So I bought something at a thrift store, it's a “Cellebrite Touch” | Hacker News Reader

So I bought something at a thrift store, it's a “Cellebrite Touch”

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236 pointspentestercrab83 comments

'I tried hooking up the micro-usb cable to an older android phone I had sitting around and it goes "OH YEAH THAT'S AN HTC ONE. WHICH MODEL IS IT?" Scary.'

USB vendor/product ids: very spooky? http://www.the-sz.com/products/usbid/index.php?v=0x0BB4&p=0x...

Wait until he finds our that you can figure out manufacturer from MAC addresses too.

Cellebrite in an Israeli company that specializes in extracting data from phones. The device bought in the thrift store appears to be a device to copy data from phones already unlocked and open, in other words, not the most interesting device they have, and it's from 2014. Still a nice read though.

Used to work at Best Buy in Mobile. and used this POS all the time. It was good when it worked. A lot of the time it was not working because it had to get flashed by connecting to the Ethernet port. We used it to transfer information from one phone to another. It did work with almost any phone. You just had to Find the right kind of cable for every phone back then. Sometimes it would even connect and transfer via Bluetooth. Good times.

One thing caught my eye any clue what a Microphone is doing on a device like that?

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1135361988526084099

I'd guess they simply reuse some tablet hardware design (and those usually incorporate a mic) instead of coming up with their own.

Maybe cops can use it to record hidden convos?

We never used the mic functionality. But maybe some kind of audible way to detect phones on a different pitch? Like they do with Alexa now a days.

You already answered this question earlier. It’s just some off the shelf Chinese computer that’s used for multiple different products.

i heard about these things but never used one myself (although i had access to a similar if ess user friendly data extraction tool called a DM3 used for nokia and blackberry forensics etc)

they were mainly for forensic or data recovery and sometimes unlocking or password removal. i can tell you that the left side will almost certainly be for various data clips/cables (usually over UART) which usually use an RJ45 although some older ones used the serial connector and a 3.5mm jack, use of RJ45 cables is still fairly common as some models can only be unlocked via UART

im also not sure the sim card slot is actually for sim cards as such but more likely a smartcard auth token for software licences, most unlocking solutions etc are sold as a "box" which is essentially a USB>UART and a USB smartcard reader with a card for the software licence, it may even have accepted 3rd party licences such as infinity etc as i believe they were meant to be a sort of all in one solution. although it may have been for sims if it was recovering contacts and messages stored on the sim

as for why it was there i guess its just ended up unused then gotten chucked out in a clear out, old kit tends to fall by the wayside in this game despite it initially being quite expensive (ask anyone in the mobile biz for any decent amount of time and they almost certainly have an MTbox/MXbox laying about) generally by the time its obsolete its more than paid for itself and is really pretty useless unless you work on a lot of very old stock

places ive worked at had dozens of old unused unlocking boxes and the like which eventually ended up in various tote boxes etc and when the business moved the majority ended up in the skip (where people soon came to try and dig out any potentially worthwhile bits) i suspect this found its way to the store in a similar fashion

it may not actually be much use in this day and age but its an interesting find

>im also not sure the sim card slot is actually for sim cards as such

One of the choices under "phone vendor" was "simcard".

Presumably it was for dumping the address book off of the simcard.

This was way more interesting than the title suggests, so if you don't know what a Cellebrite is (like I didn't), keep reading the thread. For people who do know what it is, the real question is "what the hell was that doing in a thrift store?!"

Back in the day you'd find random gear like this just thrown in dumpsters when it became obsolete or replaced. Rarely was data wiped correctly. I can see a misguided intern thinking, "someone else must be able to use this!", or it just getting into a donation pile by accident.

My assumption is dumpster -> dumpster driver -> pawn shop/thrift store

Come to thrift stores in Silicon Valley, you'll find all kinds of neat stuff!

This device is used in commercial apple stores for transferring data off customers old, non-apple phones. Pretty straightforward service, hardly a curious device.

But with a drip of whodunit the thread made the product seem quite mysterious.

"Not news to you personally" is not the same thing as "not interesting."

Cellebrite makes devices for forensics, and they make devices for cellphone stores. This is the latter. Definitely not interesting.

It's like saying "I found a Diebold fountain pen, can I learn about ATMs from it?". No. It's not the same thing.

