Saturday, November 11, 2006

Fact or fiction - anonymous phones?

And the answer appears to be 'yes!'. Just bought a $15 SIM from Cingular for an unlocked HTC Wizard (what I am using to post this message). Could have bought the fone too at the same time. 'Could you give me your name and address? No? I'll just put the store name and address then.' No problem.

This plays a role in 'Dead Children' btw. Kathy drops off the map and uses these 'disposable' fones when some cops in the pay of corrupt politicians are looking to kill her while 'resisting arrest'...

Badtux the Researching Penguin

Posted by BadTux at 11/11/2006 01:03:00 PM

8 comments:

  1. Are these available in the US already?

    ReplyDelete

  2. Umm, I don't have a frigging clue what you are talking about.

    And if I go on vacation I'm not going to take a lot of tech crap with me and do any blogging.

    What part of vacation don't you understand?

    ReplyDelete

  3. Lurch, I am in the US last time I looked. The Cingular store in question is in Santa Clara, CA. BTW this is via the PDA too...

    Badtux The Mobile Penguin

    ReplyDelete

  4. erm.... over here we've always had them..... do you have "Pay as you go" over there?

    Buy a phone, new or second hand, buy a sim card, pay for "top up" cards as needed to keep the phone online.... hack the phone if necessary to open it to your preferred network ( not hard and the networks don't care... your paying for the service when you buy the top-up cards.)

    No-one asks for your name or address if you do that.

    Not over here....

    At least, not yet.

    ReplyDelete

  5. Yep, David, that's how it works over here with the prepaid phone SIM's.

    Over here the carriers are considerably more anal about phone unlocking, because they want to throw obstacles into the way of you moving to another carrier, but the hacking tools are widely available on the Internet to unlock the phones. For some phones, like my old R1 HTC wizard, the tool is software and is free. In other cases the tool is hardware and costs money. This only works for GSM, of course. CDMA was designed from the start to lock people into carriers, they do not have SIM cards, the phone's ID is built in, whereas GSM was designed by European consumer agencies to be pro-consumer and thus implicitly has portability built in (via the SIM cards).

    ReplyDelete

  6. Interesting, I have a cheap prepaid Track phone, but consider it pretty much a piece of junk that couldn't do what is being talked about here.

    Not that I would know how anyway.

    ReplyDelete

  7. Well, BBC, as far as I know data service is not yet available for prepaid. So don't feel bad about not knowing how to post blog entries (and blog comments!) over a cell phone :-).

    - Badtux the Wireless Penguin

    ReplyDelete

  8. these phones are here (arizona) and used exclusively by drug people...yep...

    ReplyDelete

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