coffee, black   no sugar


20060626 Monday June 26, 2006
Raising Security Awareness

Saturday I was visiting my Mom. She had a new phone and of course there was the "I don't like the xxx setting, can you change it for me...?" The combination of woman and parent, well...

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So I changed settings, ring tones, dates, explained how the built-in camera works. To check the photo transfer I fired up opened my MacBook and started the Bluetooth assistant. It detected the phone as "Nokia 6230i" and prompted six digits to enter on the phone. And then the confusion began:

Turns out that my sister, also sitting at the table, has the same phone. And it was her phone I had connected to - as she left Bluetooth enabled. So when I said the digits to enter, she thought I was talking to her and pressed the buttons. And voilá, I was browsing her pictures. Well, I though it were my mothers which I had just taken myself. Major confusion.

My mother and me thought I had hooked up my Mac to her phone and I explained to her that I can download all pictures, so if there are valuable ones, we may print them with her sending MMSs around the world and so on.

Sometime in between this, my sister realized that we were not talking about my mother's phone, but her phone where she granted access to me by entering the digits. A look of horror came onto her voice and with a panicked voice she said: "You are on my phone! Don't download the pictures!". She started pressing buttons and disabled her Bluetooth.

I assured her that I did indeed not have her pictures, connected then to my mother's phone and, being a gentleman, did not press my sister to reveal more about the contents of those photos.

I think she is one more phone user who keeps Bluetooth disabled unless needed.

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