Leave Your Cellphone At Home, Says Jacob Appelbaum 306
An anonymous reader writes "N+1 has an interview with Jacob Appelbaum (who is part of the Tor project) titled 'Leave Your Cellphone at Home.'" Jacob has a lot to say about privacy, data security, and surveillance. He ought to know. Among other things, he's had his email seized, been relieved of his phone, been the subject of a National Security Letter (video) and generally had his travel disrupted.
Leave you phone^W lojack at home. (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for ya. Amazing how they managed to get darned near 100% of the population to agree to carry around a tracking device with nary a peep. All it took was to be very careful to NOT talk about the tracking ability, keep news accounts of the police using the cell data off the front page and make the tracker shiny and useful enough. Do those things and not only will everyone carry one they will pay an average of $50/mo for the privledge. Land of the Free indeed.
Won't be long now before they decide they have the hook set deep enough they can start making more overt use of the location/activity data without many people ditching their tracker.
The carriers WILL start renting out access to track data for advertising purposes. They know where and when you are. They will be able to link that beyond your phone. Won't take much computation to get that localized enough to have a good idea which PC you use and then tie it to doubleclick and google's cookies. Then they know EVERYTHING. Combine a tracking cookie to hard billing quality identification data and the possibilities are truly limitless. Sure they COULD do that with Amazon but there is too great a chance of a user revolt. But people won't/can't give up their iShiny.
What law enforcement will do with the data is so obvious and so dark there isn't much point in hammering it again really. Especially combined with security cameras everywhere. Who cares if the image quality isn't good enough for a positive id or you were wearing a hoodie. It gives a time/location and the tracker gives them who was at that spot in spacetime.
Bust a drug dealer and you have probable cause to grab a trace on everyone who came in contact with that person for the last month. Crunch the numbers enough and lots of patterns emerge. Not quite precrime but close enough. You show up as having been in the room with a number of dealers and that will be your ass. Or be around a few people who later get busted for burgulary and how soon until that is cause for a search warrant on your place? Being able to effortlessly work backwards from a bust and turn up clues like that will change the law enforcement game entirely.
And now you see why AT&T yanked all their payphones and for some reason simply refuses to compete in the landline business, even with billions and billions in sunk costs for all that wire going everywhere. Eliminate hardlines and everyone MUST buy a cell. It is already sorta odd to encounter someone who doesn't carry one, eventually it will be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Wouldn't suprise me if they become the preferred physical identifier, i.e. 'your papers.'
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Why was this last comment modded down, and by whom? It seems like a pretty good comment to me. Who, besides a forum spy [cryptome.org], would want to keep the above comment out of sight?
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It's rated +5 at the moment. Ah, obviously the forum spies are using reverse psychology! Woooooooo!
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You are half right. Most people assume I'm a bible humping right winger, but in reality I'm an agnostic anti-idiotarian Libertarian. And this crap annoys my Libertarian tendencies. If I didn't need one for work I wouldn't carry a mobile device. But yea the hivemind has started demonstrating their tolerance and diversity bigtime on my ass of late. I just say "bring it bitches." because nothing says "I can't win an argument" like organizing a movement to silence the few of us around here who don't toe th
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> Meanwhile I have good karma with a default score of 2 for being a complete tool.
Hey, I posted at +3 (Karma + subscriber) unbroken for pretty much the entire time the current slashdot model existed until a couple of months ago when I pissed off an admin or they totally redesigned the moderation system. Since there hasn't been widespread complaining I assume it is just me that is getting the special treatment. Mods can't really hurt you unless you are a totally usless user who never says anything worth
Re:Leave you phone^W lojack at home. (Score:5, Insightful)
nothing says "I can't win an argument" like organizing a movement to silence the few of us around here who don't toe the Party line.
Hear, hear. We might be on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum, but democracy is dead if we allow that to mean we can't have a civilized conversation with each other about the issues. Kudos to you for putting your beliefs out there for examination and peer review, and shame on the people who are trying to silence you instead of responding to your cogent and valuable posts.
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You are half right. Most people assume I'm a bible humping right winger, but in reality I'm an agnostic anti-idiotarian Libertarian.
To a lot of folks, Libertarian means conservative -- no taxes, little government, no regulations at all. Most folks (and I don't know why) confuse "conservative" with "Christian". Perhaps because the conservative atheists who pretend to be Christian (Rick Perry comes to mind) scream so loudly about their imaginary faith. They make real Christians cringe.
