When you work with GSM/cellular systems, the definite resource are the specifications. They were originally released by ETSI, later by 3GPP.

The problem start with the fact that there are separate numbering schemes. Everyone in the cellular industry I know always uses the GSM/3GPP TS numbering scheme, i.e. something like 3GPP TS 44.008. However, ETSI assigns its own numbers to the specs, like ETSI TS 144008. Now in most cases, it is as simple s removing the '.' and prefixing the '1' in the beginning. However, that's not always true and there are exceptions such as 3GPP TS 01.01 mapping to ETSI TS 101855. To make things harder, there doesn't seem to be a machine-readable translation table between the spec numbers, but there's a website for spec number conversion at http://webapp.etsi.org/key/queryform.asp

When I started to work on GSM related topics somewhere between my work at Openmoko and the start of the OpenBSC project, I manually downloaded the PDF files of GSM specifications from the ETSI website. This was a cumbersome process, as you had to enter the spec number (e.g. TS 04.08) in a search window, look for the latest version in the search results, click on that and then click again for accessing the PDF file (rather than a proprietary Microsoft Word file).

At some point a poor girlfriend of mine was kind enough to do this manual process for each and every 3GPP spec, and then create a corresponding symbolic link so that you could type something like evince /spae/openmoko/gsm-specs/by_chapter/44.008.pdf into your command line and get instant access to the respective spec.

However, of course, this gets out of date over time, and by now almost a decade has passed without a systematic update of that archive.

To the rescue, 3GPP started at some long time ago to not only provide the obnoxious M$ Word DOC files, but have deep links to ETSI. So you could go to http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/44-series.htm and then click on 44.008, and one further click you had the desired PDF, served by ETSI (3GPP apparently never provided PDF files).

However, in their infinite wisdom, at some point in 2016 the 3GPP webmaster decided to remove those deep links. Rather than a nice long list of released versions of a given spec, http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/44008.htm now points to some crappy JavaScript tabbed page, where you can click on the version number and then get a ZIP file with a single Word DOC file inside. You can hardly male it any more inconvenient and cumbersome. The PDF links would open immediately in modern browsers built-in JavaScript PDF viewer or your favorite PDF viewer. Single click to the information you want. But no, the PDF links had to go and replaced with ZIP file downloads that you first need to extract, and then open in something like LibreOffice, taking ages to load the document, rendering it improperly in a word processor. I don't want to edit the spec, I want to read it, sigh.

So since the usability of this 3GPP specification resource had been artificially crippled, I was annoyed sufficiently well to come up with a solution:

• first create a complete mirror of all ETSI TS (technical specifications) by using a recursive wget on http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/

• then use a shell script that utilizes pdfgrep and awk to determine the 3GPP specification number (it is written in the title on the first page of the document) and creating a symlink. Now I have something like 44.008-4.0.0.pdf -> ts_144008v040000p.pdf

It's such a waste of resources to have to download all those files and then write a script using pdfgrep+awk to re-gain the same usability that the 3GPP chose to remove from their website. Now we can wait for ETSI to disable indexing/recursion on their server, and easy and quick spec access would be gone forever :/

Why does nobody care about efficiency these days?

If you're also an avid 3GPP spec reader, I'm publishing the rather trivial scripts used at http://git.osmocom.org/3gpp-etsi-pdf-links

If you have contacts to the 3GPP webmaster, please try to motivate them to reinstate the direct PDF links.

Many years ago, in the aftermath of Openmoko shutting down, fellow former Linux kernel hacker Werner Almesberger was working on an IEEE 802.15.4 (WPAN) adapter for the Ben Nanonote.

As a spin-off to that, the ATUSB device was designed: A general-purpose open hardware (and FOSS firmware + driver) IEEE 802.15.4 adapter that can be plugged into any USB port.

This adapter has received a mainline Linux kernel driver written by Werner Almesberger and Stefan Schmidt, which was eventually merged into mainline Linux in May 2015 (kernel v4.2 and later).

Earlier in 2016, Stefan Schmidt (the current ATUSB Linux driver maintainer) approached me about the situation that ATUSB hardware was frequently asked for, but currently unavailable in its physical/manufactured form. As we run a shop with smaller electronics items for the wider Osmocom community at sysmocom, and we also frequently deal with contract manufacturers for low-volume electronics like the SIMtrace device anyway, it was easy to say "yes, we'll do it".

As a result, ready-built, programmed and tested ATUSB devices are now finally available from the sysmocom webshop

Note: I was never involved with the development of the ATUSB hardware, firmware or driver software at any point in time. All credits go to Werner, Stefan and other contributors around ATUSB.

In a previous life I used to do a lot of IT security work, probably even at a time when most people had no idea what IT security actually is. I grew up with the Chaos Computer Club, as it was a great place to meet people with common interests, skills and ethics. People were hacking (aka 'doing security research') for fun, to grow their skills, to advance society, to point out corporate stupidities and to raise awareness about issues.

I've always shared any results worth noting with the general public. Whether it was in RFID security, on GSM security, TETRA security, etc.

Even more so, I always shared the tools, creating free software implementations of systems that - at that time - were very difficult to impossible to access unless you worked for the vendors of related device, who obviously had a different agenda then to disclose security concerns to the general public.

Publishing security related findings at related conferences can be interpreted in two ways:

On the one hand, presenting at a major event will add to your credibility and reputation. That's a nice byproduct, but that shouldn't be the primarily reason, unless you're some kind of a egocentric stage addict.

On the other hand, presenting findings or giving any kind of presentation or lecture at an event is a statement of support for that event. When I submit a presentation at a given event, I think carefully if that topic actually matches the event.

The reason that I didn't submit any talks in recent years at CCC events is not that I didn't do technically exciting stuff that I could talk about - or that I wouldn't have the reputation that would make people consider my submission in the programme committee. I just thought there was nothing in my work relevant enough to bother the CCC attendees with.

So when Holger 'zecke' Freyther and I chose to present about our recent journeys into exploring modern cellular modems at the annual Chaos Communications Congress, we did so because the CCC Congress is the right audience for this talk. We did so, because we think the people there are the kind of community of like-minded spirits that we would like to contribute to. Whom we would like to give something back, for the many years of excellent presentations and conversations had.