I've never seen one of these gizmos before. It's new and interesting to me. It's got three RJ45 ports! That's weird! Sure, it's not as interesting as if the guy had found a government forensic tool at the thrift store, but it's still interesting.

Let people enjoy things.

I used to work in a mobile phone shop and we had these to transfer data between old and new phones. With regards to the SIM slot, SIM cards can store around 100 phone numbers and many people that swap phones regularly do keep their contacts on a SIM card. SIM cards can wear out over time so this was useful for swapping phone numbers from an old SIM to a new one or a nanoSIM etc.

Up the build quality, but keep the hyper rugged design philosophy, round things off so it slides into a backpack easily, make sure there's plenty of ports, and I'd consider buying tablet PC with about this form factor. (Yes, yes, I could just buy a tablet PC and put it in a paranoid-level ruggedized case.)

If it's telling you to configure settings on the device, can it be considered forensic? Something about that feels off.

that could be either for data recovery or sim unlocking both of which often require a diag mode or debug port to be enabled on the device

At the end of the thread, Foone posts this:

'correction, which explains some of the weirdness like the "buy-back" thing. This isn't a Cellebrite UFED Touch, it's a Cellebrite UME (Universal Memory Exchanger ) Touch. This means it's designed for phone stores to transfer data off old phones onto new phones and such. This is why it can't hack the phones, just copy data off them. It just seems they built their UFED platform and UME platform on the same hardware base.

It also makes a lot more sense why this ended up in a thrift store.'

Grady Booch even gets in on the action: https://twitter.com/Grady_Booch/status/1135459629658329090?s...

These devices are used heavily in telecommunications for transferring data from almost any model device to another. Very useful when customers transfer from an old Nokia to say a brand new iPhone.

You can find these on ebay...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cellebrite-Touch-Phone-Data-Transfe...

What a ride.

Before people complain (like last time) on why Foone doesn't just blog...

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1135439789090574338

https://twitter.com/foone/status/1100068394001256448

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1066547670477488128

We need a client that formats a series of twitter posts into a single blog post

There is at least one Twitter bot (@ThreadReaderApp) which does that. People can mention its name and add "unroll" as comment and it produces a website with the tweets compiled.

Pasting a link to a tweet into a field on their frontpage gives the same result:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1135354815259656192.html

Edit: some Twitter users do not like services like this because people can neither interact with them on these pages nor will the posters get stats how often it was accessed. They consider it stealing their content.

I like them (as user, not content creator) because I like to archive interesting things as PDFs, since you never know if or when something will go away. You might want to use Firefox' reader mode or clean up the page using Stylus or the built-in web development tools before printing to remove all the junk.

When Firefox does not offer to open reader mode on some pages, you can still access it by prepending about:reader?url= to the url. It works anyways most of the time. It even works as search shortcut, so you can add something like read as keyword that points to about:reader?url=%S , usage is then read <url goes here> in the adress bar.

One more thing regarding Stylus: you can conditionally apply custom styles by adding a parameter to the rule, so you can sanitize e.g. the Twitter thread UI when you want to screenshot them without sacrificing the UI for normal use. Here's an example that is triggered by appending ?simple to a direct link to a tweet.

    @-moz-document regexp("https://twitter.com/.*\\?simple") {
    .translate-button,
    .tweet-stats-container,
    .stream-item-footer,
    .ProfileTweet-actionList,
    .inline-reply-tweetbox-container,
    .UserNameBreak,
    .tweet-timestamp {
        display: none;
    }

    .tweet .time::before {
        content: "";
    }
    }

tl;dr he had ADHD. So he can't ever finish a blog post, but twitter works for him. Which is fair enough.

It’s good he found something that works, but that is an illogical explanation. How does he have too much ADHD to save drafts one paragraph at a time, but not enough to stop him from tinkering with an awesome thrift store computer for hours?

ADHD is a bit like autism, in that many sufferers can obsess over a single thing/topic/interest, but be unable to focus on anything else.

Ah, so I take it you don’t have ADHD then? Tinkering is something you can lose touch with time on. Writing brings with it self doubt, worry about how it will be read.

I send very clear emails (or so my colleagues tell me), but each one takes forever to write.

I do have ADHD, it’s odd that you would presume I don’t.

This is why I thought the “too adhd to blog” is odd because there are blogging platforms easier than twitter. Even Wordpress has drafts where you can update one sentence at a time.

