cell phones

Silently tapping into a private cell phone conversation is no longer a high-tech trick reserved for spies and the FBI. Thanks to the work of two young cyber-security researchers, cellular snooping may be soon be affordable enough for your next-door neighbor. In a presentation Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Washington, D.C., David Hulton and Steve Muller demonstrated a new technique for cracking the encryption used to prevent eavesdropping on GSM cellular signals, the type of radio frequency coding used by major cellular service providers including AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile. Combined with a radio receiver, the pair say their technique allows an eavesdropper to record a conversation on these networks from miles away and decode it in about half an hour with just $1,000 in computer storage and processing equipment.

MemeBox.com announces the Public Beta release of its first application, the Future Scanner (futurescanner.net), a community-powered app that organizes info about the future by year and category. Dedicated to the cutting-edge stories shaping our tomorrow, the MemeBox Future Scanner is an essential part of every forward-thinking person's toolkit.

McDonalds is experimenting with the ultimate line-buster in South Korea, where customers purchase food on their cell phones, which then ring when the order is ready. But this trial is much more an RFID effort than a traditional mobile experiment. Most of the phone's communications capabilities and its display are barely used, with customers having to download a McDonalds application into their phone.

WASHINGTON - Entomologists from across the country are meeting in Maryland on Tuesday to puzzle over a strange phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder, where bees in 25 states so far leave their hives and never return.

TOKYO Dec 28, 2006 (AP)— Stores in central Tokyo are set to beam news of special offers, menus and coupons to passers-by in a trial run of a radio-tagging system. The Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project, which launches in the glitzy Ginza district next month, sends shoppers information from nearby shops via a network of radio-frequency identification tags, infrared and wireless transmitters, according to the project's Web site.