Phone hacking is bad, how can we prevent it ?

In relations to Thursday, November 25, 2004, the post on "Trojan on cell phones".

I agree that phone should adapt to insecure medium but that will not solve this problem entirely. Let's us take a history trip back to the past.

Cell phones have never been exactly known as secure devices. With analog phones, curious "hobbyists" can pick up your conversations using the type of radio frequency scanner that you buy at Radio-Specialist shops to listen to police and emergency services bands. Digital and PCS transmissions are more secure, but can still be intercepted and decoded by someone with the right equipment. I am sure all of you know that your cell phone transmits every few seconds when it's turned on, even if you aren't talking on it.

How can mobile phone technology be made more secure? Many phones allow the owner to "lock" them so that no calls, or no long distance calls, can be made. A password or PIN must be entered to unlock the phone. Last year, Casio developed a tiny fingerprint scanner for cell phones that could be used to require biometric identification to use the phone, but it doesn't seem to have caught on. Similarly, a German company announced a "cryptophone" that promised high level protection against eavesdroppers, but with its $4,000 price tag (USD), it wasn't exactly marketed toward the average cell phone user.

Here are some questions we ponder:

What do you think about this now? Are you worried about the security of your mobile phone, or do you think that we should get better security from the phone company since we paid so much?

Similarly, if the price were right, would you prefer phones that require strong authentication (such as a fingerprint scan or a "smart card"), password/PIN protection, or strong encryption technology?

Now, with phone hackers on the lose, there might even be a possibility that cell phones will eventually become vulnerable to attacks by Internet-connected computers ? Considering Internet-connected phone or IP phones are getting more and more accepted by consumers.

Play Pac-man in the real world ?

Yes, just imagine, players put on some computerised suits and special goggles which allow them to see virtual elements present in the Pac-Man game world such as edible balls for points as well as other players who will appear either as other Pac-Men or Ghosts. Most interestingly, the game's backdrop is set in our every own world.



One day, we might be playing Pac-Man in big shopping malls or right in the heart of our main campus.

Furthermore, if this game is developed on mobile devices such as the mobile phones, imagine what kind of effect it will take on gamers in the next decade.

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3D games

PC games have come a long way to its present state. Ever since 3D games became one of the most played games, I have been always excited to try all of them. Well, as you know, there are two standards in 3D graphic rendering, Direct 3D and OpenGL.

Direct 3D vs OpenGl

From my research, I realised that these standards can be selected in different situation to give better 3D processing. These situation are based on ease of use, speed, extensions and portability. Since OpenGL seem to be a better option in many cases, most game developers would still allow you to choose which standard to use.

For me, I quite like how the way 3D games are installed now. Most of them can detect your system's configuration and give you the best suggestion which standard to use. This transparency allows the user to quickly install the game and start playing the game which what we buy the game for right? It's not a good idea to let the gamer to ponder on which standards to use and he/she does not even know whether the game is compatible to the PC's configurations.

Have you ever ignored the fire alarm ?

Yes, obviously you can't. The fire alarm is the primary warning signal in any detected occurrence of a fire. In my opinion, we should never take any chances in these emergencies.

But that has changed ever since my stay in one of the school hall of residences. Each week, on the average, the alarm sounded about 1-4 times on weekdays and about 1-3 on weekends. Till now, all of these warnings turned out to be just false alarms. Due to this circumstance, my confidence in the fire alarm warning system was greatly dampen. Nowadays, instead of rushing out of the building, my flatmates and I preferred to endure the annoying alarm and continue to stay in our rooms.

Seeing this as an opportunity for HCI blogging, i interviewed my flatmates and friends from other halls. The majority would just ignore it. This is totally insane !

This encounter made me realised that if we have to design some warning or error reporting system/programs, we do need to consider the priorties of reporting the warning/errors to the user/audience or it would be just plain annoying.

One examples would be Microsoft's Internet browser, the Internet explorer which would pop a dialog box asking whether if you want to debug the the error found ? These is definitely not required and totally useless to the user. Why would you ask the novice user to debug the errors? My suggestion would be to hide these error messages from the user but instead display it to the developers only.

As for the fire alarm problem, maybe they should just install water sprinklers that will activate in events of a detected fire in that particular room. This will definitely discourage pranksters and irresponsible hall mates. Of course, then it will be even more exciting to flood your flatmate's room !