Arun

lol, right, its the UPA government. Its already being discussed here.

That does sound good

That will be a good idea, sojok

This is an article that was published by Times News Network - India for mobile phone subscribers to be aware of 'mobile cloning' and its related issues. Please do not post any reply asking more about the technical aspects of 'mobile cloning' as it is against the forum guidelines to discuss more about it What is mobile phone cloning? TIMES NEWS NETWORK [WEDNESDAY, MAY 18, 2005 09:46:20 AM] Are your mobile phone bills unexpectedly high? There’s a chance you are the victim of ‘‘mobile cloning’’. It is also known as cell phone piracy and has been taking place throughout the world since decades. Recently this crime has come to India. Mobile phones have become a major part of our everyday life. On the one hand, India’s mobile phone market has grown rapidly in the last few years on the back of falling phone tariffs and handset prices, making it one of the fastest growing markets globally. On the other the number of mobile phone subscribers is exceeding that of fixed-line users. The mobile phone subscriber base has already crossed the 50-mn mark. Today millions of mobile phones users, be it Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) or Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), run the risk of having their phones cloned. And the worst part is that there isn’t much that you can do to prevent this. Such crime first came to light in January, 2005 when the Delhi police arrested a person with 20 cell phones, a laptop, a SIM scanner, and a writer. The accused was running an exchange illegally wherein he cloned CDMA-based mobile phones. He used software for the cloning and provided cheap international calls to Indian immigrants in West Asia. A similar racket came to light in Mumbai resulting in the arrest of four mobile dealers. What is mobile phone cloning? Mobile cloning is copying the identity of one mobile telephone to another mobile telephone. How is a phone cloned? The “cloning” occurs when the account number of a victim telephone user is stolen and reprogrammed into another cellular telephone. Each cellular phone has a unique pair of identifying numbers: the electronic serial number (ESN) and the mobile identification number (MIN). The ESN/MIN pair can be cloned in a number of ways without the knowledge of the carrier or subscriber through the use of electronic scanning devices. After the ESN/MIN pair is captured, the cloner reprograms or alters the microchip of any wireless phone to create a clone of the wireless phone from which the ESN/MIN pair was stolen. The entire programming process takes 10-15 minutes per phone. Any call made with cloned phone are billed to and traced to a legitimate phone account. Innocent citizens end up with unexplained monthly phone bills. What is an ESN/MIN pair? The ESN is the serial number of your cellular telephone. And the MIN is simply the phone number of the cellular telephone. How can mobile phone thieves detect ESN/MIN pair? Cellular thieves can capture ESN/MINs using devices such as cell phone ESN reader or digital data interpreters (DDI). DDIs are devices specially manufactured to intercept ESN/MINs. By simply sitting near busy roads where the volume of cellular traffic is high, cellular thieves monitoring the radio wave transmissions from the cell phones of legitimate subscribers can capture ESN/MIN pair. Numbers can be recorded by hand, one-by-one, or stored in the box and later downloaded to a computer. ESN/MIN readers can also be used from inside an offender’s home, office, or hotel room, increasing the difficulty of detection. How is the ESN/MIN pair programmed in another phone? To reprogram a phone, the ESN/MINs are transferred using a computer loaded with specialised software, or a “copycat” box, a device whose sole purpose is to clone phones. The devices are connected to the cellular handsets and the new identifying information is entered into the phone. There are also more discreet, concealable devices used to clone cellular phones. Plugs and ES-Pros which are about the size of a pager or small calculator do not require computers or copycat boxes for cloning. The entire programming process takes ten-15 minutes per phone. What is the impact of cloning? Each year, the mobile phone industry loses millions of dollars in revenue because of the criminal actions of persons who are able to reconfigure mobile phones so that their calls are billed to other phones owned by innocent third persons. Often these cloned phones are used to place hundreds of calls, often long distance, even to foreign countries, resulting in thousands of dollars in air time and long distance charges. Cellular telephone companies do not require their customers to pay for any charges illegally made to their account, no matter how great the cost. But some portion of the cost of these illegal telephone calls is passed along to cellular telephone consumers as a whole. Many criminals use cloned cellular telephones for illegal activities, because their calls are not billed to them, and are therefore much more difficult to trace. This phenomenon is especially prevalent in drug crimes. Drug dealers need to be in constant contact with their sources of supply and their confederates on the streets. Traffickers acquire cloned phones at a minimum cost, make dozens of calls, and then throw the phone away after as little as a days' use. In the same way, criminals who pose a threat to our national security, such as terrorists, have been known to use cloned phones to thwart law enforcement efforts aimed at tracking their whereabouts. Do GSM and CDMS sets run the risk of ‘cloning’? Looking at the recent case, it is quite possible to clone both GSM and CDMA sets. The accused in the Delhi case used software called Patagonia to clone only CDMA phones (Reliance and Tata Indicom). However, there are software packages that can be used to clone even GSM phones (e.g. Airtel, Hutch, Idea). In order to clone a GSM phone, knowledge of the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) or instrument number is sufficient. What are GSM and CDMS mobile phone sets? CDMA is one of the newer digital technologies used in Canada, the US, Australia, and some South-eastern Asian countries (e.g. Hong Kong and South Korea). CDMA differs from GSM and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) by its use of spread spectrum techniques for transmitting voice or data over the air. Rather than dividing the radio frequency spectrum into separate user channels by frequency slices or time slots, spread spectrum technology separates users by assigning them digital codes within the same broad spectrum. Advantages of CDMA include higher user capacity and immunity from interference by other signals. GSM is a digital mobile telephone system that is widely used in Europe and other parts of the world. GSM uses a variation of TDMA and is the most widely used of the three digital wireless telephone technologies. GSM digitises and compresses data, then sends it down a channel with two other streams of user data, each in its own time slot. It operates at either the 900 MHz or 1,800 MHz frequency band.