So far so good.

However, in 2016, something happened that I haven't seen yet in my 17 years of speaking at Free Software, Linux, IT Security and other conferences: A select industry group (in this case the GSMA) asking me out of the blue to give them the talk one month in advance at a private industry event.

I could hardly believe it. How could they? Who am I? Am I spending sleepless nights and non-existing spare time into security research of cellular modems to give a free presentation to corporate guys at a closed industry meeting? The same kind of industries that create the problems in the first place, and who don't get their act together in building secure devices that respect people's privacy? Certainly not. I spend sleepless nights of hacking because I want to share the results with my friends. To share it with people who have the same passion, whom I respect and trust. To help my fellow hackers to understand technology one step more.

If that kind of request to undermine the researcher/authors initial publication among friends is happening to me, I'm quite sure it must be happening to other speakers at the 33C3 or other events, too. And that makes me very sad. I think the initial publication is something that connects the speaker/author with his audience.

Let's hope the researchers/hackers/speakers have sufficiently strong ethics to refuse such requests. If certain findings are initially published at a certain conference, then that is the initial publication. Period. Sure, you can ask afterwards if an author wants to repeat the presentation (or a similar one) at other events. But pre-empting the initial publication? Certainly not with me.

I offered the GSMA that I could talk on the importance of having FOSS implementations of cellular protocol stacks as enabler for security research, but apparently this was not to their interest. Seems like all they wanted is an exclusive heads-up on work they neither commissioned or supported in any other way.

And btw, I don't think what Holger and I will present about is all that exciting in the first place. More or less the standard kind of security nightmares. By now we are all so numbed down by nobody considering security and/or privacy in design of IT systems, that is is hardly any news. IoT how it is done so far might very well be the doom of mankind. An unstoppable tsunami of insecure and privacy-invading devices, built on ever more complex technology with way too many security issues. We shall henceforth call IoT the Industry of Thoughtlessness.

I typically prefer to blog about technical topics, but the occasional stupidity in every-day (business) life is simply too hard to resist.

Today I updated the shipping pricing / zones in the ERP system of my company to predict shipping rates based on weight and destination of the package.

Deutsche Post, the German Postal system is using their DHL brand for postal packages. They divide the world into four zones:

• Zone 1 (EU)

• Zone 2 (Europe outside EU)

• Zone 3 (World)

You would assume that "World" encompasses everything that's not part of the other zones. So far so good. However, I then stumbled about Zone 4 (rest of world). See for yourself:

So the World according to DHL is a very small group of countries including Libya and Syria, while countries like Mexico are rest of world

Quite charming, I wonder which PR, communicatoins or marketing guru came up with such a disqualifying name. Maybe they should hve called id 3rd world and 4th world instead? Or even discworld?

In 2006 I first visited Taiwan. The reason back then was Sean Moss-Pultz contacting me about a new Linux and Free Software based Phone that he wanted to do at FIC in Taiwan. This later became the Neo1973 and the Openmoko project and finally became part of both Free Software as well as smartphone history.

Ten years later, it might be worth to share a bit of a retrospective.

It was about building a smartphone before Android or the iPhone existed or even were announced. It was about doing things "right" from a Free Software point of view, with FOSS requirements going all the way down to component selection of each part of the electrical design.

Of course it was quite crazy in many ways. First of all, it was a bunch of white, long-nosed western guys in Taiwan, starting a company around Linux and Free Software, at a time where that was not really well-perceived in the embedded and consumer electronics world yet.

It was also crazy in terms of the many cultural 'impedance mismatches', and I think at some point it might even be worth to write a book about the many stories we experienced. The biggest problem here is of course that I wouldn't want to expose any of the companies or people in the many instances something went wrong. So probably it will remain a secret to those present at the time :/

In any case, it was a great project and definitely one of the most exciting (albeit busy) times in my professional career so far. It was also great that I could involve many friends and FOSS-compatriots from other projects in Openmoko, such as Holger Freyther, Mickey Lauer, Stefan Schmidt, Daniel Willmann, Joachim Steiger, Werner Almesberger, Milosch Meriac and others. I am happy to still work on a daily basis with some of that group, while others have moved on to other areas.

I think we all had a lot of fun, learned a lot (not only about Taiwan), and were working really hard to get the hardware and software into shape. However, the constantly growing scope, the [for western terms] quite unclear and constantly changing funding/budget situation and the many changes in direction have ultimately lead to missing the market opportunity. At the time the iPhone and later Android entered the market, it was too late for a small crazy Taiwanese group of FOSS-enthusiastic hackers to still have a major impact on the landscape of Smartphones. We tried our best, but in the end, after a lot of hype and publicity, it never was a commercial success.

What's more sad to me than the lack of commercial success is also the lack of successful free software that resulted. Sure, there were some u-boot and linux kernel drivers that got merged mainline, but none of the three generations of UI stacks (GTK, Qt or EFL based), nor the GSM Modem abstraction gsmd/libgsmd nor middleware (freesmartphone.org) has manage to survive the end of the Openmoko company, despite having deserved to survive.

Probably the most important part that survived Openmoko was the pioneering spirit of building free software based phones. This spirit has inspired pure volunteer based projects like GTA04/Openphoenux/Tinkerphone, who have achieved extraordinary results - but who are in a very small niche.

What does this mean in practise? We're stuck with a smartphone world in which we can hardly escape any vendor lock-in. It's virtually impossible in the non-free-software iPhone world, and it's difficult in the Android world. In 2016, we have more Linux based smartphones than ever - yet we have less freedom on them than ever before. Why?

• the amount of hardware documentation on the processors and chipsets to day is typically less than 10 years ago. Back then, you could still get the full manual for the S3C2410/S3C2440/S3C6410 SoCs. Today, this is not possible for the application processors of any vendor

• the tighter integration of application processor and baseband processor means that it is no longer possible on most phone designs to have the 'non-free baseband + free application processor' approach that we had at Openmoko. It might still be possible if you designed your own hardware, but it's impossible with any actually existing hardware in the market.

• Google blurring the line between FOSS and proprietary code in the Android OS. Yes, there's AOSP - but how many features are lacking? And on how many real-world phones can you install it? Particularly with the Google Nexus line being EOL'd? One of the popular exceptions is probably Fairphone2 with it's alternative AOSP operating system, even though that's not the default of what they ship.

