In the "Things That Make You Go 'Hmmm...'" Dep't (especially at the moment)

[dianeduane]

I mean, we've had a fair number of cellphones in and out of the house over the last few years.

But who buys six hundred of them in a matter of months? And why?

 

 

(Edit: more info here, here and here.)

Comments

[xnamkrad.livejournal.com]

Has mental image of them hearing a phone ring and scrambling through a pile of phones till they find the one actually ringing - and then its a telesales call.

[wishwords.livejournal.com]

And those guys wonder why they were questioned. Over here cell phones are used to set off IEDs all the time. They can't wire up a light fixture or install a toilet but they can turn a cell phone into a triggering device in minutes. Go figure...

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Don't light fixtures and toilets rely on there being an infrastructure? At least, your common or garden IED (OK, common or roadside) IED is a standalone item.

Here's hoping you'll never encounter one, by the way.

(I'm reading a history book at the moment. It's about the Assassins, with their context in Islam. My, have the Shi'ites and Sunnis really been at each other's throats for well over a millennium?)

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

For the last several years every time someone says "sunni and shia" want to guess what my brain parses it as? Go on :)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Oh, they fought too.

[wishwords.livejournal.com]

Yes, they have. Why we think we want to be referees, I'll never know.

Not much chance of me running into an IED. Don't even really have to worry about mortors or rockets. The biggest hazzard is bad drivers in really, really big vehicles... and monotony.

[phoebesmum.livejournal.com]

Hope it stays that way! Monotony = better than some possible alternatives. ("But Mummy, I don't want to live in Interesting Times!")

[naienko.livejournal.com]

Only if it's written by Terry Pratchett.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I can think of two reasons for owning 600 mobile phones (and not being a phone shop):

1. The obvious. (Anonymous comms and some cunning mix'n'match to defeat, or at least impede, traffic analysis.)

2. Modern phones mostly have an ARM processor clocked at up to 400mhz in it, and some megs of memory. They also have a Java run-time environment. That's a serious computer! And many mobile phones are subsidized heavily by the cellco. I can envisage some folks wanting to do distributed coarse-grained parallel processing on small data sets and figuring out that cellphones are cheap subsidized processors and suck less electricity than, say, XBox 360s (the next obvious choice as Microsoft subsidizes them to the tune of about $100 a box, and they can be wrestled into running Linux if you know how).

Many examples of the sort of problem you'd attack with #2 are mostly murky and/or illegal, though ...

[dduane.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Such a cynic as I am, I never got as far as #2. You're quite right about the processing power, though. Now I'm going "hmmm" in earnest.

[gerardkeating.livejournal.com]

A lot of pre-paid phones come with more "credit" than you paid for the phone, so i know a few people here in ireland, they replace the phones once the credit is used and send the phones home to the Philippines to be unlocked.

All the operators here subsidise even pre-paid phones.

[willplant.livejournal.com]

A simple explanation may be that, as Charlie suggests, they are taking advantage of the phone companies subsidies and exporting the phones abroad for sale. And pocketing the difference as extra profit.

I don't know about the US but in the UK, i believe, the subsidies can equate to hundreds of pounds per handset. For example the Dixons at Canary Wharf has a prominent sign saying "No more than two Mobile Phones per customer".

as for example #2, this sounds like a great idea. And reminds of a discussion I saw somewhere on the internets about whether or not to allow the import of a large number of PlayStation 2's by Saddam's regime pre Dubya's "Revenge for the Slight on Pappy Bush" escapade. I believe that there were serious concerns that the chips could end up in a homebrew supercomputer for nuclear modelling etc...

Will

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

ginmar, who was in Iraq, will tell you that you use them to trigger IEDs.

[syberghost.livejournal.com]

Three reasons:

1) Money laundering. You have somebody you don't think is "on the radar" yet take money from supporters, convert it into cellphones, then take the cellphones somewhere that they're more expensive and turn them back into money.

2) Untraceable communications. The reasons a terrorist would want this are obvious.

3) Triggering IEDs.

Of the three, I'd rate #1 the least likely, and #2 the most in this case, because the US isn't the right place to buy cellphones you want to end up in Iraq or Afghanistan. However, #2 is also useful to drug traffickers.

[xnamkrad.livejournal.com]

just to point out that terrorists have been exploding car bombs, IED's etc around the world for decades long before mobile phones were around.