GSM encryption crack made public

Posted Jan 7, 2010 15:14 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755)
In reply to: GSM encryption crack made public by drag
Parent article: GSM encryption crack made public

Well, to be clearer (and slightly less paranoid :-), the encryption is to protect you from criminals, not from the telco, or the cops.

And it's to protect carriers from fraud, which they will have to eat -- which is the *real* issue here. As soon as some noticeable fraudulent traffic starts eating into their revenue, there will be a fix; bet on it.

GSM encryption crack made public

Posted Jan 7, 2010 18:39 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (8 responses)

There are a lot of criminals that work for the telco and work in the
government.

GSM encryption crack made public

Posted Jan 7, 2010 18:51 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

Also you can't trust the government either way. If your involved in legal difficulties then what you say can easily be taken out of context and used against you. With the laws in the country so massively out of control a normal executive violates criminal federal a minimal of several times a year just doing normal business.

For example; Doing something, like, transporting dentures (like what old people use in their mouths) across state lines, is a federal offense and is prosecutable with a fine and even jail.

The chances of the government picking up on something and throwing you in jail or a dishonest person in government using something against you is very likely if you do end up being a target.

So no. I definitely meant to protect yourself form your own government and from your own telco.

Not also to forget that people tend to travel and your cell phone will automatically latch onto pretty much anything. So you are very unlikely to actually know what telephone company your going through and if your travelling internationally then it can be controlled by a wide verity of different governments. If your on a business trip in Asia and your in a country like China were the government runs the businesses and they work together.. how much do you want to have to trust their infrastructure?

That is to say, if you don't care that your shit is unsafe then you shouldn't care if GSM encryption sucks. If you _DO_ care that GSM encryption sucks then you should definitely not forget that the entire infrastructure is a huge pile of crap when it comes to security.

If your going to be paranoid then you might as well do it right.

GSM encryption crack made public

Posted Jan 8, 2010 4:42 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

So, what you're saying is: this is roughly like going to the Security Theater, and then complaining that the Milk Duds are stale.

Got it. ;-)

GSM encryption crack made public

Posted Jan 8, 2010 23:14 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (5 responses)

> transporting dentures (like what old people use in their mouths) across state lines, is a federal offense

What? Really? Cite please?

Federal denture crime

Posted Jan 9, 2010 0:01 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (4 responses)

That would be -- tadaa! -- the Federal Denture Act (18 USC 1821, enacted in 1942 and amended in 1996 and 2002). You may be relieved to hear that the penalty of a fine and/or one year in the federal pen applies not to your granddad crossing a state line with his dentures but specifically to people who market unlicensed dentures in interstate commerce -- where »unlicensed« means »not manufactured or legally approved by a dentist licensed to practice in the state where the dentures are being sent«. So, no false teeth on the cheap over the Internet.

Some very few US states allow »denturists« to sell dentures to the general public without the involvement of dentists, and denturists have been campaigning to be allowed to do so in other states. Dentists aren't too keen on the idea, insisting that denturists are not properly trained to diagnose (let alone treat) various diseases and complications in the mouths of their patients that would prevent dentures from being properly fitted. Considering that, in the states where it is legal, you can become a denturist after usually a mere two-year degree and a licensing exam, plus possibly an internship with another denturist, they may have a point.

Federal denture crime

Posted Jan 9, 2010 2:05 UTC (Sat) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

Oh, okay, so it's a license-to-practice restriction; that makes much more sense. Thanks for the clear and informed answer!

One could certainly argue about the fine points of profession legislation, but alas for the original poster, I don't see how this proves that the laws in the USA are "so massively out of control a normal executive violates criminal federal [law] a minimal of several times a year just doing normal business". (I can see how this might be true for copyright law, which is a particular portion of the law that is indeed massively out of control -- though even then, *criminal* violation is not *that* trivial -- but I am not sure there are any other examples.)

Federal denture crime

Posted Apr 19, 2010 7:43 UTC (Mon) by Denture (guest, #65465) [Link]

Fortunatly Denturist are far more trained and educated in the specialty of removable prosthetics(dentures) Denturist undergo a more thorough and vigorous educational curriculum dealing in the specialty of dentures only, therefore making Denturist the best health care provider to treat, provide and fabricate dentures for edentolous or partially edentolous patients. Most present Dentist college denture curriculums are being elimated or are providing only a couple of weeks of their entire four year dental curriculum due to the lack of time to teach a general dentist all the phases of dentistry and also most dentist are not interested for the lack of money in dentures when compare to the more lucrative root canals, veneers, crown and brigdge procedures. This statement comes from their own American Dental Association Journals. So if you need root canal see your Dentist, if you need a denture see your Denturist.