• The many binary-only drivers / blobs, from the graphics stack to wifi to the cellular modem drivers. It's a nightmare and really scary if you look at all of that, e.g. at the binary blob downloads for Fairphone2 to get an idea about all the binary-only blobs on a relatively current Qualcomm SoC based design. That's compressed 70 Megabytes, probably as large as all of the software we had on the Openmoko devices back then...

So yes, the smartphone world is much more restricted, locked-down and proprietary than it was back in the Openmoko days. If we had been more successful then, that world might be quite different today. It was a lost opportunity to make the world embrace more freedom in terms of software and hardware. Without single-vendor lock-in and proprietary obstacles everywhere.

There are plenty of cellular modems on the market in the mPCIe form factor.

Playing with such modems is reasonably easy, you can simply insert them in a mPCIe slot of a laptop or an embedded device (soekris, pc-engines or the like).

However, many of those modems actually export interesting signals like digital PCM audio or UART ports on some of the mPCIe pins, both in standard and in non-standard ways. Those signals are inaccessible in those embedded devices or in your laptop.

So I built a small break-out board which performs the basic function of exposing the mPCIe USB signals on a USB mini-B socket, providing power supply to the mPCIe modem, offering a SIM card slot at the bottom, and exposing all additional pins of the mPCIe header on a standard 2.54mm pitch header for further experimentation.

The design of the board (including schematics and PCB layout design files) is available as open hardware under CC-BY-SA license terms. For more information see http://osmocom.org/projects/mpcie-breakout/wiki

If you don't want to build your own board, fully assembled and tested boards are available from http://shop.sysmocom.de/products/minipcie-wwan-modem-usb-break-out-board

During the past 16 years I have been playing a lot with a variety of embedded devices.

One of the most important tasks for debugging or analyzing embedded devices is usually to get access to the serial console on the UART of the device. That UART is often exposed at whatever logic level the main CPU/SOC/uC is running on. For 5V and 3.3V that is easy, but for ever more and more unusual voltages I always had to build a custom cable or a custom level shifter.

In 2016, I finally couldn't resist any longer and built a multi-voltage USB UART adapter.

This board exposes two UARTs at a user-selectable voltage of 1.8, 2.3, 2.5, 2.8, 3.0 or 3.3V. It can also use whatever other logic voltage between 1.8 and 3.3V, if it can source a reference of that voltage from the target embedded board.

Rather than just building one for myself, I released the design as open hardware under CC-BY-SA license terms. Full schematics + PCB layout design files are available. For more information see http://osmocom.org/projects/mv-uart/wiki

In case you don't want to build it from scratch, ready-made machine assembled boards are also made available from http://shop.sysmocom.de/products/multi-voltage-usb-dual-uart

Ever since I first came to Taiwan in 2006 (which happens to be more or less exactly 10 years ago, watch out for a separate blog post about that), I've been coming back at least once every year until 2014. Sometimes it's business related ,but one trip per year has always been about holidays.

I really like the country for a variety of reasons. One of them is the beautiful landscape from sand beaches to tropical forsts and high mountains (Taiwan has more than 100 peaks higher than 3000m). This is also the reason I keep my Yamaha TW-225 motorbike here, as it's impossible to explore the island without your own transport. And I hate driving bulky, large cars. Plus, some of the narrow roads have ascent/descent levels and road conditions that you actually can only pass them with a motorbike, preferrably using offroad tyres.

But I digress. I like coming to Taiwan, and motorbiking accross the country is one of the main reasons why.

After the various trips before, including the FIXME last trip circling the island in 2014, I wanted to do something special this year. The original plan was to cross the southern cross-island highway (Provincial Highway 20) from Taitung to Tainan. Unfortunately that road has been closed for many years now due to typhoon related damage. Typhonns and Eathquakes (and associated landslides) unfortunately happen quite often around Taiwan.

I've received some news that a group of motorcyclists managed to pass the road very recently (despite officially being closed and having various construction sites enroute). However, the road conditions were very difficult, having to pass narrow gravel sections at the construction sites, etc. So I again postponed this plan until a future year.

Instead, I wanted to travel along provincial highway '7 jia', which passes alongside a river valley into the central mountain ranges towards Lishan, and from there take Nantou Lixing Industry road (aka road 89) further down south towards Ren'ai. This road is of the most narrow roads that you can find on maps of Taiwan, and leads through very remote mountain areas with little population. You can find an interesting report of somebody crazy enough to travel that road on a bicycle in 2015 online. The author describes it as the most epic of all rides in Taiwan and you can see pictures of the road conditions in it.

Unfortuantely, while on our way, a Typhoon struck the southern tip of Taiwan, and also brought loads of torrential rain into the central mountain areas. Given that road 89 is difficult even in dry conditions, I didn't want to take chances in terms of landslides and muddy road conditions, and I had to turn back from Lishan to Taipei.

In order to make the return trip a bit different, I went all the way up to Yilan, and then alongside the north-east coast to Gongliao, before heading back to Tiapei via Shifen and Pinxi.

Soon after returning to Taipei, the second Typhoon affected the weather (passing by off the north-east of Taiwan).

In the following week the weather was excellent and there was time for a second trip. However, due to the rain of the two typhoons I still didn't want to go for road 89, and decided to go towards the north coast and continue to explore some of the waterfalls described at the vonderful http://taiwanswaterfalls.com/ site. Specifically, those alongside the Keelung river valley, close to road 106 form Taipei towards the coast, then heading north along the coast, covering the tip and returning back to Taipei via Dansuei (aka Tamsui).

In summary, the motorbike tours were a lot of fun. What made them more fun than the previous trips was my strategy of using 'white' roads (smaller roads) and avoid the provincial highways whenever three was a 'white' alternative on the map. Also, the newly-discovered map of Taiwans waterfalls was helping a lot to find beautiful sights, and encourage to go on even uncharted roads at times, a real challenge to both bike and biker.

So if you ever consider recreational motorbike riding in Taiwan, my recommendations would be:

• get a light-weight motorbike. There's no point for a heavy bike in Taiwan, other than for locals to show it off. Many mountain roads typically have speed limits of 30 or 40 kph, and while it is possible to go 10-20 kph faster, more than that is suicidal. So no need for a fast bike with large engine.

