Its never to late to learn – you too can be an object of fear to the authorities.

Keep up with your teenage children.

Only requires one moving finger, the rest of you can be as dormant as you like.

Bring the world down from your sofa…..

Mummy x August 31, 2011 at 07:51

Living it up eh, Anna.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44333581/ns/us_news-weird_news/#.Tl3ZIF1EMSF

Mummy x

John Pickworth
August 31, 2011 at 00:24

Thank you.

I’ve been banging on for years that this wasn’t so much ‘hacking’ as in the
James Bond sense but more akin to someone printing off their emails and
leaving them on their desk.

I’m glad its all out in the open though. Maybe now that a rich source of
Sleb’ Goss has dried up then perhaps the newspapers will have more… ermm…
news? One can hope!

Andrew Duffin
August 30, 2011 at 17:15

What formertory said.

Blocking all external voicemail access would cause problems, actually.
Blocking it unless a PIN had been set would be reasonable. Many phone
companies do that when international roaming is involved, for obvious reasons
of cost.

But these half-wits would no doubt write down the PIN or use their own date
of birth, or something equally daft. There’s no security system that can’t be
defeated by determinedly stupid lusers.

formertory August 30, 2011 at 09:42

It’s arguably less about the mobile phone companies than it is about the
sheer crass stupidity of politicians, celebs, media personalities and the like
who never took the personal responsibility of setting passwords. It beggars
belief that senior politicians, for instance, hadn’t taken even the most basic
precautions; was there no advice given to them by their staff / civil servants
/ police?

Do these people leave their front doors unlocked when they leave the house
each day?

ivan August 30, 2011 at 15:17

You are assuming the aforementioned politicians, celebs etc actually have
a couple of functioning brain cells between them – something that has been
shown to be a false assumption so far.

alan August 30, 2011 at 09:22

I’m surprised that no-one has sued the phone companies for this. Surely
they must have some responsibility to keep customer voice mails private and to
fix major security flaws within an acceptable time frame?

Is the Leveson Inquiry going to ask hard questions at the mobile phone
companies about their complete failure to address these problems?

JuliaM August
30, 2011 at 10:56

If they made it any harder, most of the halfwits who use mobile phones
would never be able to get their OWN voicemail!

alan August 30, 2011 at 14:38

Blocking external voice mail access by default would not cause many
problems as most people dont use external mail access. Sending your phone
a text message everytime your voice mail is accessed externally would be
helpful. Preventing call-id spoofing using mobile phones by verifying the
IMEI number would be invisible to all users (except hackers!)

Hacking mobile phones could be made significantly harder with little to
no impact.

Matt
Wardman August 30, 2011 at 07:55

.. then all you need is a newspaper silly enough to print it and 60 million
people silly enough to read it ..