security concerns about this risk. While it is common knowledge that authorities have had access to our calls, we were satisfied by the fact that this capability could not be mis-used. Even the authorities needed to get permission from a court of law with specific reasons for their wanting to do so. (Of course I assume that you did nothing to piss off the CBI or an agency on that level. In case you already did then God Help You, those people have technology which would leave you dumbstruck, as well as a free hand to use it when they think necessary).
With landlines, it was difficult to tap the phone, especially since they would need to put a physical bug on the wires which meant access to the lines and a kind of sophistication which would not be easily learnt. However with things going wireless, it becomes easier. Interception devices are now available that can record conversations. If you suspected the presence of these things and sent confidential data by SMS, then it was in vain since these things are powerful enough to get these too. To add salt to the wounds, the conversations and messages are neatly indexed and stored in a data base for future reference. These interceptors are cleverly disguised in forms of briefcases, suitcases or perhaps even a rugged outdoor case (cant be smaller than those since a particular size is required to be effective, maybe with more advances in technology we will have smaller ones.) While they do have their own power units which could last for some time, its better if you gave them a power supply since spying on someone is not something you do for an hour or two. Days of patience are required before you can have results. Don’t worry about power points though, these things are designed to be inconspicuous; you are ready to go even with a car cigarette lighter point.

These portable interception devices cost someplace between 20,000 dollars upwards depending on the features but they do come with a guarantee of getting you behind bars if you are not a law enforcing agent. Another option is to use the cell phone cloning or SIM card cloning method. However this requires you to have access to the device for some time.

We’ve seen DVDs replacing CDs,But what next??The next on arena are HD-DVD and Blue-Ray Disc.Both use a blue-laser for read-write instead of the usual red laser in curreb\nt generation DVDs.Blue rays have the shortest wave lenght among the visible spectrem.So it can pack more data within the same space.Both HD-DVD and Blure-Ray DVD use Blue laser ,but they use the technology in two ways.Lets go deep into two of’em
Blue-ray discs are more efficient with using the blue laser and pack at least 25GB per layer,whichcan be increased in multiples of 25 as you add more layers and use both sides of the media.The developers are saying that they could introduce 50GB this year and then by 2007 it will reach 200GB.To achieve this they use a completely new technology and hence it costs lot for mass production….lot means…sony released a 23GB Blue ray drive with SCSI and USB interface and the cost is well above 1.25Lakhs Rs.
HD-DVD on the other hand starts with 15 GB per layer and the capacities wud therefore increase in multiples of 15.Blue_ray is definitly a superio technology.But technology alone wont save a product.Production and marketing costs are also important.But HD-DVD maintains some backward compatability with DVD,so the same production facilities can be used to manufacture its products,meaning lesser production cost ,faster time to market and low cost to products.And there is a rumour that Microsoft will ship its upcoming OS Longhorn on HD-DVDs.But Blue-ray is more activewith more than 70 MNCs suppoting it including giant Sony,Hp,JVC,TDK …So at moment it seems like that inspite of the price ,future is with Blue-Ray.But it will not be a surprise if both technologies co-exists like the DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW formats.