• avoid travel on weekends. Everything is super crowded on weekends. I prefer to stay home (and even work) on weekends, while using the quiet weekdays to travel.

• always choose mountainous roads over straight roads.

• choose smaller 'white' roads over provincial highways. Even though provincial highways on weekdays have less traffic, they still tend to attract a fair number of trucks, and are generally more easy and a less challenging ride.

• always carry sufficient water with you.

• go in September or October, after the rain season (normally) is over. The weather is still warm to hot (depending on altitude).

For many years I've always been wanting to do some motorbike riding across the Alps, but somehow never managed to do so. It seems when in Germany I've always been too busy - contrary to the many motorbike tours around and across Taiwan which I did during my frequent holidays there.

This year I finally took the opportunity to combine visiting some friends in Hungary and Bavaria with a nice tour starting from Berlin over Prague and Brno (CZ), Bratislava (SK) to Tata and Budapeest (HU), further along lake Balaton (HU) towards Maribor (SI) and finally across the Grossglockner High Alpine Road (AT) to Salzburg and Bavaria before heading back to Berlin.

It was eight fun (but sometimes long) days riding. For some strange turn of luck, not a single drop of rain was encountered during all that time, traveling across six countries.

The most interesting parts of the tour were:

• Along the Elbe river from Pirna (DE) to Lovosice (CZ). Beautiful scenery along the river valley, most parts of the road immediately on either side of the river. Quite touristy on the German side, much more pleasant and quiet on the Czech side.

• From Mosonmagyarovar via Gyor to Tata (all HU). Very little traffic alongside road '1'. Beautiful scenery with lots of agriculture and forests left and right.

• The Northern coast of Lake Balaton, particularly from Tinany to Keszthely (HU). Way too many tourists and traffic for my taste, but still very impressive to realize how large/long that lake really is.

• From Maribor to Dravograd (SI) alongside the Drau/Drav river valley.

• Finally, of course, the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, which reminded me in many ways of the high mountain tours I did in Taiwan. Not a big surprise, given that both lead you up to about 2500 meters above sea level.

Finally, I have to say I've been very happy with the performance of my 1996 model BMW F 650ST bike, who has coincidentally just celebrated its 20ieth anniversary. I know it's an odd bike design (650cc single-cylinder with two spark plugs, ignition coils and two carburetors) but consider it an acquired taste ;)

I've also published a map with a track log of the trip

In one month from now, I should be reporting from motorbike tours in Taiwan on the equally trusted small Yamaha TW-225 - which of course plays in a totally different league ;)

Based on some encouragement from friends as well as my desire to find more time again to hang out at community events, I decided to attend Electromagnetic Field 2016 held in Guildford, UK from August 5th through 7th.

As I typically don't like just attending an event without contributing to it in some form, I submitted a couple of talks / workshops, all of which were accepted:

• An overview talk about the Osmocom project

• A Workshop on running your own cellular network using OpenBSC and related Osmocom software

• A Workshop on tracing (U)SIM card communication using Osmocom SIMtrace

I believe the detailed schedule is still in the works, as I haven't yet been able to find any on the event website.

Looking forward to having a great time at EMF 2016. After attending Dutch and German hacker camps for almost 20 years, let's see how the Brits go about it!

At sysmocom we maintain a webshop with various smaller items and accessories interesting to the Osmocom community as well as the wider community of people experimenting (aka 'playing') with cellular communications infrastructure. As this is primarily a service to the community and not our main business, I'm always interested in ways to reduce the amount of time our team has to use in order to operate the webshop.

In order to make the shipping process more efficient, I discovered that Deutsche Post is offering a Web API based on SOAP+WSDL which can be used to generate franking for the (registered) letters that we ship around the world with our products.

The most interesting part of this is that you can generate combined address + franking labels. As address labels need to be printed anyway, there is little impact on the shipping process beyond having to use this API to generate the right franking for the particular shipment.

Given the general usefulness of such an online franking process, I would have assumed that virtually anyone operating some kind of shop that regularly mails letters/products would use it and hence at least one of those users would have already written some free / open source software code fro it. To my big surprise, I could not find any FOSS implementation of this API.

If you know me, I'm the last person to know anything about web technology beyond HTML 4 which was the latest upcoming new thing when I last did anything web related ;)

Nevertheless, using the python-zeep module, it was fairly easy to interface the web service. The weirdest part is the custom signature algorithm that they use to generate some custom soap headers. I'm sure they have their reasons ;)

Today I hence present the python-inema project, a python module for accessing this Internetmarke API.

Please note while I'm fluent in Pascal, Perl, C and Erlang, programming in Python doesn't yet come natural to me. So if you have any comments/feedback/improvements, they're most welcome by e-mail, including any patches.

In private conversation, Holger mentioned EC-GSM-IoT to me, and I had to dig a bit into it. It was introduced in Release 13, but if you do a web search for it, you find surprisingly little information beyond press releases with absolutely zero information content and no "further reading".

The primary reason for this seems to be that the feature was called EC-EGPRS until the very late stages, when it was renamed for - believe it or not - marketing reasons.

So when searching for the right term, you actually find specification references and change requests in the 3GPP document archives.

I tried to get a very brief overview, and from what I could find, it is centered around GERAN extension in the following ways:

• EC-EGPRS goal: Improve coverage by 20dB

  • New single-burst coding schemes

  • Blind Physical Layer Repetitions where bursts are repeated up to 28 times without feedback from remote end

    • transmitter maintains phase coherency

    • receiver uses processing gain (like incremental redundancy?)

  • New logical channel types (EC-BCCH, EC-PCH, EC-AGC, EC-RACH, ...)