I broke the screen off m
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I was unaware of any movement to silence people by name, and despite my tendency to disagree with Libertarians on matters economic, I think you're spot-on here. Depending on the phone/frequency, I think you might find that a "tinfoil" (aluminized mylar) pouch might do a good job of thwarting your tracking device, though I understand that this causes phones to drain their batteries extra fast.
Re:Leave you phone^W lojack at home. (Score:4, Informative)
There's nothing abnormal about your account. Your posting bonus is easy to kill because your karma is hovering right around zero, and because you seem to generate a lot of moderations. The comment to which I'm replying has, at this moment, 20 mods to it (and none from the editors; we don't really care what you say, as long as it's not spam or links to shock sites). The parent comment has even more.
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I'm guessing you say that about everyone that doesn't agree with your point of view.
"A person who believes in the doctrine of free will" (by definition) isn't anything like the "right" or "conservative". It's what it says, people who like free will. A Libertarian is also someone who can think more for them self unlike the far "left" and far "right" brainwashed groups lead around on a leash by the media.
Re:Leave you phone^W lojack at home. (Score:4, Interesting)
For me it depends on why they disagree. Christopher Hitchens was a card carrying socialist, which I am definitely not (for the most part), but I had a lot of respect for the guy and enjoyed hearing his POV on things. On the other hand if someone starts parroting some Party line bullshit at me simply because they are circling the wagons against a new idea, they can get bent.
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I don't think that's a fair characterization. Libertarians genuinely believe that their ideology is best for society. They also have some very different ideas from conservatives on social issues. I think where Libertarian ideals fall down is on non-local issues, or issues involving large groups of people.
Pollution is the classic problem. If I get sick drinking some polluted water downstream, the libertarian answer is to sue the guy upstream. The "guy" upstream could be hundreds, thousands, or millions of pe
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The Libertarians have to stop with the open border stuff, though. Yes, immigration policy needs to be reworked from top to bottom, but wide open borders is way into woo-land. They also need to recognize that getting to a smaller more focused government is not going to happen overnight.
Re:Leave you phone^W lojack at home. (Score:5, Informative)
Your submissions weren't 'removed' at all, you just apparently don't know where to look for them. You can see see them on your user page [slashdot.org].
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holy tinfoil
You get a tinfoil hat for free with your 4-digit slashdot uids.
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it's not tinfoil.
the only thing keeping government tracking you with your cellular data is the government.
but don't americans really understand that? don't you watch your own movies - aren't there high profile murder cases where cellid data is used? there's been several in Finland - the only thing keeping the abuse off is having few good cops. impossible to say what the secret("protection") police is up to though, but in general they don't fuck around with population in Finland(nobody really knows what the
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Who watches the watchers?
Turns out it's the secret police. They don't exactly keep that part a secret either.
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holy tinfoil
No tinfoil required.
In Canada, we had this thing called "lawful access" which allowed the police to initiate a search and seizure without a warrant. Including tracking a person without a warrant if there were exigent circumstances. This was struck down by the supreme court. But that's not tinfoil is it?
Hell, have you even bothered to look at some of the app updates recently for say google maps? Or some of the QR readers? That's just giving away info. Here let's take an example of the latest google map
What about ... (Score:3)
Put your device into wifi mode, only use open access points and communicate over tor?
More people should leave their access points open for the greater good. Or have one open and one closed for their personal use.
Too bad that's not the case =p
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The problem is not technology. But governments how are happy to abuse it against it's citizens and others how travel across countries borders (U.S in this case. But this applies on a lot wider scale today). If you want to carry an mobile phone. Get the dumbest quad-band phone you can find. Or just use smart phone as dumb phone with nothing special in it (wipe it clean before crossing the border. Keep the backup encrypted on Google drive or Dropbox).
There are options are out there. One of them is to have no
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Any mobile phone can be tracked, you don't need GPS capability. I turn off hte GPS but at times it is suprisingly accurate about knowing where I am with out it. The difference with smart phones is that this info is on the phone, with a dumb phone someone would have to query the carrier's data.
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GPS doesn't tell The Man where you are. GPS tells YOU where you are.
If you want The Man to not be able to track you, turn off mobile voice and data. Cell tower triangulation is where it's at.
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Exactly so.
Welcome to the fascist United Snakes of Amerika, Inkorporated, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the international bankster cabal. "1984" and "Brave New World" were supposed to be dire warnings of a possible alternative future, not an operations manual for the Powers That Be.
We are tracked by our cell phones, our automobiles (OnStar) & license plate cameras, the public cloud of face recognition video surveillance cameras, UAV drones equipped with FLIR & Hellfire missiles, cancer-inducing naked
Re:Leave you phone^W lojack at home. (Score:5, Funny)
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If you're neither and are worried about tracking, just turn the phone off when not in use. You really don't need it on all the time. And turn off GPS for sure, that's just a waste of battery.