LG RD 5130's price has gone down now to around Rs.3800 now , so a second hand one of two months old will fetch you around Rs.3000

Thanks for the detailed steps, clinton... I've seen some 2130 users asking for help in R-Connect with Linux, this should to helpful to them.

Reliance <-> TATA Indicom connectivity is still not yet available in Kerala.

This has been already discussed here a number of times. Please search or go through all the topics in R-World/Technical Programming forum. The OTA tools will work fine as I have been using it for some time now to test Java applications. Please continue from those posts instead of opening a new topic. Closing topic.

ofcoure Reliance and TATA are CDMA operators, even though they have seperate GSM arms too. Follow these links for updated statistics/news: http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1113022.cms http://www.zdnetindia.com/news/features/stories/121778.html

Have a great day, Dhananajay(27), rEdshiFt(29), afsal(37) !

The R-World in RD 6000 is based on BREW platform and they haven't yet deleveloped all the R-World applications that Java based handsets have.

well, 40 kbps (around 5 kB/sec) is not at all good, when they claim speeds upto 115 kbps, even if thats the average speed you get.

Ofcourse it can be used for R-Connect. And no, you cannot use GSM data cables.

Only in 'some pages' ? Most probably, you didn't notice as the image could have not loaded. If you still find, send me a screenshot ! It happens only for the Vanilla Cola Skin ? Which OS & browser version do you use ?

No, its not haunted. The 'permissions' for the skins folder were changed for testing purposes. I may make changes for further testing, which is related to the recent issue that we had faced. Anyway, I've changed them back to normal now.

It looks as though you are not yet a 'verified' customer of Reliance yet as they haven't 'uploaded' your CAF to their system yet. I'm not sure whether they require the CAF to be registered before R-Connect can be activated as I guess Prepaid connections should be pre-activated with R-Connect. Are you sure you entered the user/pass in the right format ? (93xxxxxxxxx:93xxxxxxxx)

wierd, absolutely wierd !

I doubt whether it will work on jBrowser, if it doesn't there is no point in implementing it.

Have you checked whether it working for any other RSS feed, using your WAP browser ?

Can you provide a link to it :-) Cheers .................................. 32281[/snapback] Here it is ! nice article btw

hmmm... it isn't clear whether the 'whole concept' of roaming will be removed. Most probably, that could mean there won't be any rental charges for roaming, but not exactly sure whether they meant incoming charge along with it. Anyway, fingers crossed till 25th

Mumbai | May 16, 2005 13:49 IST Giving a major fillip to India's fledgling broadband story, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, the public sector utility that offers telecom services in Delhi and Mumbai, is slated to offer unlimited broadband access to subscribers. Starting Tuesday (May 17), customers will have to pay no monthly rental and would end up paying only for the data they download at the rate of Rs 2 per MB. Broadband in the Indian context has been defined as Internet connection offering speeds of 256 kbps or above. Earlier MTNL used to charge its customers a minimum monthly rental of Rs 399 and allow free downloads of up to 400 MB. Extra downloads, i.e. beyond 400 MB, used to be charged at Rs 1.20 per MB. What the revenue implication of this deal will be is not yet known. According to telecom sector analysts if usage actually picks up then MTNL will actually stand to gain over a period of time. According to MTNL sources, the public sector company was adding close to 200 broadband subscribers daily and may end up having close to 400,000 subscribers in Delhi and Mumbai by December-end. MTNL, which launched its broadband services on January 24, is also mulling the offering of cable TV over broadband to its customer base. MTNL may also soon provide cable TV channels to its broadband subscribers, says an Economic Times report. These channels, said the report, will also be free. Apart from this, the telecom PSU also plans to launch another plan -- TriB 599 -- which will offer download speeds of 512 kbps and 500 MB data download free to customers. For extra downloads, it will cost customers Rs 1.20 per MB. TriBand 599 will have a monthly rental of Rs 599.

whoa, that was an excellent tutorial, dacodecz ! thanks for encouraging us to explore into Linux ! its time for me to pin this topic

rakesh, this was not announced by any operator, but DoT. The announcement is applicable to all operators. Yes, there should be more announcements from the operators and in the media by the 25th.

Use the same MMS method