Your Cell Records For Sale, Cheap

Your Cell Records For Sale Online, Cheap: "Social Engineering?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by scottd18 (593645) Alter Relationship on Friday January 06, @11:54AM (#14410282)
(http://scottdickson.net/)

I have seen the bulletin. In it they indicate that they conducted a test and placed an order to get the records of one of the agency's own cell phones. A little while later an unknown person called that cell number and said they worked for the cell phone provider. The person then asked for some information about the subscriber. Some time later they got an email with 'call records'.

A little social engineering can go a long way. If a 'service technician' calls asking me for information, I'm going to tell him I'm George War Bush.
--
Heck is a place for people that don't believe in gosh."
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Re:Oh no!!

(Score:5, Insightful)

by DarkIye (875062) on Friday January 06, @11:06AM (#14409937)
(http://uk.geocities.com/darkiye@btinternet.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday December 10, @07:01AM)

A bit of a controversial issue, that. Most people (the government included) will see only the fact that an FBI agent's been snooped on, and that something important's gone awry. Of course, people won't often ascribe the same situation to themselves. The thing I think's a bit poor is that people don't really care if they're being swindled or not, unless somebody says "This is happening to you, and it's bad". A bit like terrorism in America - it's been going on around the world for years, but it's only when it comes to the hearth and home and the government starts telling people it's bad that people start to have any feelings about it.

I'm not trying to call names here, but that's sort of how a salesman works - he gives you a problem you don't usually think about, then says "This thing will solve your problem". Never thought of it like that before.

--
Err... I mean, shut up.
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Re:Oh no!!

(Score:5, Insightful)

by scheming daemons (101928) on Friday January 06, @11:03AM (#14409919)

don't I have a civil right to keep my phone records private or something?

Your post is a troll, to be sure... but yes. You do have such a civil right. It's called the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. it reads:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The Supreme Court, on several occasions, has read that to be an implicit Right to Privacy.

Just because the current administation (and to be fair, many past administrations) has wiped their collective asses with the 4th Amendment doesn't mean that it no longer applies.

My cell phone calls are my personal effects.

This has nothing to do with Bush... this time. But it again shows the erosion of our personal liberties. And your flippant response notwithstanding, you're going to regret it one day when you wake up and wonder why you can't do or say the things you used to be able to do and say in this "free country".

It didn't start under Bush.. but it's not being rolled back by the current crowd in Washington either. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, with the very notable exception of Russ Feingold, are fighting for our freedoms anymore.

--
I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
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Re:Oh no!! (Score:5, Insightful) by Vesperi (10991) on Friday January 06, @11:15AM (#14409994) (http://www.houseofzen.org/)

No, your phone records are your providors business records. They can do with them what they want. Go read your TOS.

--
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"

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[silly! ]

Re:Ethernet! Finally, for the love of the almighty

(Score:5, Funny)

by suprchunk (782952) on Friday January 06, @09:00AM (#14408917)

Incidentally - why does everybody feel the need to list the TV programmes they like to record You know I always wondered about that too. You don't see me running around telling you what kind of toilet paper I use (Charmin) or anti-perspirant I use (Arid). Maybe there should be a study done on this kind of behavior. But I have a feeling they have no friends and are trying to make some on the net by spouting out shows that seem to be popular with all the other losers.
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Re:Ethernet? USB?

(Score:5, Informative)

by Zathrus (232140) on Friday January 06, @09:45AM (#14409250)
(http://slashdot.org/)

t's nice that it has Ethernet, but can you do anything useful with it or will it be heavily DRM'ed?

With current S2 TiVos you can do quite a bit with the ethernet -- play MP3s, slideshows, get weather/traffic/movie times and tickets/etc (the interface is open and extensible), transfer recordings to a PC and back (PC includes Windows, Mac, and Linux; although for the latter two you probably need to run Galleon [galleon.tv]), transfer MPEG2 video to the TiVo (and maybe MPEG4/H.264 w/ the Series3? It's not clear yet), and various other stuff.

As far as the video that's exported goes -- it's in a ".tivo" format which is a loosely containered MPEG2 video. It's completely trivial to strip off the outer layer and get to the real data beneath it. And it looks like the new TiVo Desktop software will even offer transcoding to a number of alternate (DRM'd) formats as well. But really, it's a joke to take off the TiVo DRM, or to just play it from a standard MPEG2 capable video player (it's designed to allow you to do that). Yes, you can play it in mplayer.

