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Chinese cops cuff 1,500 in fake base station spam raid

The street finds its own uses for things, in this case Stinger/IMSI-catcher-type fake mobile-phone base stations:

Fake base stations are becoming a particularly popular modus operandi. Often concealed in a van or car, they are driven through city streets to spread their messages. The professional spammer in question charged 1,000 yuan (£100) to spam thousands of users in a radius of a few hundred metres. The pseudo-base station used could send out around 6,000 messages in just half an hour, the report said. Often such spammers are hired by local businessmen to promote their wares.

(tags: stingers imsi-catcher mobile-phones mobile cellphones china spam via:bernard-tyers)

TJ McIntyre on the incredible surveillance of telephone traffic at various Garda stations around the country

The most grave issue is that each recording likely amounted to a serious criminal offence. Under Irish law, the recording of a telephone conversation on a public network without the consent of at least one party to the call amounts to an “interception”, a criminal offence carrying a possible term of imprisonment of up to five years. […] Consequently, unless gardai were notified that their calls might be recorded then a large number of criminal offences are likely to have been committed by and within the Garda Siochana itself.

(tags: gubu surveillance gardai ags tjmcintyre bugging tapping phones ireland politics)

rr

A cool-looking new debugging tool for C/C++ from Mozilla.

Many, many people have noticed that if we had a way to reliably record program execution and replay it later, with the ability to debug the replay, we could largely tame the nondeterminism problem. This would also allow us to deliberately introduce nondeterminism so tests can explore more of the possible execution space, without impacting debuggability. Many record and replay systems have been built in pursuit of this vision. (I built one myself.) For various reasons these systems have not seen wide adoption. So, a few years ago we at Mozilla started a project to create a new record-and-replay tool that would overcome the obstacles blocking adoption. We call this tool rr.

(tags: via:bos mozilla debugging coding firefox rr record replay gdb c++ linux)

Ask AIB – Boards.ie

AIB now have a dedicated customer-support forum on Boards.ie. That is a *great* idea

(tags: aib banking support forums boards.ie banks)