$15 phone, 3 minutes all that's needed to eavesdrop on GSM call

Especialyl since it also demonstrates how to target a particular phone - the previous GSM cracks captured all the packets on all the phones in a cell, so it was only much later you worked out which was the phone you were looking for - too late if they moved to a new cell while you were recording.

The software is indeed very specialized, and according to the guy doing the demo it will be released, but without the last polishing to run the attack on an actual live network, but claims that it took him less than 1 week of work to come from currently published code to the stuff he's shown in the attack.

But of course to come to the level of expertiese of Sylvain Munaut will take a mere mortal more than a year of studying GSM... ;-)

And they have furthermore been modified to remove filters that in "normal" phones improve signal reception but for this particular application would prohibit you from listening to the base-station-to-phone direction.

Not to mention the fact that since it's just a simple look-up table with lots of small entries, you could store it in the cloud and only get what you need via the same GSM connection.