Courts and bug product

[Ian Mason]

On 13 Feb 2008, at 13:03, Roland Perry wrote:

>
> Meanwhile, if it's a "well known fact" that new phones all have GPS  
> chips in, why all the speculation over GPS addons for iPhones? Just  
> use the chip it "has" inside, already.
>

iPhones made for the US market MUST by law have GPS "chips" built in  
to enable E911 service. I strongly suspect that non-US iPhones may  
have identical hardware for reasons of production economy*. It then  
just becomes a question of firmware as to whether the phone appears  
to be GPS enabled or not. As I've not ripped apart a US and non-US  
iPhone I can't say this with any certainty. Apple's marketing tactics  
could dictate keeping this capability quiet so that the firmware  
upgrade can be charged for later. A similar situation arose with  
802.11n capability in Apple's computer products.

*In the past phones had different hardware because of differing  
transmission standards. Nowadays most of the difficult stuff is done  
with DPSs and other soft reconfigurable hardware so it becomes  
practicable to have a single chassis regardless of intended market.  
This trend may dictate that many phones sold in both US and non-US  
markets are GPS capable in some fashion. This could be what's behind  
the 'secret GPS chip' rumour. If that indeed is the case then, in  
theory at least, a covert change of firmware on a phone might be  
possible to enable a GPS based location surveillance capability.