Obviously, they Leapt Without Thought

[discreet_chaos]

Over the past couple of days, a lot of blogs have been pointing toward the newest "feature" from the "braintrust" at Google.

If you've seen any of the other postings, you've learned that you can now search via Google Maps for a business, say "Socorro NM hotel" and when you click one of the little locator flags, a "call" link appears behind the

Comments

[jaberwockynmt]

My understanding is that spoofing caller ID is trivially easy with the right equipment and the equipment is really cheap (less than $50). I don't know how to do it myself, but I'm sure two_pi_r and/or killbox knows.

[discreet_chaos]

I figured as much and I'm not one to advocate limiting technology, but if memory serves, an article from 2003 in the NY Times about the ease with which one can intercept images from wireless cameras prompted a couple of states to pass laws on the subject.

Of course, Google isn't really one to follow the law and who knows if they've even checked with every locality. Unfortunately, I can't put my hands on a copy right now because I can't go out to my storage area, but I do recall seeing something somewhere about a law governing Caller ID stuff. I just can't remember if it was local and if so, local to where. And, though I would never advocate restricting the sale of anything, it seems that not too many good purposes can be served by spoofing a Caller ID.

The original NY Times article about camera spying is behind their pay-for-it wall, so here's a quick Google of somebody's copyright violation in case anyone is interested.

PS) Please nobody get any ideas and have me bothered all night by Teleflorist. I'd appreciate it.

[schlake]

Even scarier than wireless webcams is that you can do the same thing with CRT monitors. All you need is an antenna and something to parse the signal and you can view the screens on anyones CRT. LCDs would still be doable, but few people have access to the equipment needed to do that.

Caller ID means nothing. It is generated at the PBX, so anyone with a PBX can spew out whatever numbers they want. The ASN number isn't spoofable or hidable (so buying a "normal" private number means nothing), but only corporate customers are allowed to get that data from the phone company.

There used to be, and probably still are, actual private numbers. They were maintained and manged in an isolated telephone facility are were presumably very expensive and only available to very powerful people, such as the President. Those numbers were anonymized and uncallable via the caller id/ASN data that emerged from the facility.