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The experiment has ended. The result is failure. Several millenia of genetic selection cannot be undone in 200 short years.
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Nice theory. Let's take a look at some practical examples, though. In all of the rebellions in the Arab Spring, involving actual totalitarian government being overthrown by force, my understanding is that cell phones have proved far more useful to the rebels for coordinating their activities than to the Government for tracking people.
There are potential dangers from tracking and such, but I think they can be mostly mitigated with good tactics, and that the overall benefits outweigh the risks in most cases.
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No, it cuts both ways. When I wrote and researched my book, The Dictator's Handbook, it was clear governments are able to make easy use of this data. There are numerous examples: governments planting trojans, tracking journalists, hacking email, sending out spear phish attacks, and worse. Rioters in Syria and Iran are frequently amazed when they are put in jail and their own email is read to them during the legal proceedings. Twitter is no better, and rogue governments create fake Facebook log-in pages
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It's like a cell phone for your car that doesn't work quite as well. Oh, and doesn't make phone calls or send SMS.
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1. AT&T ditched their pay phones because they didn't make any money.
2 . hardlines - they WANT you to keep them! Really! Case in point: when I called to drop my hardline ATT immediately, without asking, cut roughly 40% off of my bill to keep me on ($95 [with internet] down to $60). Reason given by customer retention person - "We DON'T want you to give up your landline!".
Sunk costs indeed.
After hearing that they could have reduced my bill at anytime, I told them that I was not interested. Cancel immediately. Thank you.
Firm and cold stops all salespeople in their tracks - no emotion is the key.
Well no company that relies more or less entirely on subscription fees will never want you to cancel one of their subscriptions. Doesn't mean they wont stop marketing them as heavily though-
And to think I'm paying for this "convenience" (Score:3, Insightful)
If todays phones are nothing more than tracking devices for the government and anybody with the right tools to know where we are at all times, then why are we paying for this?
I mean facebook is free and collects tons of information, yet we pay to use our phones and it collects our information the same way...
Re:And to think I'm paying for this "convenience" (Score:5, Insightful)
if you pay for it, you think you have gotton value.
if they gave it away for free, you'd think it was worthless.
perceived value.
just like sms is seen as having value when its just spare bytes that are always there on every packet, no matter what! costing nothing but they convince you that you need YET ANOTHER form of email and they gave it a cute next, texting.
what a nice scam to be in on. if you're the unethical type, that is.
Re:And to think I'm paying for this "convenience" (Score:5, Insightful)
There could come a time very soon when NOT carrying a cellphone will be viewed as evidence of criminal activity in-and-of itself. Much like not carrying an ID can get you thrown in jail today, tomorrow's cops may well toss you into the clinker for not carrying a cellphone (i.e. tracking device).
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Whooosh?
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Obviously the device is more to you than just a government tracker.
After all, you wouldn't possess the phone if you thought it to be nothing but a tracker - unless you actually wanted the government to track you, I suppose.
Not just your phone! (Score:5, Funny)
This isn't just with phones. Did you know that law enforcement agencies can see what you're doing when you're on the internet?? You should stop using the internet. But it's probably too late, anyway, because they've probably infected your computer with a program that monitors your every keystroke!
And that's not all! Did you know there're identifying numbers on your car, too? Law enforcement can track you and indict you simply because of a number on the backside of your car! You should probably just leave your car at home.
And don't even get me started about how unsecure your fingertips are.
Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem
"And don't even get me started about how unsecure your fingertips are."
Solution:
Hot irons
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Nope.
Scarred fingerprints set off even more alarm bells than normal ones. Plus the scar pattern is often uniquely identifiable. Better to be safe and chop the whole finger off.
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Although tracking you by your stump-prints might be even easier! Better to be safe and chop the whole limb off.
ENTRAPMENT (Score:2)
You are just trying to trick into leaving an easily trackable trace of my blood rich in succelent DNA everywhere I go... granted not very far with me spurting blood from where once my fingers were but still, police could track me to my corpse!!!
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A really sharp knife or a pair of bolt cutters.
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And that's not all! Did you know there're identifying numbers on your car, too? Law enforcement can track you and indict you simply because of a number on the backside of your car! You should probably just leave your car at home.
Apparently so. [kansascity.com]
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> Law enforcement can track you and indict you simply because of a number on the backside of your car! You should probably just leave your car at home.
