Jamming Cellphones with Text Messages

Steve writes "Some Penn State professors and students have published a way to jam cellular voice service with simple text messages. From the article: 'Because text messages are transmitted on the same signal that is used to set up voice calls, just 165 messages a second is enough to disrupt all cellphones in Manhattan.' Cellular providers, of course, fired back, one stating that it 'constantly and aggressively monitors potential threats to the integrity and security of its network.'"

Blackberry jam

[EmbeddedJanitor]

more like!

Slashdotting a cell phone

[maxrate]

I guess it's kinda like a cell phone getting slashdotted too!

Re:u r hot

[rk87]

Easy enough, about 3 or 4 japanese school girls should be able to send a sustained rate of 180 messages a second.

No 12 Days of Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

Last year I had a friend that wrote an app that would text message a verse from the 12 days of Christmas every day, but something went horribly wrong and I was getting messaged a verse from that damn song every few milliseconds for a couple hours straight. Not fun.

Hey Steve! (you ass)

Re:165 msgs a sec OR

[Anonymous Coward]

So it costs a bunch to send those messages? So what? Bad guys can have some real (or fraudulant) financial resources when that's part of their plan.

1) Sign cell phone contract with monthly billing.
2) Send massive amounts of text messages.
3) Blow self up.
4) Don't care if phone bill is high at end of month - having too much fun with the 72 virgins.
5) ...
6) Profit?

Re:One problem.

[MightyMartian]

$990/minute, assuming a charge of 10 cents per message.

Ch-rist! For that price, I could have a dozen women heavy breathing on my cellphone, telling me how much they love it when I do that to them!

Re:165 msgs a sec OR

[ScentCone]

6) Profit?

Don't you mean "Prophet?"

Re:u r hot

[SeekerDarksteel]

Yeah, but lets face it. There are so much better things to do with 3 or 4 japanese school girls than text messages.

All you guys in Manhattan!

[Palal]

Hey all you guys in Manhattan! Are your cell phones working? If so, then I'll up the number of SMS/second.

Next up

[freaktheclown]

Next up, the Motorola JAMR!

+5 informative?

[Anonymous Coward]

When a simple check with google calc directly disproves the post. Mods on crack.

Re:Expensive

[hey!]

Yeah, and piloting an airliner into a building leaves you dead. So we don't worry about that, do we?

Re:now I know why text messages cost a fortune...

[Dan East]

Also- can anyone explain why data is still so damn expensive?

Sure. Carriers would prefer a small number of people to pay extremely high rates than a whole lot of people paying a reasonable rate. Otherwise they have to invest a lot more in their infrastructure to support the extra traffic. Competition is the only way to help the consumer in this area - the threat of completely losing a customer to a competitor is the only real motivation for a carrier to do anything. All the carriers have their data rates set very high, so at the moment no carrier is much more appealing than the others. As long as there is a group of people willing to pay a high price to utilize a worthwhile amount of available bandwidth the carrier is happy.

Same thing happens with gas stations. Ever notice how groups of gas stations within sight of each other sell gas at nearly the same price? Can't you just picture the managers, who have a tiny amount of say in the price of gas, looking over at their "competitor" and winking and nodding as they decide how high they will set their price?

Dan East

Re:What flavour?

[andrewagill]

RADAR TECH. Sir. The radar, sir. It appears to be....
Jam starts dripping down the screen.
RADAR TECH. ....jammed.
HELMET Jammed? (takes a taste of the jam) Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry. (pulls down mask) Lone Starr!
CAMERA hits HELMET. HELMET falls backwards.

Re:Texting phones is free with Google

[Minwee]

"Now all you need is a perl script and ... hello? ...hello?"

"Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?"

In other news...

[mcdade]

I'm writing a paper on how you put enough cars thru a major traffic intersection and it will create a problem and cause downtime in that area. I'm going to to call it a 'traffic jam'.

Tell us something we didn't know.. every technology has it's limit, flood it beyond capacity and you will see it fail.

nice.

-b

Re:One problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

for that price, you probably could have a dozen women breathing heavily on _you_ rather than just your phone, and _still_ tell you how much they love it.