Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

Richard left a comment on my blog and believes his AT&TWS phone got virus attacks. It picked up phone numbers from the phone book and sent out short messages.

Chinese cellphone users are expected to send 10 billion SMS greetings during the seven-day Chinese New Year holiday. (It was 7 billion last year.) In Beijing alone, 150 million short messages were sent out in the new year eve night.
At the end of 2003, China had 260 million mobile phone users.

[ "Phone Bugs", SignOnSanDiego.com ]
According to this article, "in Japan, the country’s popular I-Mode wireless service has been the recipient of attacks that caused the phones to make calls to Tokyo’s version of 911."

Malicious applications are not limited to making phone calls or sending SMS. They can also be used to collect and send out the user’s private information (contacts etc.). It is probably not so easy to write a fatal virus to crash the phone using J2ME because of Java’s security sandbox, bytecode verification and lacking of OS level native function calls (check Michael Yuan’s Securing wireless J2ME). QualComm did a good job to protect BREW phone users by rigorous testing and Application Download Server recall. But for some other platform like MicroSoft Smartphone, carriers and users should be very careful (link1, link2).

SmartMobs cites a report from China.org.cn:

A comic film for the New Year is supposed to bring laughter and happiness, but this is one that has made quite a few couples walk out of cinemas.
And they’re not laughing. They’re ready to confiscate their spouse’s cellphone.
It is Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang’s latest movie called, Cellphone.
Some say it is actually "a horror movie," because it can make those who’ve had love affairs feel uneasy and ignite family warfare.
Suddenly, spouses are eager to check their spouse’s cellphone for call records or to browse through short messages.
That’s because the film’s hero Yan Shouyi, a TV talk show anchor, was betrayed by his cellphone records and messages and had his affairs exposed.
Tianjin-based News Daily reported that a woman immediately wanted to check her husband cellphone after the couple watched the film.
When he refused, she grabbed the phone but was knocked senseless by her angry husband.

Not only the call history and messages stored on phone can disclose users’ privacy, the screenshot above (from an interesting article on sina.com [in Chinese]) shows that the powerful auto-completing feature could also be a problem. This guy inputs "dear, my wife is not at home today", next time when his wife types in "dear", the phone can help and complete the entire original message: "dear, my wife is not at home today"!

By the way, the screenshot above is taken from Motorola A760, a very powerful Linux phone availble in China.

[off topic]
I always have the similiar troubles when I use Google: If I search by keyword ‘BREW’, I actually mean ‘Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless’ or ‘Qualcomm BREW’. Unfortunately most of the hits I got will be ‘home brew’, ‘coffee’ or even ‘beer’. We need a searching engine with "Context Searching" ability. The user should be able to specify a ‘context’, but the searching engine is not necessary to search upon the actual words of the context. For example, one context of BREW is "the mobile phone platform from Qualcomm".

Vivísimo partially solves my problem. It is a clustering engine, which uses a "specially-developed heuristic algorithm" to group - or cluster - textual documents. The image above is the searching result of "J2ME" on sun.com using Vivisimo. Looks pretty good, huh? Go to vivisimo.com or download the Vivísimo Minibar (for IE).