5 years ago I wrote an obituary on the Thalys train on-board Wifi system. After a brilliant start in 2007 the system was working well for a while before it more and more became unusable. Fortunately, while cellular coverage on the German part along the tracks was and still is lousy, mobile network operators in … Continue reading Thalys Improves On-Board Internet Access – Somewhat
When Thalys started to offer Wifi service in 2009 on their trains in Europe I was ecstatic as it was working great. Over the years however, their service deteriorated to something barely usable (see here, here and here) and has remained so ever since. In contrast to their service, Internet access on high speed trains … Continue reading I Like Free Wifi on The Train – But Would I rather want to Pay for it?
Back in 2011 I had my first in-flight Internet experience over the Atlantic with a satellite based system. Since then I’ve been online a couple of times during national flights in the US where a ground based system is used. In Europe most carriers don’t offer in-flight Internet access so far but an LTE based … Continue reading In-Flight Internet Reloaded On A Flight To Asia
Some people would probably still say today that they don't need or want Internet access when going on vacation on a cruise ship or to a remote island. But I suppose their number is on a steep decline and cruise ship operators are investing in Wi-Fi Internet access on their ships not only in special … Continue reading Cruise Ship and Remote Island Internet Access
In the past couple of days I've had two posts on how we are now past the human subscription peak in Germany and also past peak telephony, both based on numbers of the German telecoms regulator (RegTP) report for 2014. In this third part let's have a look at some other numbers and how they … Continue reading German Telecoms Regulator Report For 2014
Here I am, over the clouds again and an interesting aspect of flying in the US is that they have Internet access on board on many of their flights. Here's how it worked for me while putting together this blog post: On Delta, Internet over the clouds is provided by GoGoAir and I was getting … Continue reading GoGo Experience Over The Clouds – Without Certificate Forgery
I'm always a bit shocked when I hear people saying that “Google and others track you anyway on your smartphone and there is nothing that can be done about it”. I sense a certain frustration not only on the side of the person who's made the statement. But I obviously beg to differ. As this comes up quite frequently I decided to put together a blog post that I can then refer to with the things that I do on my Android based device to keep my private data as private as possible.
The Three Cornerstones to Privacy
In essence, my efforts to keep my private data private is based on three cornerstones:
In some cases, implementing these cornerstones in practice is straight forward while other things require a more technical approach. The rest of this blog entry now looks at how I implement these cornerstones in practice.
After my previous posts on how to trace and analyze A-GPS SUPL requests (see here and here) I thought I'd also write a quick post with some references to more details on the parameters that are contained in an A-GPS SUPL message. When discussing GPS, two terms are regularly mentioned, The 'Almanac' and the 'Ephemeris … Continue reading More Background On SUPL, A-GPS, the Almanac and Ephemeris Data
In a previous post I've described my results of tracing an A-GPS SUPL request from my mobile device to the Google GPS location service and the issues I've discovered. In this follow-up post I thought I'd give an overview of how to setup up an environment that allows to trace and decode the conversation.
In a previous post I was delighted to report that assisted GPS (A-GPS) has become fast enough so I no longer have to rely on Google's Wi-Fi location service that in return requires me to send Wi-Fi and location data back to Google periodically. Unfortunately it turns out that the A-GPS implementation of one of my Android smartphones sends the ID of my SIM card (the IMSI) to the A-GPS server. From a technical point of view absolutely unnecessary and a gross privacy violation.
Read on for the details…