All the futzing and sequencing to get this out of twitter requires lots of effort that seems, to me, similar or greater effort than other formats that wouldn’t make me abandon an otherwise interesting post.

My apologies, didn’t meant to assume you didn’t. I guess I should have stated how I can empathise with the author, as I can spend a lot of time perfecting something longer like a blog, but a twitter thread is incremental without the option to go back and edit.

>> illogical

Yes, that's what ADHD does to you.

Source: Have it. Not as severe as Foone, but I empathize.

Seriously though, if you are one twitter, Foone is one of the best people you can follow.

The kind of stuff Foone turns up, and the rate that the weird equipment is aquired, dissassembled, and analyzed, not to mention the digital forensics tearing into obscure old game roms to extract assets for the name generator project, is truly prodigious. Just an insane quantity of high quality output.

I love @foone's content, but I had to unfollow him because his output is so prodigious my entire Twitter feed became just @foone.

On second thought, having seen the rest of what Twitter has to offer, that's not such a bad thing...

Self awareness helps, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating or easier to read because of vis chosen format.

It’s a free world and whatnot, but Twitter is a poor medium for these kinds of stories. It took me at least twice as long due to scrolling, squinting, etc.

So given the choice between no content or oddly formatted content you'd go for no content?

I've gone through the hurdle of reading it, and as someone just curious and not specifically interested in the topic, in the end more it was more pain than pleasure.

Also there's a great tool made to settle this endless dispute : https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1135354815259656192.html

But seeing how chronically and rudely the guy cries about this issue, without even looking for the halfway compromise, he just looks like a jerk to me. And I'm not impressed enough by the content to get over it in the future.

Thanks for the reference to threadreaderapp.

Agreed. Twitter is terrible for long-form content, end of story. They could easily write chunks of a blog, in the same size as a tweet, one-by-one, then publish when it's all ready. I think it's just their 'thing' now and it must be nice to have loads of people jump to your defence because you said ADHD. It's like they have an army of people ready to be offended on their behalf.

Or even just update the blog post repeatedly like it was a tweet. At least at the end it wouldnt have horrible ux

Would the blog have 32 thousand readers though?

>> They could easily write chunks of a blog

Foone disagrees. You know better than him how his brain works?

That’s exactly what I did, so yes.

This is a cool topic and OP put some effort into a cool investigation. But half way through I gave up because twitter kept bugging me to open an app and adjust some setting. It also used 25% of the screen showing framing info.

Okay, problem solved then.

So you agree then that given the existence of free will, it's better that the author tweet this story than [not] blog it and thus allows folks like yourself to ignore it while others who don't mind can read and enjoy.

It’s better that we try to reduce false dichotomies and that the author improve the readability of content by using more appropriate tools.

>> author improve the readability of content

This is, again, a subjective opinion. You are free to improve the readability of his content on your own using all the tools that are available. Given Foone's audience, he's doing well enough and people enjoy consuming his content as he decides to publish it.

Your authoritarian stance here is really condescending and odd.

Yes. There is already enough content out there for hundreds of lifetimes.

One could also choose to simply not read this story and go on to another story that's more suited for the reader.

ADHD is one disorder; the need to actively tell people you're not reading something and why is another. ADHD is less anti-social.

Twitter makes me jump through hoops to even look at the content (oh look, I've been rate-limited for loading their website once today, but they'll happily remote the rate-limit if I install their app!), so yes.

Also every 2 seconds twitter has a full screen popup saying to use the app or to sign up or that I have been rate limited.

Let's not go through this again. Many people disagree with you and find no problem reading tweetstorms, which are becoming more popular, not less.

It’s the first time for me :)

That’s cool that lots of people like tweetstorms, I don’t. That’s cool that there are different people in the world with different preferences.

Expecting me not to comment on something that is novel to me and seemingly pretty annoying and easy to fix (use a better tool) is something that would make me frustrated if I tried to apply that to others.

Imagine if I stubbed my toe. Imaging if someone said “lots of people don’t stub their toes, your complaint bores me” when I said “Dammit.”

The point is, for the author, this is the best tool. Using any other tool would not be an easy fix, it'd be a significant enough barrier to publication that they simply wouldn't publish it.

In their words, if they had to blog, they wouldn't publish anything; this is where it's on us to adapt, or move onto other content if you really can't stand Twitter.

