Tbh, contraptions like this have a long history for gray-market VoIP call termination, but usually in countries where governments charge a lot for incoming international calls as means of fund-raising (or inefficient telecoms) but domestic rates are low.
Merge with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45353925 ?
Praising the device and stating how cool it is? Highlighting how inexpensive it is? Screenshots of how it works? Saying where you can buy it from?
The line is blurry but this article has all of that. Here's to responsible journalism and being inundated with more spam on my phone so that a newsletter gets more clicks.
This problem isn't going to be solved by making information about the devices more obscure. It's going to be solved by technical preventions and legal action against the senders.
This explains using such a bank. You want to cover as many prefixes as possible and you can’t match area codes with traditional sms services.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/erratarob.bsky.social [2] https://cybersect.substack.com/p/that-secret-service-sim-far...
I actually did see the tweet in full it turns out. It's just that there's not much content so i figured "oh it's one of those twitter thread chains i can't read".
Still not gonna help if you have cookies disabled because of the rate limiting, but hey.
Someone used an online SMS service to send threatening messages to a member of the Gleichschaltung squad, and the secret service traced the SIM card back to one of these rented apartments. The reason it was linked to a "Chinese state sponsored blah blah blah" is because most Chinese criminal operations in the US have some indirect benefit to the Chinese government, which is why they are allowed to operate.
You could use this hardware to launch some sort of a flooding attack, but given the density all you are going to knock out is the one cell site all your devices are talking to. If China wanted to knock out cell service around the UN they would use the hundreds of thousands of backdoored Android phones in New York to launch a more distributed attack.
I think this explains why the spam texts I receive never show up as an iMessage or rcs. This thing-a-ma-hugger doesn’t support it.
It is being pushed by the carriers because retail locations are their biggest overhead expense, for what is basically a place to go pick up a SIM card.
Cache of devices capable of crashing cell network is found in NYC (263 points, 251 comments)
it's been a few interesting couple months at work, as google being google there was never an announcement or anything.
leakycap•1h ago
Sad to see Mobile-X MVNO as the preferred SIM in the photos shown, but I wonder if an MVNO has local-level data to detect a situation like this when hundreds of phones are in one area and don't move. Postpaid carriers running their own network might easily connect the dots between SIM/accounts/phone towers... but the piggyback nature of MVNO network management probably makes even detecting this behavior even harder.
rr808•36m ago
mike_d•14m ago
MVNOs don't care because they collect the profit without having to deal with any of the network issues. The carriers in turn only care when it impacts performance for legitimate customers, as they also see a piece of the pie.