You Couldn’t Make it Up It’s starting to sound like something from Monty Python. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition GCHQ. Our chief weapon is surprise, and snooping. Our two chief weapons are surprise, snooping and building a database of the whole population, etc. All we need now is the “and near fanatical devotion to the… Read More


SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit Another day, another piece of the Snowden papers. This is probably the least surprising revelation from the Snowden papers. Texts are sent in the clear, and always have been. i.e. there is no encryption in the SMS standard. Vodafone are reported to be “shocked and surprised”, although I’m… Read More


In the Interests of National Security? A very interesting article came to light over the weekend. Aftenposten.no (Norway’s Evening News – their largest newspaper) runs a story on GSM and A5/1, the encryption standard within GSM, reporting how the British requested weaker encryption. We have the Washington Post reporting that the NSA can break one… Read More


A Very Brief History of Telecoms We’ve been writing a description of how our VSIM hosting service works. To help understand it’s helpful to take a lightning speed, but somewhat technical, tour of the history of telecoms. I’ve conflated a few steps to smooth our journey a little! We’ve come a long, long way since… Read More


Inbound SMS Text Messaging Oh so boring and 20th Century. SMS may not be the latest in thing, but everyone has a device capable of texting, and 17.6 billion messages are sent daily across the globe. So we’re not ready to write an obituary quite yet! SMS may not be very Web 2.0 and sexy,… Read More


SMS Delivery Status is Important In a week they proudly announced a record drop in unemployment, the French government have been forced to admit the figures were rather too good. Turns out that they miscounted the jobless by around 25,000 due to SFR having a technical issue.  It turns out that the automated texts sent via SFR to French… Read More


Better SMS SPAM Blocking Coming to the UK… Interesting to learn that one of the large UK networks has a new product coming online soon – automated detection and blocking of SIM Farms and grey routes. (Grey routes being non-interconnected routes). So a new product that most customers will have no awareness of at all,… Read More


Programmers’ Day Today is the 256th (0x100 or 2^8th) day of the year. Programmers’ Day is an officially recognised day in Russia – Dmitry Medvedev issued an executive order establishing it as a new professional holiday back in 2009. It’s fair to say that without programmers much of what we take for granted in the… Read More