Yea, that is becoming a major nightmare. Until pervasive cameras it didn't matter much. The could put an APB on a plate number and still not have a very high success rate on the cops finding it. Now with cameras in every intersection that changes. They can get a big chunk of the same info collection that way that cell phone tracking gives them but it i
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As usual, the key here is never attract their interest.
I think that that is the message.
Driving while black (Score:3)
Funny, this (Score:2)
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'cause he is apparently well-off enough to be able to afford a lawyer.
It's not so much 'DWB' (although that's part of it) a lot more of it is 'DWP' - Driving while [obviously] poor.
AC
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Take your phone, turn it off (Score:3)
Keep your phone on you, powered down. Or powered up in airplane mode (cell, gps, wifi turned off) if the phone has it. (Advantage is that "airplane mode" is usually instant on.)
This is assuming that you're carrying a phone that can be powered down. If not, I agree; leave it at home. Or get a different phone.
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Keep your phone on you, powered down. Or powered up in airplane mode (cell, gps, wifi turned off) if the phone has it.
That would make cell-phones nearly useless. Nobody could reach you quickly. Imagine if everyone you wanted to reach quickly also did this.
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Leave a message. (Remember those?) Check your messages at appropriate times. You're still better connected than the time before cell phones.
My conversations with my teenage daughter are almost entirely via text. She's more comfortable with that than with phone calls, as you can check for and respond to texts when you're not doing something else (like driving), whereas phone calls are more immediate -- they don't work unless both parties are in an environment where they're able to give the conversation t
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Correct!
And so, you use your cell phone to send messages in TEXT rather than talk to them directly. It's less prone to misunderstanding, and is more easily queued and accessed from the queue.
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I don't carry a cell phone anymore because it'd be completely useless to me for at least 95% of the time. If I did resume carrying one though I think I'd like to devise a faraday cage type case for it to reside in while not in use.
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Um, mine does not work like that...
Blessings on Jacob and Julian (Score:3)
http://www.nnn.se/nordic/assange/suspicious.pdf [www.nnn.se]
http://www.whale.to/b/gelbspan_b.html [whale.to]
And blessings on Jacob for everything he's done and is still doing.
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Yeah right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who thinks leaving a cell phone at home, powered off, or in airplane mode is an option obviously doesn't have a wife.
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Or.. anyone, at all. Many of the suggestions on Slashdot about avoiding privacy invasions would only be possible if you were a hermit, living in the basement, and having no contact with society.
Pandering to the base, I see (Score:3)
...would only be possible if you were a hermit, living in the basement, and having no contact with society.
All the time we get "Why the hell is this posted on slashdot?" Here, it seems, is an article aimed directly at the core demographic.
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Yea, because the core demographic is going to not take their cellphone travelling....
The warning might be correct, but the solution is not reasonably possible for most "normal" people.
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You do realize that for all of human history up until the late 1990's most of the world lived perfectly happy, fulfilled lives without a cell phone, right? You really don't need to be connected to everyone else all of the time. Try silencing the damned thing once in a while and connect with the meatsacks around you at the moment.
> living in the basement, and having no contact with society.
Just the opposite, depending on all this tech too much is what makes you a virtual hermit with no real contact wit
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Amazingly enough, people get very angry when you suggest that - try separating a kid from their cellphone, and you'll get angry calls from their parents about that very aspect ("but
Re:Yeah right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it has been democratised. Indian peasants can use a mobile phone to find the market offering the best price for their produce. Nepalese herders can decide the best time to bring their goats to market. For a lot of people who don't live in the US, the cellular phone is literally transforming their lives. You can only take the attitude you do because you live in a rich society and are insulated from the factors that have held most people in the world back economically. One of those factors is lack of access to fast, reliable communications.
Ted Kaczynski tried that (Score:2)
...and it didn't work out so well for him in the long run.
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The funny thing is that, if you are a hermit with no contact with society, then Government agencies are very unlikely to care where you are or what you're up to anyways, since nobody else does. The people they want to know all about are the ones who are actively influencing opinion against whatever the Government is trying to do.
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Welcome to Slashdot.
Fuck you, Says Average Person. (Score:2)
If you're only going to use it at home, get a land line. They're cheaper.
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But hey, you hang out with hornets, you get stung.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Leave it at home? (Score:4, Funny)
I use CDMA [wisegeek.com] you insensitive clod!!!
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You could just leave the SIM card at home and take the phone with you. The wi-fi capability is all you need to maintain communications with the outside world in most urban environments, and doing encrypted, TORed VOIP over a wifi connection shouldn't identify you like the SIM would.
That works only if you know how to spoof your device's MAC address. Otherwise, you are just as uniquely identified as your SIM.