The point is, I think it’s not the best tool for the author and that if he had more help he would find a better tool.

If course, it’s pretty much impossible to literally know this, as how in the world do you know what people have tried or what they are capable of. As someone who once worked in tech support, I learned not to believe people who say “I tried everything and I have a unique need that I can’t explain to you.” Only to learn they didn’t try everything and their computer is not plugged in.

There are a few steps I need to know about between “ADHD; ???; therefore Twitter” before I understand.

I think this is an opportunity to help the author learn about new advances in microblogging that will reduce the number of people who ignore or don’t understand the content. I think it’s possible for the author to adapt, rather than requiring thousands of people to adapt on their own. That’s inefficient.

Just deal.

I used to find Twitter threads difficult to follow, but you know, if you work at it, if you spend time reading them, it's not as big a deal.

I'm sure people raised a big stink when moving from scrolls to books, that turning pages was asking too much.

If it helps you, there's this:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1135354815259656192.html

And a bookmarklet:

http://protips.maxmasnick.com/unroll-tweetstorm-bookmarklet

Anyone with ADHD: is there a difference between writing a hundred of lines in Twitter, and writing the same amount of text, but published in one piece? Just curious.

The tweets likely align with his thought process. I can align myself with it, I do rambling too, just not often online. However when i write a bigger text I would keep re-reading and correcting it. For a message like this that’s fine but it gets a bit harder with longer texts. I just try to cope with it though instead of giving in.

The problem here for readers is probably not the tweeting but the rambling in the tweets (incoherent text)

Readers of a Twitter stream of thought generally realize that they’re dealing with a loosely connected series of thoughts. While individual appreciation of this style of writing varies, there’s no confusion about what’s going on.

Writing in that manner in a blog post would be taken more poorly, as we generally have higher structural expectations of “a blog post” than we do of “a Twitter thread”. Simply writing one paragraph per tweet into an append-only post would not be equivalent.

So the readability might improve for removing Twitter’s UI, but then the content would be evaluated as an “essay” rather than as a “stream of consciousness”.

Big difference. If you're tweeting stream of consciousness, it's one thought at a time, published and quickly beyond reach of editing, and you move on to the next thought. One could spend hours re-reading and editing a blog post.

As someone with ADHD, I can say it's nearly impossible for me to read a post split up into tweets like this. Too many comments between each post.

[edit]

someone posted https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1135354815259656192.html elsewhere in the comments, and this is perfectly readable for me.

As someone without ADHD, is there really a difference between an hundred of rambly lines in Twitter or an hundred rambly lines in a blog post?

The only difference I see are expectations, in a blog post, I expect edited content that flow well, while on Twitter, I don't expect much.

I can't find half of this tweet stream because twitter starts interspersing it with replies in places. I'm missing out on content :(

> Not to humblebrag or anything, but my favorite part of getting posted on hackernews or reddit is that EVERY SINGLE TIME there's one highly-ranked reply that's "jesus man, this could have been a blog post! why make 20 tweets when you can make one blog post?"

> CAUSE I CAN'T MAKE A BLOG POST, GOD DAMN IT. I have ADHD. I have bad ADHD that is being treated, and the treatment is NOT WORKING TERRIBLY WELL. I cannot focus on writing blog posts. it will not happen.

> if I try to make a blog post, it'll end up being abandoned and unfinished, as I am unable to edit it into something readable and postable. so if I went 100% to blogs: You would get: no content I would get: lots of unfinished drafts and a feeling of being a useless waste

> but I can do rambly tweet threads. they don't require a lot of attention for a long time, they don't have the endless editing I get into with blog posts, I can do them. I do them a bunch! They're just rambly and twitter, which some people don't like.

> so given this is a choice between two options, I can either: 1. make rambly tweet-threads that some people hate and wish were blogs 2. make no blog posts

> I am sorry that I am picking #1, but it's really best for everyone.

... and so on. So, it's apparently due to ADHD...

This is one of those subthreads that show how offtopicness is preserved under negation.

Does anyone have the link that turns a twitter thread in to a blog post? This is unreadable.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1135354815259656192.html

Thanks. Fascinating article.

Thank you for the TLDR.

Terrible writing and Twitter is a fatal combo.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20080987 and marked it off-topic.

Anyone else read this and think "Celibate Touch"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com