It's time GSM killed off dial-up modem in notebooks
Opinion It could also recover stolen laptops
MOBILE PHONE network coverage is almost everywhere. And mobile phones can be easily be tracked as soon as powered up, even if there's no SIM card installed. So why do laptops still include an obsolete dial-up modem instead of a built-in GPRS modem which could also act as a location device after the unit is reported stolen?
Notebook theft is a favourite sport for low-life people everywhere. It's easy: the merchandise is small, lightweight, and effortlessly moved around, and can be resold at a pub or a street corner without fear of being caught, as there's no way to pinpoint the location of it. But things shouldn't be so easy for laptop thieves.
For the sake of this argument, we'll ignore CDMA-only areas especially across the pond - the world is much bigger than the 300 million people in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Research firm ABI says of all mobile technologies, GSM has the highest number of subscribers with a 78 per cent market share in 2007, world-wide.
Just as mobile operators are able to identify a stolen mobile phone by tracking the phone radio's IMEI code - no matter if the thief changes the SIM card to another phone number - they could do the same with computers, provided notebooks were essentially carrying a mobile phone embedded within.
In other words: there's little reason nowadays for not having a GSM/GPRS radio built in into every notebook for connectivity purposes. The advantages would be twofold: first, coupled with a SIM slot, it'd provide instant wireless low-speed connectivity, and second, it would be like having an anonymous location device on-board.
If you think about it for a second, the RJ11 port and Winmodem in today's laptops is feeling increasingly obsolete. It doesn't feel like the 3 1/2-inch diskette drive in an ancient Stinkpad yet, but give it time. Some mobile modems can be had for $12, but that's taking things to an extreme. Let's suppose the real cost is two and a half times that amount.
The bill of materials to integrate GPRS/Edge into a mobo can't be much higher than half the cost of the bottom of the barrel mobile phones. After all, a mobile phone includes a battery, a screen, a PCB antenna, a hard case, - all items the notebook already includes in its price. So there's indeed a missed opportunity by system builders not adding a GSM/GPRS radio into notebook mobos. GSM is everywhere. Land in any country in Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and soon Antarctica and you will be able to find GSM mobile phone service.
The GSM association hasn't thought of the implications of the market share implications of having every notebook becoming a GSM device.
Stolen notebooks tracking as a bonus
The reason there's a market for stolen notebooks is because people who buy these
from a chap on the street at ludicrously low prices know they can't be easily
tracked and get caught if it's a stolen unit. And the hopes of the legit owner
of ever getting his notebook back are slim. So, the advantages of having a
built-in GSM/GPRS radio as part of a notebook system board are twofold: besides
instant connectivity almost everywhere where civilization is, comes the hope of
getting higher recovery rates for the stolen kit.
Looking at it from the thief's perspective, if every stolen notebook needs to be 'serviced' with an indeterminate expense in time and money to disable its built-in GSM radio, the business is no longer as attractive as it was before. Other "solutions" involving installing software, IP geolocation and the like cannot match a notebook mainboard mass-broadcasting its IMEI number to any GSM network within reach. [Evil Twin note: perhaps notebook manufacturers want systems to be easily stolen, so you buy new ones!]
Making it hard to disable would be a matter of placing the GSM chip and GPRS radio below one of the mainboard chips, or sandwiched below the Bios Flash. There's allegedly a GSM phone wristwatch, which we haven't seen, but miniaturisation has gone very far. In short: any would-be hackers have to de-solder or drill through the mainboard PCB to reach it. In a world where even digital cameras like Nikon's feature GPS chips and some have Wi-Fi, why hasn't anyone thought making GPRS/Edge part of every PC and kill two birds with one stone?
Suddenly, you wouldn't have to rely on the chances of being hit by a thief dumb enough to have his face shown by the webcam, and the authorities could - if they wanted - easily pinpoint on a map, with the assistance of the mobile operator- the sites where notebooks reported stolen are routinely powered up.
Before you downplay the notebook theft figures, it should be mentioned that according to a recent news story, about 10,000 notebooks are reported stolen per week at US airports, and the recovery rate is only 35 per cent. The GSM-based location service is a tested technology which has been perfected and multiple location based services are now available, of which Google Maps with "My Location" using GSM positioning is the current usage in vogue. It's not as exact as GPS but it's better than nothing.
A GSM radio doesn't have to do anything, just start working, to be pinpointed on the mobile network. And while a determined hacker can defeat anything given enough time and resources, time and resources is something a low life who steals notebooks often doesn't have. To boot, the impact on battery life would be minimal, given the battery size difference between a mobile and a laptop.
The market for high-end modems for WiMax and "3G" HSDPA wouldn't be affected, as these come with a higher price tag. We're talking here about replacing the aging dial-up modem which is part of the system board with a low-cost wireless version.
Okay, we hear can the chorus of negative comments: its overkill, it won't work and nobody would want slow wireless connectivity thrown in for free, much less if it comes just for a $25 price increase over today's systems.