  • New RLC/MAC layer messages for the EC-PDCH communication

• Power Efficient Operation (PEO)

  • Introduction of eDRX (extended DRX) to allow for PCH listening intervals from minutes up to a hour

  • Relaxed Idle Mode: Important to camp on a cell, not best cell. Reduces neighbor cell monitoring requirements

In terms of required modifications to an existing GSM/EDGE implementation, there will be (at least):

• changes to the PHY layer regarding new coding schemes, logical channels and burst scheduling / re-transmissions

• changes to the RLC/MAC layer in the PCU to implement the new EC specific message types and procedures

• changes to the BTS and BSC in terms of paging in eDRX

In case you're interested in more pointers on technical details, check out the links provided at https://osmocom.org/issues/1780

It remains to be seen how widely this will be adopted. Rolling this cange out on moderm base station hardware seems technicalyl simple - but it remains to be seen how many equipment makers implement it, and at what cost to the operators. But I think the key issue is whether or not the baseband chipset makers (Intel, Qualcomm, Mediatek, ...) will implement it anytime soon on the device side.

There are no plans on implementing any of this in the Osmocom stack as of now,but in case anyone was interested in working on this, feel free to contact us on the osmocom-net-gprs@lists.osmocom.org mailing list.

Some topics keep coming back, even a number of years after first having worked on them. And then you start to search online using your favorite search engine - and find your old posts on that subject are the most comprehensive publicly available information on the subject ;)

Back in 2011, I was working on some very basic support for Ericsson RBS2xxx GSM BTSs in OpenBSC. The major part of this was to find out the weird dynamic detection of the signalling timeslot, as well as the fully non-standard OM2000 protocol for OML. Once it reached the state of a 'proof-of-concept', work at this ceased and remained in a state where still lots of manual steps were involved in BTS bring-up.

I've recently picked this topic up again, resulting in some work-in-progress code in http://git.osmocom.org/openbsc/log/?h=laforge/om2000-fsm

Beyond classic E1 based A-bis support, I've also been looking (again) at Ericsson Packet Abis. Packet Abis is their understanding of Abis over IP. However, it is - again - much further from the 3GPP specifications than what we're used to in the Osmocom universe. Abis/IP as we know consists of:

• RSL and OML over TCP (inside an IPA multiplex)

• RTP streams for the user plane (voice)

• Gb over IP (NS over UDP/IP), as te PCU is in the BTS.

In the Ericsson world, they decided to taka a much lower-layer approach and decided to

• start with L2TP over IP (not the L2TP over UDP that many people know from VPNs)

• use the IETF-standardized Pseudowire type for HDLC but use a frame format in violation of the IETF RFCs

• Talk LAPD over L2TP for RSL and OML

• Invent a new frame format for voice codec frames called TFP and feed that over L2TP

• Invent a new frame format for the PCU-CCU communication called P-GSL and feed that over L2TP

I'm not yet sure if we want to fully support that protocol stack from OpenBSC and related projects, but in any case I've extende wireshark to decode such protocol traces properly by

• Extending the L2TP dissector with Ericsson specific AVPs

• Improving my earlier pakcet-ehdlc.c with better understanding of the protocol

• Implementing a new TFP dissector from scratch

• Implementing a new P-GSL dissector from scratch

The resulting work can be found at http://git.osmocom.org/wireshark/log/?h=laforge/ericsson-packet-abis in case anyone is interested. I've mostly been working with protocol traces from RBS2409 so far, and they are decoded quite nicely for RSL, OML, Voice and Packet data. As far as I know, the format of the STN / SIU of other BTS models is identical.

Is anyone out there in possession of Ericsson RBS2xxx RBSs interested in collboration on either a Packet Abis implementation, or an inteface of the E1 or packet based CCU-PCU interface to OsmoPCU?

In recent days, various public allegations have been brought forward against Jacob Appelbaum. The allegations rank from plagiarism to sexual assault and rape.

I find it deeply disturbing that the alleged victims are putting up the effort of a quite slick online campaign to defame Jakes's name, using a domain name consisting of only his name and virtually any picture you can find online of him from the last decade, and - to a large extent - hide in anonymity.

I'm upset about this not because I happen to know Jake personally for many years, but because I think it is fundamentally wrong to bring up those accusations in such a form.

I have no clue what is the truth or what is not the truth. Nor does anyone else who has not experienced or witnessed the alleged events first hand. I'd hope more people would think about that before commenting on this topic one way or another on Twitter, in their blogs, on mailing lists, etc. It doesn't matter what we believe, hypothesize or project based on a personal like or dislike of either the person accused or of the accusers.

We don't live in the middle ages, and we have given up on the pillory for a long time (and the pillory was used after a judgement, not before). If there was illegal/criminal behavior, then our societies have a well-established and respected procedure to deal with such: It is based on laws, legal procedure and courts.

So if somebody has a claim, they can and should seek legal support and bring those claims forward to the competent authorities, rather than starting what very easily looks like a smear campaign (whether it is one or not).

Please don't get me wrong: I have the deepest respect and sympathies for victims of sexual assault or abuse - but I also have a deep respect for the legal foundation our societies have built over hundreds of years, and it's principles including the human right "presumption of innocence".

No matter who has committed which type of crime, everyone deserve to receive a fair trial, and they are innocent until proven guilty.

I believe nobody deserves such a public defamation campaign, nor does anyone have the authority to sentence such a verdict, not even a court of law. The Pillory was abandoned for good reasons.

Back in late April, the well-known high-quality SDR hardware company Nuand published a blog post about an Open Source Release of a VHDL ADS-B receiver.

I was quite happy at that time about this, and bookmarked it for further investigation at some later point.

Today I actually looked at the source code, and more by coincidence noticed that the LICENSE file contains a license that is anything but Open Source: The license is a "free for evaluation only" license, and it is only valid if you run the code on an actual Nuand board.

Both of the above are clearly not compatible with any of the well-known and respected definitions of Open Source, particularly not the official Open Source Definition of the Open Source Initiative.

I cannot even start how much this makes me upset. This is once again openwashing, where something that clearly is not Free or Open Source Software is labelled and marketed as such.

I don't mind if an author chooses to license his work under a proprietary license. It is his choice to do so under the law, and it generally makes such software utterly unattractive to me. If others still want to use it, it is their decision. However, if somebody produces or releases non-free or proprietary software, then they should make that very clear and not mis-represent it as something that it clearly isn't!

Open-washing only confuses everyone, and it tries to market the respective company or product in a light that it doesn't deserve. I believe the proper English proverb is to adorn oneself with borrowed plumes.

I strongly believe the community must stand up against such practise and clearly voice that this is not something generally acceptable or tolerated within the Free and Open Source software world. It's sad that this is happening more frequently, like recently with OpenAirInterface (see related blog post).