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Why does that matter?
Do you think they are monitoring the access point?
MAC addresses don't get sent beyond the broadcast domain.
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MAC addresses don't get sent beyond the broadcast domain.
You sure?
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> You sure?
Don't know about the guy you were replying to but of course I'm sure. And if you knew anything about how this tech you depend upon daily actually worked you would be sure as well. There isn't a spot in an IP frame for the MAC, only in the lower level ethernet frames. If you aren't on the same subnet you don't see the mac address. If a wireless access point has node isolation turned on the different clients attached don't even see them. Of course DHCP servers do log them so if the access p
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Why does that matter?
Do you think they are monitoring the access point?
MAC addresses don't get sent beyond the broadcast domain.
Why wouldn't they?
I doubt that open access points at random residences are being monitored but I'd bet every Starbucks, McDonalds, and airport that offers free wifi are being monitored and MAC addresses being stored. Most of these are run by monolithic organizations, one of the largest being one that allowed three letter government agencies to snoop on their customers. [wired.com]
Firewall logs typically show DHCP negotiation along with requesting MAC addresses.
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Not unless someone is doing something they shouldn't. Each device is assigned a unique 48bit MAC address at time of manufacture. Each one.
You buy a 24 bit prefix from IEEE (I think) and are then supposed to do your own accounting on the lower 24 bits to be sure you don't duplicate one. If you have ever looked up a MAC to see who made the device, that is how it works. The owner of the prefix is a published record.
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Even counting every network interface in every cellphone, laptop, desktop, server, router and switch that I have ever owned, administrated or even *touched*, I don't think I'm anywhere near my share of network interfaces. While I have no doubt whatsoever that there are people whos
Re:Leave it at home? (Score:4, Informative)
You're assuming perfect distribution of MAC-48 AKA EUI-48 addresses among manufacturers and their products, which is far away from true. 1/2 of the 48 bits here are assigned to a manufacturer. 24 bits there make about 16M unique addresses available to each manufactured device. The flip side to that is that every manufactured device gobbles up 16M addresses, whether they use them all or not. Every time someone releases a new device assigned its own NIC address, another 16M addresses die, even if they only sell 1 of them.
That means the important part then is that there are only ~16M Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI) blocks, the other 24 bits here. Those are getting consumed at some rate, bigger manufacturers will need more than one of them, and therefore want to ask for a larger block of them. The IEEE is already aiming to reclaim them after 100 years [ieee.org] and otherwise tightening standards for keeping companies from getting more OUI "space" than they need. As they state there, "The total number of EUI-48 identifiers available, while large, is NOT inexhaustible.". It's similar to the situation with IPv4 addresses, where the capacity looked practically infinite at first, but waste forced the size of the average block allocations down hard over time to keep from running out. Now you have to use 95% of the addresses you've already got before you can get more OUIs.
MAC addresses have started to move from 48 bits to 64 in order to make this problem go away, because then you're at a "atoms in the universe" scale. I believe that's going about as well as the IPv6 migration. We're a long time from the 48 bits running out, but it's not as impossible as you might think just from computing against 2^48.
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Unless you want to, I don't know, make a phone call?
No open access points in range (Score:2)
The wi-fi capability is all you need to maintain communications with the outside world in most urban environments
But not for seeking roadside assistance, in my experience (Fort Wayne, Indiana). And even once at the destination, there are still lots of places where Wi-Fi is explicitly for employees only.
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Isn't the whole point of a cell phone to take it with you? If you're going to buy one to leave at home, just get a land line.
Problem is the mobile devices have shot right past "only in necessary situations" to "what the heck, everything, all the time, everywhere" to the point of addiction (gotta text someone on /. called me an addict!), can't put the thing down while driving, interrupt conferences or work taking personal calls, etc.
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Try Readability:
http://readability.com/ [readability.com]
Also available as a browser plug-in.
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The 'off' button does not turn your phone OFF (Score:3)
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No, no, see, it transmits your GPS coordinates to a monitoring station while "off" all the time and magically does this without draining any battery power or emitting detectable RF.
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Have you seen how long it takes for a modern phone to turn on? You may as well leave it home. (I think my iPhone takes several times longer than my desktop to cold boot).
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He's right, you can get one here [faradaybag.com]. Of course I've probably placed myself on some government agency watch list by posting this.
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Why would they confiscate your phone and computer at the border? Was this the US border?
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And border patrol agents are actually looking out for him? Not denying it, but it's pretty disturbing if they have apparatus in place to grab people like this at the border (i.e., non-fugitives) and then have lowly peons harass them just because some politicians don't like them.
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