What about the data on the USB disk--is it encrypted or is it readable and usable MPEG files?

It's SATA, not USB, but that's a minor nit. The data is not in straight MPEG files -- it's on TiVo's proprietary FS. That was figured out [dealdatabase.com] long ago. But if you can simply download the stream to your PC, there's little reason to futz around with the drive -- especially since you cannot be assured that the entire video is stored on the external drive (it may be, but it may also cross drives; the article states this).
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So, if you want to record HDTV, you have the following options:
a) Build a PC w/ HDTV card and use an antenna (unless your HDTV capture card supports CableCard)
b) Build a PC w/ HDTV capture card and use the cable company's Cable box to tune. Note: consider the remote control implications if you choose this. Changing channels = change channels on Cable box.
c) Use the cable companies HDTV DVR (@ $15/mo from Cox. YMMV)
d) USE A TIVO3 w/ CableCard (simplest, easiest, hopefully cheapest)
=================
I built a MythTV box because I wanted to:

* Bring programs *into* the box, not out of it. MythTV lets me view all my videos and DVD images in a nice, neat, format that resembles the directory hierarchy they are stored in.
* Record HDTV programs. Thanks to two cable boxes and two FireWire cables, I can today record two HD programs simultaneously.
* Have plenty of storage space. MPEG-2 HD programs take 7GB/hour. about 10 times more than TiVo's about 700MB/GB on the lowest-quality standard. With MythTV I can use NFS (or, in my case due to mysterious performance issues [gossamer-threads.com], Samba) to put all the recordings I want on my 2.8TB RAID 5 array [google.ca]. From the description it sounds like the Series 3 TiVo will have an Ethernet jack, but a) it's likely to be 100Mbps--likely to be problematic in real-life conditions when recording two HD programs and watching a third at the same time--and b) who knows what type of external storage the box will ever support in practice.

That's it. No, I really don't care about MythTV's themability (Why, oh why, do people focus on themes in free software so much? Don't they realize that 99% of them look eye-meltingly awful--Kids, raytracing is, like, *so* 1995--and don't do a thing to fix any underlying usability issues with the application?), MythWeather, MythGame, MythPhone, etc., etc. Hey, they're nice, but I'd give them up in a flash to fix the last niggling bugs in mythfrontend (Geez, folks, what *is* up with the "displaying OSD in some recordings consistently crashes mythfrontend" bug in 0.18.1? Linus used to call such issues "brown bag" bugs, as in bugs in Linux kernel releases so showstoppingly bad he wanted to wear a brown bag for letting it loose into the world.) and the annoyances (some pretty colossal) in MythVideo's Video Manager module. If TiVo Series 3 manages to robustly support external filesystems (I have *no* problems with some sort of encryption scheme here) *and* let me view my preexisting videos through the elegant TiVo interface, I'm there. (Especially if TiVo kindly offers us longtime lifetime-subscription owners free upgrades.) I am, however, not waiting for these things to occur; there's TV to watch, and record, today.

--
Homemade 2.8TB RAID 5 array [google.ca]
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Tivo is soooo out of bidnezz. No way can they compete with Comcast, TWC, etc.

Comcast and TiVo has a deal that starts mid-2006 to market TiVo DVRs to Comcast customers.

http://news.com.com/TiVo,+Comcast+reach+DVR+deal/2 100-1041_3-5616961.html [com.com]
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--
Homemade 2.8TB RAID 5 array [google.ca]
----------------
Tivo is soooo out of bidnezz. No way can they compete with Comcast, TWC, etc.

Comcast and TiVo has a deal that starts mid-2006 to market TiVo DVRs to Comcast customers.

http://news.com.com/TiVo,+Comcast+reach+DVR+deal/2 100-1041_3-5616961.html [com.com]
---------------------

--
Homemade 2.8TB RAID 5 array [google.ca]
----------------
Tivo is soooo out of bidnezz. No way can they compete with Comcast, TWC, etc.

Comcast and TiVo has a deal that starts mid-2006 to market TiVo DVRs to Comcast customers.

http://news.com.com/TiVo,+Comcast+reach+DVR+deal/2 100-1041_3-5616961.html [com.com]
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/01/06/1326232

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