Playing Devil's advocate, suppose it doesn't work and also nobody wants the added benefit of tracking stolen notebooks - even if the locations can suddenly appear in a real-time map when powered up. Yet think again: isn't it time the Winmodem was gone for good and replaced with a form of basic wireless connectivity like GPRS? µ
L'INQs
10,000
notebooks stolen per week at US airports
Are
GSM phones THE solution for localisation?
AOL
and how to profit from the death of dial-up
Comments
GSM + USA
erm, you DO know that there's at least 2 nationwide GSM carriers in the US, both rolling out 3G (a bit late, but better than never).And in fact the Jesus Phone is GSM?
Why not snark about South Korea (CDMA) or Japan (DoCoMo)?
Because anti-Americanism is the cheap laugh. Well done! But don't think we'll come to save you when they're replacing the towers of Canterbury Cathedral with minarets..
No thanks
Well, first off, it wouldn't be "free low-speed connectivity", unless you entered into a contract with a mobile provider (in most countries). Some of us actually don't fap ourselves into a lather over the latest mobile, and get along quite nicely with pre-pay without such things, and having to get exposed to the world of hurt that is mobile contracts would be a chilling factor when buying a new laptop.Secondly.. I have contents insurance. If one of my laptops is stolen, I claim it back. I do not want to be tracked via the laptop. It's bad enough that the mobile phone facilitates this, internet traffic is snooped upon and everywhere is blanketed by CCTV. Why anyone would voluntarily decide to be more tracked is quite beyond me.
I wish I had an exciting and mysterious enough life that I had something worthwhile to hide- but as it is, all this information collected is usable as circumstantial evidence to hang various accusations on you. A friend of mine spent some time in custody due to having been unlucky enough to appear on CCTV in the wrong street at the wrong time- he was later released without charge, but it caused major problems with his family and employer.
Consider, if you will, the implications of laptops tracking you willy-nilly- it's yet another thing you need to eschew if you're someone who doesn't want to be tracked. Political opposition in countries with less than cuddly leaders have just another thing they need to learn to avoid- writing everything with dead tree until they can get to a land line to send their PGPed email- an unnecessary spped bump, and one that makes them easier to track (etc).
I dunno, it was an interesting article, but I can't help feeling that the idea is utterly terrible. The more that I think about it, the more objections spring to mind. So, I'm going to stop thinking about it now, and press "Submit Comment".
Increased recovery doubtful
I'm doubtful the inclusion of a GSM chip would increase recovery rates for laptops to be honest, best it could do is tell plod in which cell the laptop was last used, and I'm sure they would be very interested (not).A more practical benefit of the GSM chip might be to completely disable the laptop at the BIOS or hardware level once the IMEI has been blacklisted, in much the same way that stolen mobile phones are useless once they have been blacklisted.
Also, the SIM slot can be optional if the laptop has Bluetooth. With Bluetooth, the laptop can access the SIM card in the owners phone using the Bluetooth SIM Access Profile, avoiding the need for the owner to have two mobile network accounts. Then again, if the laptop had Bluetooth it could just access the modem in the mobile phone...
a truly sensible article
This is one of the most down-to-earth practical things I've ever read on the Inq.As a reader from "across the pond" I applaud your suggestion and think it is way beyond time for this to happen. Except of course it'd need to be CDMA, but beside that.
I have a PCMCIA mobile card for my laptops and, in town, get EVDO rev A almost everywhere, rev 0 in the other places. When I'm out of town (such as the small town in which my in-laws live) I can normally get at least a 1xRTT which is enough to check email and perhaps some text-only surfing with elinks.
This would be a very intelligent idea.
The caveat being all the major carriers (save Alltel) in the US have data caps on their mobile modems.
poppycock
While I live in a CDMA zone I'm pretty sure there is no better location awareness for GSM than there is for CDMA. Which means that your location can be determined to the nearest cell phone tower that your handset is currently connected to. That would give your location within a rather large radius (think 10 km more or less depending on number of buildings and terrain in your area). By tracking movement (from tower to tower) one might be able to pinpoint direction of travel and even location to a fairly small radius at a given moment, but not for long.Disinformation about the ease with which police can capture stolen cell phones or users of cloned cell phones has it's purpose but frightening the thieves is not one of them. Frightening you and me from buying from them certainly would be.
The best way police have to capture illegal cell phones is to track known criminals and gangs. Not tracking the cell phones but the people. A far cry from your technical utopia where we are all tracked to our precise location with our mobile phone.
The mobile is not GPS. Better to advocate GPS. Still, there's little chance that will work unless GPS is wired to the hardware to otherwise disable the hardware if the GPS is disabled. Try getting that past the privacy groups.
Big Brother
I prefer not to have my legitimately purchased and legaly used notebook to be trackable at any given time by anyone other than me.Finding good spots for a fort is hard enough already.
