Carrier IQ is a software that runs on more than 140 million mobile phones (according to information on the Carrier IQ website). It is a monitoring software that can track user activities and data, including their personal information, locations, network communications, phone calls, messages and a lot more.

A few aspects make the software especially suspicious from a consumer perspective. Carrier IQ is not listed as a running application on the phone. The software furthermore cannot be stopped or deactivated on standard phones.

The Carrier IQ company stated that the Carrier IQ software “delivers Mobile Intelligence on the performance of mobile devices and networks to assist operators and device manufacturers in delivering high quality products and services to their customers”.

How can you find out if Carrier IQ is running on your phone?

It’s almost impossible for users to find off switches, user interfaces, policies, or references to IQRD anywhere on the phone. Using standard functionality, the only place you can see that the application is installed on the phone is in Menu -> Settings -> Manage Applications -> All, then scroll down to IQRD. This application has a non-descript icon and offers no information about itself. Even on old devices, IQRD runs continuously because it’s set to start automatically at boot. The only option you have to stop the application is to select “force stop”—which does nothing. The application continues to run.

The only option to remove Carrier IQ is to root the phone:

The only choice we have to “opt out” of this data collection is to root our devices because every part of the multi-headed CIQ application is embedded into low-level, locked regions of the phones. Even if you unlock your device and remove the base application with a sophisticated removal method, neutered, leftover code called from other applications will likely throw an error each time an old action is triggered.

It’s almost impossible to fully remove Carrier IQ. The browser is modified to send to Carrier IQ daemon, as is almost everything else. The application is so deeply embedded in our devices that a user must rebuild the whole device (system.img and boot.img) directly from source code to remove every part of CIQ.

Eckhart only looked at Android devices, but it is likely that other phone manufacturers are also making use of Carrier IQ.

I suggest you take a look at the YouTube video that is a live demonstration of the Carrier IQ software by the security researcher himself.

I suggest you read the two detailed articles (What is Carrier IQ? and CarrierIQ Part 2 for a deeper understanding of the situation.

My opinion? I’d stop using a phone immediately if it would run the software and would not give me an option to opt-out of it. What’s your take?

Update: Carrier IQ has also be confirmed running on Apple’s iOS. Read the blog post here for detailed information.

The program is offered as a limited free version and commercial versions. ManicTime Free comes without program support and advanced features like password protection, categorization of applications or advanced search functionality.

The free version of the time tracking software tracks and analyzes application usage automatically, and creates charts and statistics about the general computer usage.

When you start the program for the first time, you will see a tabbed interface that is divided into two main areas. The area at the top of the program window displays the current day and a time bar that visualizes computer, application and document usage on the computer. Different programs and documents are displayed with different color sets. Hovering the mouse over them displays tooltip information about the program, time and duration as well as document titles and related information.

The lower half of the screen displays the active application or document (e.g. browser tab) and totals combined (e.g. how long you spend in the Firefox browser).

The statistics tab displays various information like the top applications and documents, top computer usage or day durations.

You can pause tracking at any time with a right-click on the program’s system tray icon and the selection of “Go off the record”.

The information that ManicTime present can be a real eye opener for some users. Maybe you realize that you spend to much time gaming on Facebook or your favorite Flash games site, or watching movies on the computer.

I personally like the fact that the program keeps not only track of programs but also window titles, so that you can for instance see how much time you spend on specific websites in your web browser.

ManicTime is a handy time tracking software for the Windows operating system. Windows users can download all available versions of the software from the developer website. The program is fully compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

Ping Monitor is a desktop gadget for Windows that can monitor up to five local or remote servers. As the name suggests, it pings the servers in intervals specified by the user of the application. (I suggest you read through Ryan’s excellent Network Troubleshooting Basics: The Ping Command if you need to refresh what you know about the ping command).

All information are presented then as a graph and in averages on the Windows desktop.

Configuration of the sidebar gadget may be somewhat confusing. Download it from the developer website and install it as usual. It should work out of the box under Windows Vista and Windows 7, I have tested it under Windows 7 Pro and it worked without problems.

When you first display the gadget it does not monitor a domain, IP or server. Right-click the interface and select Options.

Up to five different urls or IP addresses can be added to the gadget. Ping Monitor supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Enter an IP address or domain name in the first field, and an alias that is used to identify it in the second. The alias is shown on the main interface which is better than displaying IP addresses for instance. Still, you can select to use the domain name or IP address as the alias as well.

Make sure you change the default ping frequency from 1 per second (!) to another value. I suggest you switch to minutes or even hours instead.

Click on the 3 tab afterwards. Here you can change the size of the gadget. The default size was to small for my taste, and I changed that to 200% for a better view at the stats.

You can also make changes to colors and the graphs under the other tabs in the configuration.

The gadget displays the maximum, average and current ping time as well as the number of errors while pining the server or IP address.

