The other night, CBS News’s 60 Minutes did a segment on cell phone security (or the lack thereof), titled “Hacking Your Phone”:
“We wanted to see whether Nohl’s group could actually do what they claimed — so we sent an off-the-shelf iPhone from 60 Minutes in New York to Representative Ted Lieu, a [Taiwanese American] congressman from California. He has a computer science degree from Stanford [’91] and is a member of the House committee that oversees information technology. He agreed to use our phone to talk to his staff knowing they would be hacked and they were. All we gave Nohl, was the number of the 60 Minutes iPhone that we lent the congressman.”
I’ve blogged about Congressman Lieu in the past and have met him a few times. Lieu has both a computer science and law degree, and thus often interviewed during the whole Apple vs. FBI iPhone encryption legal battle. Congressman Liu has been a strong defendant on privacy and encryption for individual and against any “backdoors.”
A group of professional hackers demonstrate how they can access Lieu’s phone calls, location and even turn on the phone’s camera and view remotely. Pretty frightening…
You can watch the entire 60 Minutes segment below:
Make you kind of think who is listening to you on your phone or watching you via your phone’s camera … pretty scary.
Microsynopsis: Emery is suddenly having difficulty getting along with the other boys in school, so Louis gives him some advice on making his behavior more manly so he’ll fit in. Jessica chaperones Eddie’s class field trip to Colonial Floridatown, where she demonstrates (much to Eddie’s surprise and anger) that she can be a lot of fun.
Bad: More idiocy from Eddie’s school principal. And I’ve been casually trying to nail Fresh off the Boat for anachronisms, but my eye must not be very good, because I haven’t found one in more than thirty episodes so far, but aha! I kind of found one, although you could make the case that when Louis says he mistook the “Critter Capers” section at the video store for the “Criterion” section, he was just reaching for anything that might be conceivable, and not mistakenly thinking that Criterion ever released titles on VHS (it didn’t–in those days, its titles were on LaserDisc, which this store doesn’t seem to rent). It’s weak, but it’s all I’ve got so far.
We get a bowling alley, a bar (made of ice, apparently), a mannequin, and a bunch of hidden cameras as each training session and first date unfolds. To every participant’s credit, despite the forced nature of the entire exercise from premise to execution, everyone seems to make a sincere attempt at making things work, with no trace of irony, which would destroy a show like this. Any irony needs to be brought by the viewer, and I at first didn’t have any problem looking at the show through a non-ironic prism.
The show is fun to watch in the first half. The edits are playful, with quick shots of subjects against seamless white backgrounds. It’s a good-looking, well-produced program. My only technical complaints come in the second half, where the voiceover (which is fine in the intro) gets needlessly intrusive, and there are a few too many exterior shots through a fisheye lens.
Microsynopsis: The spec house jointly owned by Jessica, Honey, and Grandma is finally ready for sale, but Jessica gets the idea that renting it will give them, over the long haul, a better return on their investment. When the tenants she carefully selects turn out to be deadbeats, she is forced to deal with them on her own, rather than admit to Grandma and Honey that she was wrong.