No better recovery
I have to agree with Neil. While it is technically possible to locate the item to within a cell, the police have to care enough to serve a warrant on (all) the mobile networks in order to actually GET that information.And let's face it, they do have much more important things to do, such as catching drivers doing 11km/hr over the speed limit on the motorway.
In any case in practice the best you could hope for would be that the IMEI is blacklisted and - OMG - the modem effectively stops working. You're still never going to see your laptop ever again.
Baloney
yeah just what we need ...more intrusion into our freedoms so stupid ass people who cant remember were they left a thousand dollar notebook can be helped...no thanks. Its time to start letting the stupid people fall down and learn the lessons of life. Besides dial tone is the most common technology on the planet...and you want me to cut off access in favor of some craptacular technology that is really only available in cities ? yeah ok....Bad Idea
I think it would be an bad idea...... from the fact that you could track where someone else is, and also wouldnt that drag down the already crowded wireless networks? Aside from people already using it for mobile phone calls and mobile web browsing, pc or laptop computers use alot more data when connected to the net so that would slow the data usage down to an crawl. Bad idea I think so.Big Bro
Maybe some of us don't want to be tracked and wish to choose how we reveal ourselves to the world. I content fully patriotic, non terror suspects have the right to personal choice regardless of what some holier-than-thou, politico-cretin thinks.Sorry, I'll opt for not giving up that personal freedom.
@john
Actually, John, mobile phones are tracked by triangulating their position from several towers. In ideal conditions they can get you down to a few feet, though generally it'll be a few yards (or metres for our metric friends across the channel). CDMA and GSM will both do this with ease.Poppycock on your poppycock
Actually location awareness can be done on GSM on a single base station. It uses heuristics based on relative signal strength between directional aerials and phase errors between late reflections and the main signal. It's therefore more accurate in built up areas than in open countryside. Of course if the terminal is in contact with more than one base station you can just triangulate.This is used by the UK emergency services to locate terminals that 112 or 999 calls have been made from. It's also used by paid for services to track specific phones. You have to give permission for your phone to be tracked via sending an SMS from it, but it's easy for parents to give a phone that they've "pre-authorised" to their children or for nefarious people to send and SMS from phone left on a table etc.
See
http://www.traceamobile.co.uk/
INQ pays you too much money
Around here mobile phone coverage costs a lot of money. We can use our office dial-up connection for a flat-rate per month. Not a charge per minute.RE: poppycock
Actually, location information from mobile works quite well, granted, it's not as accurate as GPS, but especially if you are near a base station, location to within 20m is quite possible and typically works.If you are between base stations, the information such as signal strength and frequency works quite well to give you a location within 500m. This works well with the Google Maps application, and has helped me figure out where I am many times. This unfortunately however isn't going to be enough to give police any incentive to go after a stolen laptop. If you could tell them where and when in advance they could well go after it, but otherwise, the idea of permanently disabling the laptop and making it useless is a great idea in my opinion.
Wiping the hard disk or making it unreadable would be even better with all the data loss that seems to be occurring at the moment.
I've been told
In Canada, 911 services receive no location information. This is a problem that I am aware of. It is also what I was using as a basis, along with some outdated data, for my ill-informed opinion.So I accept that the capability exists and surely in the future it will improve. For the nonce, 911 service in Canada has no location awareness and in the u.s. their are a few areas in large cities that provide it.
I still love the line, "A far cry from your technical utopia where we are all tracked to our precise location ..."
Maybe I can use it somewhere else.
Liberty can be given away
The emergency tracking service is called e911 in US. It requires the emergency call center (999 in UK) to have equipment to receive and process the signal from the phone. Also required is that the phone be within range of a cell tower. Having used a cell phone in US I find it is quite easy even in "high coverage" areas to have no contact with a cell tower.As for cost, you're looking at hundreds of dollars a month in charges if you keep usage reasonable. Not too many months ago INQ reported on a Canadian man who used his cell phone to connect to the internet ... Can$85,000 later he got the bill...
Aside from that the author has kindly laid out what the NSA, CIA and other agencies NOT authorized to conduct domestic surveilance in US would immediately put into practice...only to track known terrorists of course :P
The reason we have a constitutional right to bear arms in US is so that we will have the weapons to rebel if it becomes necessary. It goes against American ideals to make it easy for the government to track down and 'disappear' individuals who have upset a government bureaucrat.
You don't need to be paranoid to think this way, you just need to be aware of the things that the news media has chosen to talk about. We're left to wonder how many of these secret programs are running undiscovered and how many of the legitimate ones are being used for unintended purposes (FBI & National Security Letters for example)
You lose the freedoms you aren't ready to fight for
Fritz
yes thanks
You wont use a modem at home or in the office, where the phonecalls maybe free, because there you have internet. But a modem is usefull when you are one the road but there phonecalls are rarely free. And you don't need a contract, a prepaid is good enough. And you don't have the work at gartner what will be included with every laptop if you look at the shovelware that is included with most laptops. Any laptop will include a prepaid SIM card for a day or 2 use and an easy way to top it up