Federal denture crime

Posted Jan 2, 2021 1:48 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

People interested in dentures law may be fascinated to find out that 18 USC §1821 has been repealed in the “Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021”, specifically Division O, Title X, Section 1002(8), as part of a general cleanup of various oddball provisions in the U.S. Code which, for example, also decriminalises unauthorised for-profit use of the Forest Service's iconic “Smokey Bear” mascot.

This means that transporting dentures across state lines to where they haven't been prescribed by an appropriately licensed practicioner is now no longer a federal crime. We can presumably expect breakthroughs in online DIY denturistry.

Federal denture crime

Posted Jan 4, 2021 0:34 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I love when people come back, 10+ years afterwards, to give updates to comments about obscure laws on side threads :) .

GSM encryption crack made public

Posted Jan 8, 2010 17:59 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (7 responses)

And it's to protect carriers from fraud, which they will have to eat

They won't eat it. They'll charge it to the customers (i.e. fraud increases the cost of phone service). So what we can say about encryption is that it's partly to protect the customer (from a privacy standpoint) and partly to reduce the price of the service.

Re: "They'll charge it to the customers"

Posted Jan 9, 2010 4:05 UTC (Sat) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (6 responses)

Producers almost never have the power to arbitrarily raise prices in response to increasing costs. Simply put, if it were possible for them to bring in more revenue by setting a higher price they would already have done so.

However, rising costs do have one noticeable *indirect* effect on prices: under some conditions they can nullify the profit margins of the marginal producers, thus forcing them to go out of business and reducing the overall supply of the good. At that point prices must rise such that supply and demand regain their balance. However, the change in price is typically less than the change in cost, so the rising cost is born in part by both the producers and the consumers, not simply "passed on".

Re: "They'll charge it to the customers"

Posted Jan 9, 2010 11:43 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Simply put, if it were possible for them to bring in more revenue by setting a higher price they would already have done so.

Read Grossman & Stiglitz's _On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets_ and come back to us.

Re: "They'll charge it to the customers"

Posted Jan 9, 2010 18:13 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

Simply put, if it were possible for them to bring in more revenue by setting a higher price they would already have done so.

But it's not possible because we have laws to prevent an industry as a whole from setting a price of its own volition.

I know why you're responding this way. It's because when someone says a company will just pass on its costs to its customers, 99% of the time he doesn't understand economics and is wrong because he's talking about a product with high elasticity of demand -- for example a product of a single producer in a competitive market. However, in this case, I know a great deal about economics and was actually talking about a product with pretty high elasticity -- wireless phone service overall. The costs of having GSM not be encrypted affects all the providers.

Certainly, the statement, "If Sprint loses this lawsuit, it will just pass the cost of the judgment on to its customers" is wrong.

Re: "They'll charge it to the customers"

Posted Jan 9, 2010 18:20 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Whoops, I said phone service overall has pretty high elasticity of demand; I meant low. The demand is pretty inelastic. You can raise the price of phone service (from all providers) and a lot of people will still pay it.

Re: "They'll charge it to the customers"

Posted Jan 9, 2010 18:05 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

Everything you say is right and important, but I stand by my statement that the phone companies would pass the cost on to the customers instead of eating it.

First of all, I'm being approximate because the rise in price will not be the entire rise in cost; it will be somewhat less. This will cause there to be less phone service delivered (because some customers are priced out of the market), which will reduce costs to fill the rest of the gap.

But the more important part of my statement is that the producers won't eat the cost of fraud. It's a competitive market; the producers have no profits with which to eat it. The cost of fraud will be reflected in higher prices and less total service.

It's not true that if the industry could raise prices, it would do it even without the fraud. The competition among individual members of the industry prevents it from setting a price above cost.

Re: "They'll charge it to the customers"

Posted Jan 11, 2010 11:10 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

Mobile-phone usage probably does have a pretty inelastic demand. I wonder what the demand elasticity is for things like data plans, though.

Re: "They'll charge it to the customers"

Posted Jan 12, 2010 9:42 UTC (Tue) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

This is simply not true - consider the price of petrol, food, and many other commodities, which goes up at retail when the commodity costs go up. If retailers or producers didn't do this, they would go out of business, of course.