[wplug] US Gov warns of id theft in China

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Christine Rial wrote:
> Interesting
>     One time I had a very nasty problem with a customer phone.  Eventfully I 
> was relay up to second level support and while they were doing their magic 
> they had be not only turn off the phone but also take the battery out.  I 
> asked him, if the phone was turn off the transmitter was turn off.  He never 
> gave me a full responds to my question but indicated that things were still 
> working with the phone turn off.  Maybe that's why your battery dies in less 
> than a month even with your phone turn off.

Two things cause this.  First, the nature of the battery itself.  All 
rechargables will slowly loose charge over time.  Actually, all batteries 
do it, but it's more pronounced with rechargables.  Without going deeply 
into physics I'll simplify by saying that electrons move.

Secondly, the E911 system in your phone may be active even when the device 
is turned "off".  Frankly, some of this seems a bit like conspiracy theory 
stuff.  It is known that it's easy for authorities to get access to the 
E911 location of a phone with little effort[1,2], however it has not been 
concretely established (at least to my satisfaction) that that this works 
when the phone is off -- although every news article has someone writing 
such a comment.

--Patrick

[1] 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201444_pf.html

[2] 
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/is-the-government-tracking-us-through-our-cellphones-lawsuit-seeks-answers/