Anonymous Caller? New Service Says, Not Any More

By Kevin Poulsen

A new service set for launch Tuesday allows cellphone users to unmask the Caller ID on blocked incoming calls, obtaining the phone number, and in some cases the name and address, of the no-longer-anonymous caller.

The service, called TrapCall, is offered by New Jersey's TelTech systems, the company behind the controversial SpoofCard Caller ID spoofing service. The new service is likely to be even more controversial — and popular.

"What’s really interesting is that they’ve totally taken the privacy out of Caller ID," says former hacker Kevin Mitnick, who alpha-tested the service.

TrapCall's basic unmasking service is free, and includes the option of blacklisting unwanted callers by phone number. It also allows you to listen to your voicemail over the web. It's currently available to AT&T and T-Mobile subscribers, with support for the other major carriers due within weeks, says TelTech president Meir Cohen.

"It’s not meant for spies, it’s not meant for geeks, it’s not meant for any specific target audience,” Cohen says. "Everybody hates getting blocked calls, and in this day and age they want to know who’s calling, and they want the option of taking the call or not."

Consumers have had the option of shielding their number from display since Caller ID was introduced in the early 1990s, either by dialing *-6-7 before placing a call, or asking their carrier for blanket anonymity for their line. But TrapCall takes advantage of a loophole in Caller ID blocking that’s long benefited corporate phone customers: Namely, calls to toll-free numbers are not blocked, because those calls are paid for by the recipient.

TrapCall instructs new customers to reprogram their cellphones to send all rejected, missed and unanswered calls to TrapCall’s own toll-free number. If the user sees an incoming call with Caller ID blocked, he just presses the button on the phone that would normally send it to voicemail. The call invisibly loops through TelTech’s system, then back to the user’s phone, this time with the caller’s number displayed as the Caller ID.

The caller hears only ringing during this rerouting, which took about six seconds in Wired.com's test with an iPhone on AT&T. Rejecting the call a second time, or failing to answer it, sends it to the user’s standard voicemail.

The service comes as bad news to advocates for domestic violence victims, who fought hard to make free blocking an option in the early days of Caller ID. "I have huge concerns about that,” says Cindy Southworth, director of technology at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, in Washington, D.C. Southworth fears that abusers will use the new service to locate partners fleeing a violent relationship.

In a notable case in 1995, a Texas man named Kevin Roberson shot his ex-girlfriend to death after locating her through the Caller ID device on her roommate's phone line.

The problem is serious, because domestic violence victims who've fled an abusive relationship often have to stay in contact with their abuser by phone, particularly in situations where the former couple share custody of their children,” Southworth says.

"The judge will require that the victim contact the offender to discuss where they’re dropping the children off, for example," says Southworth. "And there’s often court-mandated phone contact between the abusive partner and the victim." In those cases the victims often rely on Caller ID blocking to keep their former partner from knowing where they’re living.

Cohen dismisses that concern, arguing that Caller ID blocking was never secure to begin with. "It’s very simple for somebody to forward a phone to an 800 number in their office, and right there, they’re picking up the phone number of the person who is calling," he says. At least now the false illusion of Caller ID privacy will be dispelled by TrapCall, he adds.

In addition to the free service, branded Fly Trap, a $10-per-month upgrade called Mouse Trap provides human-created transcripts of voicemail messages, and in some cases uses text messaging to send you the name of the caller — information not normally available to wireless customers. Mouse Trap will also send you text messages with the numbers of people who call while your phone was powered off, even if they don’t leave a message.

With the $25-a-month Bear Trap upgrade, you can also automatically record your incoming calls, and get text messages with the billing name and street address of some of your callers, which TelTech says is derived from commercial databases.

TelTech is no stranger to controversy. Its Spoofcard product lets customers send any phone number they want as their Caller ID. Among other things, the spoofing service has been used by thieves to activate stolen credit cards, by hackers to access celebrities’ voicemail boxes, and by telephone hoaxsters to stage a dangerous prank called "swatting," in which they spoof an enemy’s phone number while calling the police with a fake hostage situation. The goal of swatting — realized in hundreds of cases around the country — is to send armed cops bursting into the victim's home.

Cohen’s company has cooperated in law enforcement investigations of Spoofcard abuse, which have led to several prosecutions and convictions. Despite the spoofing-linked crimes, he insists that most Spoofcard users are just privacy-conscious consumers, including celebrities, government officials, private investigators and even spousal abuse victims and shelters.

He also expects his new business will be good for his old one.

