Tag: mobile

eMobile, NetworkManager and You

While being in Ireland I happened to have access to an Irish eMobile SIM card and USB modem. The modem was a Huawei e173 and it worked perfectly well on a recent Ubuntu installation. Even the USB modeswitch worked out of the box 🙂

However, I couldn’t dial up with any of my Linux machines while I double checked that it worked on Windows using their software. The NetworkManager wouldn’t list the settings for eMobile and every other setting from Meteor didn’t work. The NetworkManager in debug mode revealed that the connection got cut just after the PPPd requested configuration settings. I tried to change the PPPd settings for hours with no success.

Funnily enough, not even my N900 could connect to the Internet using the predefined connection. That was named “Meteor DATA” and used “data.mymeteor.ie” as APN.

Also very interesting, that I couldn’t find the neccessary dial up information *anywhere* on the web. The eMobile.ie site is utterly unstructured and didn’t allow me to find any sensible information at all. I sent them an email but I still haven’t receive any answer.

After having had access to a Windows box with their software again, I found out that it uses the APN: “broadband.eircommbb.ie“. Putting that into the NetworkManager makes it dial up *yay*!

So I hope this information is useful for anybody wanting to use their eMobile SIM Card with their Linux based system. I also prepared a patch for mobile-broadband-provider-info so you should be able to click the connection via NetworkManager easily 🙂

Bossa Conference 2010

I’ve just attended Bossa Conference 2010 in Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil. Thanks again to the Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia (INdT) for holding this amazing conference. I’d say it’s somewhat like FOSS.in, but with less people and a more relaxed atmosphere.

I gave a talk about “Security in Mobile Devices” and went very well although I refactored my slides just shortly before I gave it and I expected more fuckups. But the people apparently enjoyed it and I got lots of interesting feedback. You can find my slides here.

If you’ve been there and want to follow-up, you might find the Maemo Wiki on Security interesting. I recommend to read through the stuff that Collin Mulliner did, on i.e. NFC or the iPhone. Also the things that he did together with Charlie Miller are worth reading, basically fuzzing the Operating System by pretending to be the modem which produced interesting results. But there is more work to be done which I am convinced will give more interesting results in the future. Maemo on the N900 apparently doesn’t talk via a serial line to the modem but rather via PhoNet, making it even more interesting to fiddle around with the low level GSM stack.

As for policies and statistics,  Symantecs Ollie Whitehouse wrote some interesting articles such as this or that. Other, more technical papers include Yves Younans Filter Resistant ARM Shellcode or some guys proposing Kirin to extend the Android security model. For a more general overview, have a loot at a good Android link list.

As for the rest of the conference, I felt that it was a bit shallow content-wise probably because of all that Qt stuff that was presented. But in fairness, they had to bring it since it’s going to be used by Maemo Meego. Anyway, I enjoyed it pretty much, because the people were all open and interested and I had good conversations. And good food 😉

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.