A5/3 (Kasumi) is near-on identical to the cyphers used in 3G connections, but you're right, this is the 2G only implementation; so yes, this only affects (applies to) 2G/EDGE/GSM.

I'm absolutely bloody agog that commercial first-world operators have taken until the end of 2014 to actually support this -I think it was ratified into the specification around 2001 if not earlier.

Also, for all you tinfoil wearers out there, you might like the fact that the original specification for A5/3 was altered to make it more hardware friendly. In 2010 it was realized that this actually made it extremely easy [1] to recover the session key (if not in real time) [2].

[1] core2due in a couple of hours easy, see the abstract [2]. [2] http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/013

A5/3 is a block cipher, 3G connections use a stream cipher. Respectfully, this is not "near-on" identical.

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/334/advantages-a...

Integrating support for these algorithms on the device side ends up being a high hurdle. Doing anything at scale is inevitably harder than you expect it to be. If it was a simple change, people would make it.

THanks for the clarification, I'm obviously getting myself confused somewhere. /me goes back to the documentation.

BART in the South Bay, huh? Sounds legit.

... Yes. South San Francisco on the way to the airport. If it's South SF isn't that South Bay? Who drew the line and where :P

Probably Sunnyvale. South S.F. is definitely the Peninsula at least, if not considered part of the city.

It's not the South Bay until you are at least in Santa Clara county.

Unless you are using VoIP, all of your voice calls go over the 2G network.

You're mistaken - 3G/UMTS supports circuit-switched voice calls just fine. It's 4G/LTE that hasn't supported voice calls until very recently when the first networks deployed VoLTE.

There's a tunnel in South Bay? Don't you mean East Bay near Oakland?

He probably just means he was underground. Not the Transbay tube

IIRC, there is a fairly lengthy tunnel on the line down to SFO.

That is nowhere near the South Bay though.