I will definitely write an e-mail to Nuand management requesting to correct this mis-representation. If you agree with my posting, I'd appreciate if you would contact them, too.

I've been giving a keynote at the Black Duck Korea Open Source Conference yesterday, and I'd like to share some thoughts about it.

In terms of the content, I spoke about the fact that the ultimate goal/wish/intent of free software projects is to receive contributions and for all of the individual and organizational users to join the collaborative development process. However, that's just the intent, and it's not legally required.

Due to GPL enforcement work, a lot of attention has been created over the past ten years in the corporate legal departments on how to comply with FOSS license terms, particularly copyleft-style licenses like GPLv2 and GPLv3. However,

License compliance ensures the absolute bare legal minimum on engaging with the Free Software community. While that is legally sufficient, the community actually wants to have all developers join the collaborative development process, where the resources for development are contributed and shared among all developers.

So I think if we had more contribution and a more fair distribution of the work in developing and maintaining the related software, we would not have to worry so much about legal enforcement of licenses.

However, in the absence of companies being good open source citizens, pulling out the legal baton is all we can do to at least require them to share their modifications at the time they ship their products. That code might not be mergeable, or it might be outdated, so it's value might be less than we would hope for, but it is a beginning.

Now some people might be critical of me speaking at a Black Duck Korea event, where Black Duck is a company selling (expensive!) licenses to proprietary tools for license compliance. Thereby, speaking at such an event might be seen as an endorsement of Black Duck and/or proprietary software in general.

Honestly, I don't think so. If you've ever seen a Black Duck Korea event, then you will notice there is no marketing or sales booth, and that there is no sales pitch on the conference agenda. Rather, you have speakers with hands-on experience in license compliance either from a community point of view, or from a corporate point of view, i.e. how companies are managing license compliance processes internally.

Thus, the event is not a sales show for proprietary software, but an event that brings together various people genuinely interested in license compliance matters. The organizers very clearly understand that they have to keep that kind of separation. So it's actually more like a community event, sponsored by a commercial entity - and that in turn is true for most technology conferences.

So I have no ethical problems with speaking at their event. People who know me, know that I don't like proprietary software at all for ethical reasons, and avoid it personally as far as possible. I certainly don't promote Black Ducks products. I promote license compliance.

Let's look at it like this: If companies building products based on Free Software think they need software tools to help them with license compliance, and they don't want to develop such tools together in a collaborative Free Software project themselves, then that's their decision to take. To state using words of Rosa Luxemburg:

Freedom is always the freedom of those who think different

I may not like that others want to use proprietary software, but if they think it's good for them, it's their decision to take.

Have you ever used mobile data on your phone or using Tethering?

In packet-switched cellular networks (aka mobile data) from GPRS to EDGE, from UMTS to HSPA and all the way into modern LTE networks, there is a tunneling protocol called GTP (GPRS Tunneling Protocol).

This was the first cellular protocol that involved transport over TCP/IP, as opposed to all the ISDN/E1/T1/FrameRelay world with their weird protocol stacks. So it should have been something super easy to implement on and in Linux, and nobody should have had a reason to run a proprietary GGSN, ever.

However, the cellular telecom world lives in a different universe, and to this day you can be safe to assume that all production GGSNs are proprietary hardware and/or software :(

In 2002, Jens Jakobsen at Mondru AB released the initial version of OpenGGSN, a userspace implementation of this tunneling protocol and the GGSN network element. Development however ceased in 2005, and we at the Osmocom project thus adopted OpenGGSN maintenance in 2016.

Having a userspace implementation of any tunneling protocol of course only works for relatively low bandwidth, due to the scheduling and memory-copying overhead between kernel, userspace, and kernel again.

So OpenGGSN might have been useful for early GPRS networks where the maximum data rate per subscriber is in the hundreds of kilobits, but it certainly is not possible for any real operator, particularly not at today's data rates.

That's why for decades, all commonly used IP tunneling protocols have been implemented inside the Linux kernel, which has some tunneling infrastructure used with tunnels like IP-IP, SIT, GRE, PPTP, L2TP and others.

But then again, the cellular world lives in a universe where Free and Open Source Software didn't exit until OpenBTS and OpenBSC changed all o that from 2008 onwards. So nobody ever bothered to add GTP support to the in-kernel tunneling framework.

In 2012, I started an in-kernel implementation of GTP-U (the user plane with actual user IP data) as part of my work at sysmocom. My former netfilter colleague and current netfilter core team leader Pablo Neira was contracted to bring it further along, but unfortunately the customer project funding the effort was discontinued, and we didn't have time to complete it.

Luckily, in 2015 Andreas Schultz of Travelping came around and has forward-ported the old code to a more modern kernel, fixed the numerous bugs and started to test and use it. He also kept pushing Pablo and me for review and submission, thanks for that!

Finally, in May 2016, the code was merged into the mainline kernel, and now every upcoming version of the Linux kernel will have a fast and efficient in-kernel implementation of GTP-U. It is configured via netlink from userspace, where you are expected to run a corresponding daemon for the control plane, such as either OpenGGSN, or the new GGSN + PDN-GW implementation in Erlang called erGW.

You can find the kernel code at drivers/net/gtp.c, and the userspace netlink library code (libgtpnl) at git.osmocom.org.

I haven't done actual benchmarking of the performance that you can get on modern x86 hardware with this, but I would expect it to be the same of what you can also get from other similar in-kernel tunneling implementations.

Now that the cellular industry has failed for decades to realize how easy and little effort would have been needed to have a fast and inexpensive GGSN around, let's see if now that other people did it for them, there will be some adoption.

If you're interested in testing or running a GGSN or PDN-GW and become an early adopter, feel free to reach out to Andreas, Pablo and/or me. The osmocom-net-gprs mailing list might be a good way to discuss further development and/or testing.

According to some news report, including this report at softpedia, a 26 year old student at the Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security in Maribor, Slovenia has received a suspended prison sentence for finding flaws in Slovenian police and army TETRA network using OsmocomTETRA

As the Osmocom project leader and main author of OsmocomTETRA, this is highly disturbing news to me. OsmocomTETRA was precisely developed to enable people to perform research and analysis in TETRA networks, and to audit their safe and secure configuration.

