top story text
Eavesdrop on GSM calls in 3 minutes with a $15 phone
How secure do you think your phone calls are over your mobile phone? If you answered “not very” then you’re right. Some researchers at the Security Researcher Labs recently gave a demonstration at a conference in Berlin about a very simple hack that can be completed in a matter of seconds. All they needed was a $15 dollar Motorola phone, modified with their own custom firmware and a USB port to connect the phone to a laptop and some programs with a whole collection on encryption keys (2TB worth) and they were able to record a conversation that was going on between two people on the phone. Granted, not everybody has the skills or knowledge on how to use such technology to snoop on phone calls, but knowing that such a method exists is enough to make someone think twice before discussing confidential topics over a regular GSM phone call. Let’s hope carriers rectify the problem before somebody finds a way to simplify the whole process into something anybody can do. Head here for a more in-depth explanation to the whole process.
According to some recent reports, Intel might be dipping its toes into the smartphone market in the coming months. Bloomberg reports that the chip manufacturer has struck a deal with ZTE to produce some new phones together. Intel will be designing the devices that will run on a version of their Atom microprocessor. The phone is said to go on sale in China and it hasn’t been made known if we’ll see the phones on this side of the world. No word on what operating system will be running on the phones either, so the question is still up in the air. Despite Intel’s dominance in the PC market, they haven’t been able to make any headway in the smartphone sector due to their processors being power hungry and the current mobile operating systems designed to run on ARM chips. As usual, take this rumor with a pinch of salt, but if things do turn out to be official, expect Intel and/or ZTE to speak up soon.
It has been a good 24 hours that the world has been talking about the Amazon Blaze smartphone which leaked on the web, literally out of nowhere. No one was talking about an Amazon smartphone and no one really expected Amazon to be readying a smartphone. This leads us to the question whether this product has an element of truth associated to it, or is it one of those million rumors which is directed at entertaining the web readers. By the look of things, Amazon Blaze is a reality. You feel like trusting this product for real because Amazon has manufactured gadgets in the past, but all those were limited to being e-book readers. So is Amazon now looking to expand into the smartphone arena? The Blaze does look an impressive start, if at all it will be one. Android 2.3, a 4.3-inch Mirasol display, a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm MSM8600 processor, a 5MP rear camera and a 1.3MP front cam for video chatting – all this sounds very impressive. But we would still wait for Amazon to endorse this as a reality, before we talk about it any further. You can of course type in your views in the comments section to let us know what you make of the Amazon Blaze.
The majority of Apple fanboys and freaks around the globe believe that the next generation iPhone will break cover at the WWDC which is to be held in the first half of June 2011. But, the Koreans are out there to contradict this belief and they think that it will be the last week of June this year when the iPhone 5 will eventually be released. Korean news site ETNews apparently heard this at the Mobile World Congress in Spain earlier this year and that is how this source is almost certain of the iPhone 5 release in late June. For some strange reason, this source also believes that the iPhone 5 will debut in South Korea and the US at the same time, which is something that cannot be trusted. The world is so used to seeing Apple products being first introduced in the US and then elsewhere that such a change of strategy from Cupertino is indigestible. I guess the Korean source needs to do its homework right before coming up with such gossip.