The graph visualizes those findings. You can ping a server manually with a click on the update icon next to the server’s alias.

Ping Monitor is a handy gadget for Windows users who want to use the ping command to monitor websites or servers. The ping command is not as sophisticated as other server monitoring means, for instance by performing checks if a database is running on a server.

Users who prefer an application instead of a gadget can take a look at Nirsoft’s Ping Info View instead which is also compatible with Windows XP.

I want to introduce you to a few of these handy, but little-known, Linux administration tools.

Figure 1

w

The w command is a very simple tool that displays to you who is logged onto a system, when they logged in, and what processes they are using. This command is incredibly simple to use, just issue the command w and you will receive output similar to that shown in Figure 1.

As you can see the user jlwallen (that’s me) has been logged in since 14:19 and has four processes running.

iostat

Figure 2

The iostat command (part of the sysstat program) will report CPU statistics and I/O statistics. As you can see, in Figure 2, iostat is broken into three sections:

Information: Information about kernel, hostname, date, and architecture.

Avg-CPU: This section gives you all of the information about your CPU on different levels (user, system, I/O, involuntary wait, and idle).

Device: This section offers statistics on a per physical device basis.

Figure 3

mpstat

The mpstat command will display a per-processor listing of processes. If you issue the command mpstat -P ALL you will see a listing of your processes for each CPU (see Figure 3). This command will report processes on a user, idle, nice, system, irq, involuntary wait, and guest level.

Instead of running this on all processors you can specify a processor with the -P argument.

Figure 4

pmap

This tool is more used for developers as it will report bottlenecks in memory. You have to use it on a process ID (PID) like so:

pmap -d PID

Where PID is the actual process ID of the program you want to check.

As I already mentioned, the information output from this command will be helpful for developers and not much more.

Figure 5

ss

The socket statistics command will give you output of all network sockets on your system. As you can see (in Figure 5) there are a lot of sockets to list on the average computer. This command is similar to netstat but is much faster at reporting. Figure 5 illustrates how ss does its reporting. Here you see localhost as well as some private IP addresses connecting to sockets on this particular machine.

Figure 6

iptraf

The iptraf tool is one of my favorite text-based network monitoring tools. You won’t find iptraf installed by default (it’s generally in the default repositories for distributions, so it’s easy to install). Once you have iptraf installed you can start it by issuing the command iptraf. This tool allows you to create filters which can monitor specific network devices, addresses, packets, ports, and more.

Conclusion

The Linux operating system offers a ton of administration tools. Since many of those tools are commands, they wind up disappearing in obscurity. Here you have seen a few of those obscure commands. If you need more information on any of these commands you can check out the man page for each.

There are three options on how to stay informed about downtimes. The first two options are managed by the webmaster or system administrator. Online services and computer programs are available to check a website regularly to see if it positively responds to those checks. The third option is a hosting company that does the monitoring for the webmaster.

Karen’s Net Monitor is a website monitor for the Windows operating system that can check websites, email servers and IP addresses.

Two websites are configured on startup that are checked regularly. Websites are displayed with a checkbox that indicates if they are being monitored. A check log is displayed at the bottom of the main screen as well as overall stats and stats for individual jobs that are selected.

The testing interval can also be configured in the screen.

New websites and properties can be added by clicking on the Edit Settings button. Here it is possible to add new websites, email servers and ping checks.

The program has no options to test services that run on a web server or to check responses on a site. A common check in many monitoring programs is to see if a previously defined text is returned on the website or server that is being checked.

Karen’s Net Monitor can be used for basic network monitoring tasks. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows and available for download at the developer’s website.

Check Host is a free application for Windows that can be used for this monitoring purpose. The software program offers two methods of checking servers and services: Ping and Socket Connection. Ping will perform a simple ping to the selected hostname or IP address while a socket connection needs to be configured with a protocol (TCP or UDP) and a port.

It is furthermore possible to define the interval in which the checks are performed and the timeout which will trigger notifications if those have been configured.

Speaking of which; The program supports desktop and email notifications and starting a program or batch file whenever a server check produces a timeout. The same options are also available when the service or server are available again.

All services and servers that are monitored are displayed in the main interface of the software along with their description, hostname or IP address, method and time the last check was performed.

Some or all of the checks can be paused at anytime and a double-click on a row will open the configuration for that specific service or server again.

The options contain the interesting feature to write a protocol to a file which can be a great way of analysing server availability over time. It is here that the user needs to configure the SMTP server if emails are selected as part of the notification setup.

Check Host is a basic service and server monitoring software for the Windows operating system. It requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 and can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website. It is compatible with most editions and versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 7.

The movie uses animations and a dramatic voice to display possible consequences for everyone. Definitely worth to see.

I think Goethe put it nicely by saying “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.” All of these mechanisms provide a false sense of security. What good does it do if all network traffic is monitored when terrorists use encryption, one use computers, meet in person, meet in another country, send letters, use codes only they know ?