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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

Over here in the EU any cellular device should contain a SIM card which must be registered to someone or some company, therefore it can be used to track the owner; is that different in the US? The article doesn't mention any SIM card present. If I discovered such a tracking device in my car I'd immediately look for the card, get its number and find the owner.

Also, it would be nice to fool the GPS through a jammer that emits false signals in order to make it report a fake location, after placing cameras at that place to record whoever shows up.

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>Over here in the EU any cellular device should contain a SIM card which must be registered to someone or some company...

This isn't true for all of the EU. For example, in the Netherlands, you can buy and activate a prepaid SIM without any identification requirements. This prepaid SIM, once activated in the Netherlands, can then be used in other parts of the EU without subsequent registration.

The photo in the article shows "P/N: CDMA"

So if it was a CDMA device, then it probably doesn't use a SIM.

Last I checked, you could activate a prepaid SIM without any proof of identity in the US. We don’t have a national ID card system. Postpaid does involve a credit check.

In addition, these kinds of rules (in countries which have them) almost invariably do not apply to B2B sales, especially for machine to machine communications - at that scale the operator really only cares that they know which customer is footing the bill for the subscription.

At least in my experience many years ago managing an enterprise mobile account, I could have SIM cards and handsets sent out with no name or similar allocated - the name was a nicety for getting the package to the right person, but there was absolutely no verification of anything. The name helped you reconcile the bills, so we had users on the account called "office spare 1" and "field engineer spare". Any customer support had to go through the B2B account.

At scale, an M2M device customer won't be telling the operator anything else about the device or user - the customer will manage allocating subscriptions to vehicles or devices, and won't want to have to deal with their operator for this.

> "Also, it would be nice to fool the GPS through a jammer that emits false signals in order to make it report a fake location, after placing cameras at that place to record whoever shows up."

First : don't confuse jamming with spoofing. Jamming is extremely easy to perform by any idiot, while spoofing GPS is significantly harder https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/sdr_gps/

Second : keep in mind that both of them are actually illegal in most countries, and besides unless you exactly know what you are doing it's fairly easy to jam/spoof on much larger areas than you would intend to ! (and GNSS is not restricted to consumer products and maps but are used in a lot of industrial/serious applications so it can actually have consequences)

> while spoofing GPS is significantly harder

You are very wrong. Spoofing GPS is downloading a file, and then running a commandline program with a hackrf attached. The *only* hard part is getting a HackRF or other TX capable SDR.

Download and compile https://github.com/osqzss/gps-sdr-sim

Download today's ephermis https://cddis.nasa.gov/archive/gnss/data/daily/

run:

gps-sdr-sim -e $EPHERMISFILE -l $LAT,$LON,$ALT

And, if you're nearby an airport, you're violating felonies with FCC AND FAA.

Jamming is easy enough that people do it by accident. There was a guy with a broken VCR a number of years back that got a visit from the FCC because it was jamming, I think, VOR beacons.

Having a broken VCR is significantly easier than downloading a file and then running a commandline program with a hackrf attached.

> spoofing GPS is significantly harder

I recall seeing someone's project that did exactly that: transmitting at a very short distance a radio signal that spoofed a number of satellites so that the GPS receiver would report completely bogus positions. Anyway, that would be unnecessary as I completely missed that the GPS receiver is connected through a serial port, therefore spoofing NMEA strings would be much easier.

nowadays you'd install an E-Sim, which is just a code, not a physical card anymore.

jamming GNSS satellite connection? only heard of Russians doing that. could be more expensive than exploring this little modem.

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