If a TETRA network (like any other network) is configured with broken security, then the people responsible for configuring and operating that network are to be blamed, and not the researcher who invests his personal time and effort into demonstrating that police radio communications safety is broken. On the outside, the court sentence really sounds like "shoot the messenger". They should instead have jailed the people responsible for deploying such an insecure network in the first place, as well as those responsible for not doing the most basic air-interface interception tests before putting such a network into production.

According to all reports, the student had shared the results of his research with the authorities and there are public detailed reports from 2015, like the report (in Slovenian) at https://podcrto.si/vdor-v-komunikacijo-policije-razkril-hude-varnostne-ranljivosti-sistema-tetra/.

The statement that he should have asked the authorities for permission before starting his research is moot. I've seen many such cases and you would normally never get permission to do this, or you would most likely get no response from the (in)competent authorities in the first place.

From my point of view, they should give the student a medal of honor, instead of sentencing him. He has provided a significant service to the security of the public sector communications in his country.

To be fair, the news report also indicates that there were other charges involved, like impersonating a police officer. I can of course not comment on those.

Please note that I do not know the student or his research first-hand, nor did I know any of his actions or was involved in them. OsmocomTETRA is a Free / Open Source Software project available to anyone in source code form. It is a vital tool in demonstrating the lack of security in many TETRA networks, whether networks for public safety or private networks.

Right now I'm feeling sad. I really shouldn't, but I still do.

Many years ago I started OpenBSC and Osmocom in order to bring Free Software into an area where it barely existed before: Cellular Infrastructure. For the first few years, it was "just for fun", without any professional users. A FOSS project by enthusiasts. Then we got some commercial / professional users, and with them funding, paying for e.g. Holger and my freelance work. Still, implementing all protocol stacks, interfaces and functional elements of GSM and GPRS from the radio network to the core network is something that large corporations typically spend hundreds of man-years on. So funding for Osmocom GSM implementations was always short, and we always tried to make the best out of it.

After Holger and I started sysmocom in 2011, we had a chance to use funds from BTS sales to hire more developers, and we were growing our team of developers. We finally could pay some developers other than ourselves from working on Free Software cellular network infrastructure.

In 2014 and 2015, sysmocom got side-tracked with some projects where Osmocom and the cellular network was only one small part of a much larger scope. In Q4/2015 and in 2016, we are back on track with focussing 100% at Osmocom projects, which you can probably see by a lot more associated commits to the respective project repositories.

By now, we are in the lucky situation that the work we've done in the Osmocom project on providing Free Software implementations of cellular technologies like GSM, GPRS, EDGE and now also UMTS is receiving a lot of attention. This attention translates into companies approaching us (particularly at sysmocom) regarding funding for implementing new features, fixing existing bugs and short-comings, etc. As part of that, we can even work on much needed infrastructural changes in the software.

So now we are in the opposite situation: There's a lot of interest in funding Osmocom work, but there are few people in the Osmocom community interested and/or capable to follow-up to that. Some of the early contributors have moved into other areas, and are now working on proprietary cellular stacks at large multi-national corporations. Some others think of GSM as a fun hobby and want to keep it that way.

At sysmocom, we are trying hard to do what we can to keep up with the demand. We've been looking to add people to our staff, but right now we are struggling only to compensate for the regular fluctuation of employees (i.e. keep the team size as is), let alone actually adding new members to our team to help to move free software cellular networks ahead.

I am struggling to understand why that is. I think Free Software in cellular communications is one of the most interesting and challenging frontiers for Free Software to work on. And there are many FOSS developers who love nothing more than to conquer new areas of technology.

At sysmocom, we can now offer what would have been my personal dream job for many years:

• paid work on Free Software that is available to the general public, rather than something only of value to the employer

• interesting technical challenges in an area of technology where you will not find the answer to all your problems on stackoverflow or the like

• work in a small company consisting almost entirely only of die-hard engineers, without corporate managers, marketing departments, etc.

• work in an environment free of Microsoft and Apple software or cloud services; use exclusively Free Software to get your work done

I would hope that more developers would appreciate such an environment. If you're interested in helping FOSS cellular networks ahead, feel free to have a look at http://sysmocom.de/jobs or contact us at jobs@sysmocom.de. Together, we can try to move Free Software for mobile communications to the next level!

This is great news: You can now install a GSM network using apt-get!

Thanks to the efforts of Debian developer Ruben Undheim, there's now an OpenBSC (with all its flavors like OsmoBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoSGSN, ...) package in the official Debian repository.

Here is the link to the e-mail indicating acceptance into Debian: https://tracker.debian.org/news/755641

I think for the past many years into the OpenBSC (and wider Osmocom) projects I always assumed that distribution packaging is not really something all that important, as all the people using OpenBSC surely would be technical enough to build it from the source. And in fact, I believe that building from source brings you one step closer to actually modifying the code, and thus contribution.

Nevertheless, the project has matured to a point where it is not used only by developers anymore, and particularly also (god beware) by people with limited experience with Linux in general. That such people still exist is surprisingly hard to realize for somebody like myself who has spent more than 20 years in Linux land by now.

So all in all, today I think that having packages in a Distribution like Debian actually is important for the further adoption of the project - pretty much like I believe that more and better public documentation is.

Looking forward to seeing the first bug reports reported through bugs.debian.org rather than https://projects.osmocom.org/ . Once that happens, we know that people are actually using the official Debian packages.

As an unrelated side note, the Osmocom project now also has nightly builds available for Debian 7.0, Debian 8.0 and Ubunut 14.04 on both i586 and x86_64 architecture from https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/network:osmocom:nightly. The nightly builds are for people who want to stay on the bleeding edge of the code, but who don't want to go through building everything from scratch. See Holgers post on the openbsc mailing list for more information.

While preparing my presentation for the Troopers 2016 TelcoSecDay I was thinking once again about the importance of having FOSS implementations of cellular protocol stacks, interfaces and network elements in order to enable security researches (aka Hackers) to work on improving security in mobile communications.

From the very beginning, this was the motivation of creating OpenBSC and OsmocomBB: To enable more research in this area, to make it at least in some ways easier to work in this field. To close a little bit of the massive gap on how easy it is to do applied security research (aka hacking) in the TCP/IP/Internet world vs. the cellular world.