“The only way to block your number after this is released is to use Spoofcard,” he says with a laugh.

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Wikileaks Forced to Leak Its Own Secret Info -- Update

By Ryan Singel

What's Wikileaks, the net's foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site's confidential donors as a leaked document?

That's exactly the conundrum Wikileaks faced this week after someone from the controversial whistle-blowing site sent an emergency fund-raising appeal on Saturday to previous donors. But instead of hiding email addresses from the recipients by using the bcc field, the sender put 58 addresses into the cc field, revealing all the addresses to all the recipients.

Someone then submitted the email as a leaked document, writing "WikiLeaks leaks it's own donors, aww irony. BCC next time kthx."

Wikileaks, which has been criticized for lacking discretion in deciding whether to release documents or not, published the email and the donors' email addresses on Wednesday. The entry noted that the email was submitted "possibly to test the project's principles of complete impartiality when dealing with whistleblowers."

One notable email address belongs to convicted former hacker Adrian Lamo, who now runs his own security company. In a Twitter post on Saturday, Lamo noted the screw-up, writing "Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list.[...] That's dedication." See more in his comment to this story.

Earlier this month, Wikileaks scored another leaking coup, publishing hundreds of thousands of pages of copyright-free but rarely seen Congressional Research Service reports. Congress members and their staff rely on those reports to craft laws and policy, but the reports are rarely made public. The site also just recently published an unseen NATO civilian casualty 2008 report for Afghanistan, showing the country's civilians casualties jumped 46% last year.

Wikileaks says that no one leaking documents to the site has ever been identified, but the site's amateur slip-up isn't likely to be soothing to those who have or are thinking about slipping docs to the fearless site.

In the comments, Jay Lim of Wikileaks says whistle-blowers need not worry.

"[W]hile definitely not good form, the mistake was a missed shortcut made by one of our admin people and is not related to the efforts or systems involved in source protection," Lim wrote.

Update: This post was updated Thursday morning to note Lamo's tweet and update the post with information from the comments.

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Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark

by Joshua Topolsky

The talk this week at Mobile World Congress has been largely positive about Microsoft's latest iteration of its smartphone UI, Windows Mobile 6.5. Still, some of us at Engadget (well, one of us, at least), feel like the folks in Redmond missed the mark by a longshot. Instead of demonstrating its technical prowess and vast resources, Microsoft limped out a half-hearted rehash of an OS we've seen all too much of, and managed to blind most onlookers with a storm of big time partnerships and bloated PR. While their major competitors (and even some allies) in the mobile space seem bent on changing ideas about how we interact with our portable devices, the company proved once again that it's content to rest on its laurels and learn little from its mistakes.

To give you another side of the story -- a side which I think Microsoft has done an immaculate job of hiding this week -- here's ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 disappoints.

1: It's exactly the same as Windows Mobile 6... er, 5.

That's right -- there are no underlying changes to the core system here at all (Windows CE 5). Sure, there are a few cosmetic tweaks and couple of new pieces of functionality, but underneath what amounts to a new skin, this is essentially the same Windows Mobile you've come to know and... well, you've come to know it, right? Just imagine if Palm gave Palm OS a new paint job and told you it was a new version. Sort of the same idea.

2: The interface improvements are still way behind the curve.

At a distant glance some of those updates seem pretty neat, but get up close to them. The swiping and scrolling gestures are awkward (as noted by Chris Ziegler in his hands-on), in fact, they seem to work almost opposite of what is truly intuitive and "finger friendly." The honeycomb menu is a glorified grid, a sign that Microsoft has gone out of its way to avoid a grid -- but they fail to see (or don't care) that regular grids make a lot of sense. They essentially fixed something that wasn't broken. In our video, the rep says you can tell you're at the top of the honeycomb because there's an "empty space at the top." Intuitive, no? Besides that, the big menus may be easier on the eyes, but they're just zoomed in versions of previous iterations... you're still jumping through multiple levels to get where you need to go. Microsoft touts touch in the new version, but things like the corner buttons aren't optimized for fingers at all. I was going to give Redmond points for the unlocking scheme (which lets you jump right to a specific app), but they've already been beaten there by... the Meizu M8!

3: The UI tweaks are mostly just skin deep, and third-parties have already gone way deeper.

Why didn't Microsoft just buy the UI from SPB? Look at the most recent version of SPB Mobile Shell running on a Touch Diamond.

