Talk about holiday news these days, I have to tell you a (sort of a) bad one, namely the fact that the A5/1 privacy algorithm, the code that is used to grant the privacy of about 80 percent of all mobile calls across the globe, has been deciphered, but that's not all, sadly, because they did not only decipher it, but also made it public.

Actually, come to think about it, this is a good thing in my opinion, and I will even tell you why. This algorithm has been used since the year of 1988 to encrypt GSM calls, and it was about time someone gave the companies a kick start to come up with a new encoding to secure our calls, because as non-important each and every one of us considers himself or herself in private, all together, we are the majority that pays these lazy people.

The past week, at the Chaos Communication Congress, which is a four-day computer hackers' conference, one of the encryption specialists, by his name Karsten Nohl, disclosed how he and around 24 other persons cracked the code in question.

Also, as hackers (almost) never keep information they get just for themselves (they're somewhat like the gang of Robin Hood, taking from the rich, in information, and giving to the poor), Karsten even announced that the resulted two terabyte "code book" that is the "vast log of binary codes that could theoretically be used to decipher GSM phone calls" is already available on BitTorrent websites.

I don't know what to say as of yet, if it were time to already panic, or just remain calm knowing that this A5/1 64-bit binary code will be soon phased out for its successor, namely the 128-bit A5/3 algorithm. Time will tell, but let's hope it will not be added time to our phone bills.


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