[ExI] The top secret military research programs we don't get to hear about (was: working memory implant! wow!)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 06:46:21AM -0700, spike wrote:

> Ja.  Cell phones are little computers now.  A cell phone won a chess
> tournament a couple years ago against at least two grandmasters.  Unlike old
> time telephones which had no software, it looks to me like a modern cell
> phone could be hacked such that it quietly opened a transmit line while not
> turning on any background screens or making any indication it was
> transmitting.  A cell phone could be rigged with speech recognition
> technology such that it could convert speech to text and store huge hunks of
> it.  Some of you software hipsters could likely tell us more than I can
> imagine about how thinks like this could be done.  We now all have our own
> potential bugging devices and plant them on ourselves.

Nothing potential about it. It's being done:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Covert_listening_device#Remotely_activated_mobile_phone_microphones

But what I meant was http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention
If you're a mobile phone user (not a person of interest, mark) 
this is exactly the information on-file available about anyone. 
Including you.

And it's only going to get worse. Unless we outlaw this 
obsessive-compulsive data collection. If we don't, well, we'll
be one of these truly irreversibly fubared places Vinge wrote 
about.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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