Not only does it include truly interesting and innovative features like Facebook integration and multiple homescreen support, but it blows the doors off of 6.5 in terms of speed... and it's running on previous generation hardware. 6.5 seems to have serious trouble doing basic things like scrolling through the honeycomb menu (on the newest HTC device), while Mobile Shell introduces an almost Tegra-like 3D interface on an older phone. Where were these guys when Microsoft was reskinning? If the company had introduced this UI at MWC, we're pretty sure people would have lost their minds completely. Adding insult to injury, there are still plenty of areas in the UI that are just as dated and janky as they were in 6 and 5. Just take a look at those My Phone screens or the calendar view.

Beyond that, companies like HTC and LG who've spent a lot of time and money developing their own skins for Windows Mobile may not be so quick to part with their work -- especially when it seems markedly better. Don't be surprised if Microsoft's tweaks get left on the cutting room floor with some of the higher end devices.

4: It doesn't support capacitive touchscreens.

6.5 supports resistive touchscreens. In fact, it only officially supports resistive touchscreens. Resistive touchscreens are less accurate and more frustrating to use with full touchscreen devices, and most of the new Windows Mobile devices are built around full touchscreen navigation! It's truly a mystery as to why Microsoft refuses to implement a superior technology. We did see it installed on a TI device with a capacitive screen, but it's clear that there's no effort to make this play nice with these displays (the rep in the video seems to suggest that Microsoft didn't lend a hand here). At any rate, if the scores of inaccurate, jumpy demos we've seen are any indication, using 6.5 -- no matter how "finger friendly" they tell you it will be -- is going to be a royal pain on resistive screens without a stylus. And you know how we feel about styli.

5: It's not due out until "later this year."

Word on the street in Barcelona is that Microsoft won't be releasing 6.5 until not just "later this year," but the end of the year (Q4 2009), which means what might seem interesting and exciting now is likely going to get real stale by the time you can actually put this on your device. And that brings me to my next point...

6: You probably can't upgrade your phone.

Guess what? If you want to use 6.5 on your device... well, you're probably going to have to buy a new device. According to Microsoft, no device older than what was launched this week at MWC will be eligible for an upgrade. That's right, not your new Touch Pro, Touch Diamond, Xperia X1, Shadow, or Treo Pro (assuming you can find one anyway). Furthermore, the company is saying that no phone without a Start flag hardware button will be eligible for 6.5, so you might want to put those TG01 plans on hold for a moment (even though Toshiba claims it will be running 6.5... maybe they're going rogue).

7: No Zune integration. Not even a new Windows Media Player.

C'mon Microsoft. You're gonna boost a variation of the Zune interface for your mainscreen navigation, but you're not introducing some actual integration with your Zune service? Oh, and you're just leaving that busted old WMP on there, old skin and all? If that doesn't say 50 percent effort here, nothing does.

8: Where's the keyboard?

This year, there are a lot of keyboard-less devices hitting the market. With phones like the Touch Diamond2, Garmin M20, and the LG GM730 all headed into user's hands, anything less than a "best in class" on-screen keyboard would be a tragedy. The only 6.5 device we've seen demoed that wasn't using a third-party keyboard was TI's OMAP dev unit... and it was sporting the tiny, frustrating standard WM 6 pop-up keyboard. Not exactly heartening stuff.

9: The browser is still weak.

There's no question that Microsoft has gone to great lengths to improve mobile IE, but it's still not where it should be. Scrolling and zoom smoothness is still way off for a browser of this class, and some of the navigation (like controlling that zoom) is clunky at best. There's a reason companies like HTC are tacking Opera Mobile onto their devices, and we're not sure that this will do anything to alleviate the issues.

10: It doesn't innovate in any way.

More than anything else, however, the main reason I'm disappointed with the new Windows Mobile doesn't have to do with features, lack of features, or UI design. It has to do with what 6.5 shows of Microsoft. Instead of stepping up to the plate and trying to do anything daring, new, or even remotely innovative, the company has shrunk from taking chances and delivered a new phone OS that's not simply more of the same, but more of the same dressed up to look like something new. While scores of their competition in the mobile space are working new angles to improve the user experience and change attitudes about what mobile devices can do, Microsoft has taken a bare minimum approach, likely satisfied that a new coat of paint and some minor flash will keep consumers coming back for more.

Unfortunately for the company, they may find reactions from even their base might not be what they're expecting. If we've learned anything over the past few years, it's that new ideas are just as -- if not more -- important than sheer market presence. Brute force may get the job done for a short time, but failure to innovate has repercussions... just ask the auto industry.

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