We have definitely succeeded in that. Many people have successfully the various Osmocom projects in order to do cellular security research, and I'm very happy about that.

However, there is a back-side to that, which I'm less happy about. In those past eight years, we have not managed to attract significant amount of contributions to the Osmocom projects from those people that benefit most from it: Neither from those very security researchers that use it in the first place, nor from the Telecom industry as a whole.

I can understand that the large telecom equipment suppliers may think that FOSS implementations are somewhat a competition and thus might not be particularly enthusiastic about contributing. However, the story for the cellular operators and the IT security crowd is definitely quite different. They should have no good reason not to contribute.

So as a result of that, we still have a relatively small amount of people contributing to Osmocom projects, which is a pity. They can currently be divided into two groups:

• the enthusiasts: People contributing because they are enthusiastic about cellular protocols and technologies.

• the commercial users, who operate 2G/2.5G networks based on the Osmocom protocol stack and who either contribute directly or fund development work at sysmocom. They typically operate small/private networks, so if they want data, they simply use Wifi. There's thus not a big interest or need in 3G or 4G technologies.

On the other hand, the security folks would love to have 3G and 4G implementations that they could use to talk to either mobile devices over a radio interface, or towards the wired infrastructure components in the radio access and core networks. But we don't see significant contributions from that sphere, and I wonder why that is.

At least that part of the IT security industry that I know typically works with very comfortable budgets and profit rates, and investing in better infrastructure/tools is not charity anyway, but an actual investment into working more efficiently and/or extending the possible scope of related pen-testing or audits.

So it seems we might want to think what we could do in order to motivate such interested potential users of FOSS 3G/4G to contribute to it by either writing code or funding associated developments...

If you have any thoughts on that, feel free to share them with me by e-mail to laforge@gnumonks.org.

Today I had the pleasure of presenting about Open Source Network Elements for Security Analysis of Mobile Networks at the Troopers 2016 TelcoSecDay.

The main topics addressed by this presentation are:

• Importance of Free and Open Source Software implementations of cellular network protocol stacks / interfaces / network elements for applied telecom security research

• The progress we've made at Osmocom over the last eight years.

• An overview about our current efforts to implement at 3G Network similar to the existing 2G/2.5G/2.75G implementations.

There are no audio or video recordings of this session.

Slides are available at https://gitea.osmocom.org/laforge/laforge-slides/src/branch/master/2016/telcosecday

Today I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Shane Coughlan the Linaro Connect BKK16 Keynote on GPL compliance about GPL compliance.

The main topics addressed by this presentation are:

• Brief history about GPL enforcement and how it has impacted the industry

• Ultimate Goal of GPL enforcement is compliance

• The license is not an end in itself, but rather to facilitate collaborative development

• GPL compliance should be more engineering and business driven, not so much legal (compliance) driven.

The video recording is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4Bli8h0V-Q

Slides are available at https://gitea.osmocom.org/laforge/laforge-slides/src/branch/master/2016/linaroconnect

The video of a corresponding interview is available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IgjCyO-iQ

Today, I took some time off to attend the court hearing in the GPL violation/infringement case that Christoph Hellwig has brought against VMware.

I am not in any way legally involved in the lawsuit. However, as a fellow (former) Linux kernel developer myself, and a long-term Free Software community member who strongly believes in the copyleft model, I of course am very interested in this case - and of course in an outcome in favor of the plaintiff. Nevertheless, the below report tries to provide an un-biased account of what happened at the hearing today, and does not contain my own opinions on the matter. I can always write another blog post about that :)

I blogged about this case before briefly, and there is a lot of information publicly discussed about the case, including the information published by the Software Freedom Conservancy (see the link above, the announcement and the associated FAQ.

Still, let's quickly summarize the facts:

• VMware is using parts of the Linux kernel in their proprietary ESXi product, including the entire SCSI mid-layer, USB support, radix tree and many, many device drivers.

• as is generally known, Linux is licensed under GNU GPLv2, a copyleft-style license.

• VMware has modified all the code they took from the Linux kernel and integrated them into something they call vmklinux.

• VMware has modified their proprietary virtualization OS kernel vmkernel with specific API/symbol to interact with vmklinux

• at least in earlier versions of ESXi, virtually any block device access has to go through vmklinux and thus the portions of Linux they took

• vmklinux and vmkernel are dynamically linked object files that are linked together at run-time

• the Linux code they took runs in the same execution context (address space, stack, control flow) like the vmkernel.

Ok, now enter the court hearing of today.

Christoph Hellwig was represented by his two German Lawyers, Dr. Till Jaeger and Dr. Miriam Ballhausen. VMware was represented by three German lawyers lead by Matthias Koch, as well as a US attorney, Michael Jacobs (by means of two simultaneous interpreters). There were also several members of the in-house US legal team of VMware present, but not formally representing the defendant in court.

As is unusual for copyright disputes, there was quite some audience following the court. Next to the VMware entourage, there were also a couple of fellow Linux kernel developers as well as some German IT press representatives following the hearing.

It seems my recent concerns on the OpenAirInterface re-licensing were not unjustified.

I contacted various legal experts on Free Software legal community about this, and the response was unanimous: In all feedback I received, the general opinion was that software under the OSA Public License V1.0 is neither Free Software nor Open Source Software.

The rational is, that it does not fulfill the criteria of

• the FSF Free Software definition, as the license does not fulfill freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (which obviously includes commercial use)

• the Open Source Initiatives Open Source Definition, as the license must not discriminate against fields of endeavor, such as commercial use.

• the Debian Free Software Guidelines, as the DFSG also require no discrimination against fields of endeavor, such as commercial use.

I think we as the community need to be very clear about this. We should not easily tolerate that people put software under restrictive licenses but still call that software open source. This creates a bad impression to those not familiar with the culture and spirit of both Free Software and Open Source. It creates the impression that people can call something Open Source but then still ask royalties for it, if used commercially.

It is a shame that entities like Eurecom and the OpenAirInterface Software Association are open-washing their software by calling it Open Source when in fact it isn't. This attitude frankly makes me sick.

That's just like green-washing when companies like BP are claiming they're now an environmental friendly company just because they put some solar panels on the roof of some building.