Hello FreeCalypso community, Just a quick note to let everyone know what I am working on these days: I am continuing to further develop my fc-simtool utility for manipulating (reading and writing) SIM cards. This utility began its life about a month ago in the freecalypso-hwlab repository, but has now been moved to a new Hg repository of its own:
https://www.freecalypso.org/hg/fc-pcsc-tools/ There is a doc subdirectory in the new repository, and I got two documentation articles written so far: Low-level-commands and User-oriented-commands. I invite all potentially interested parties to read these two documentation articles and see if this new tool is something you might like to play with. If you do wish to play with fc-simtool, you will need one of these SIM card "reader" (CCID) devices: http://shop.sysmocom.de/products/cm3121 http://shop.sysmocom.de/products/cm6121 If the card you wish to play with is still in its original credit-card- sized plastic carrier piece, you will need the 3121 CCID; if you are going to play with SIMs that have already been broken out (just the "plug-in form factor" piece that goes into phones), you will need the 6121. I have both, as well as this adapter for examining other people's 3FF/4FF SIMs pulled out of abomination phones: http://shop.sysmocom.de/products/sim-adapter-pcb One particularly useful feature of fc-simtool is SIM phonebook manipulation: it allows you to examine, backup, restore and manually edit SIM phonebooks. Harald Welte gave a presentation on SIM cards at the last CCC before the world went to hell (36C3), and in that talk he made a statement along the lines of "no one stores contacts on SIMs any more". I am here to refute that statement: there is one person still alive on Earth who does store contacts on SIMs, and that person is me! And if anyone wishes to join me in storing contacts on SIMs, fc-simtool is the perfect tool to manage them. Why store contacts on SIMs? Consider this analysis: when you use any classic GSM/2G dumbphone, it will typically offer you the option of storing your contacts either on the SIM or "on the phone". What does "on the phone" actually mean? Answer: it means contacts being stored in some proprietary format invented by the authors of that phone's particular proprietary fw, and known only to that proprietary fw. Sure, it may be possible to reverse-engineer that proprietary "on the phone" phonebook storage format - but why take the extra pain? OTOH, if you store your contacts on the SIM, they are stored in a format that is defined by real published standards, not proprietary - the standards are GSM TS 11.11 and its successor 3GPP TS 51.011. It is a standard format for which anyone in the world can freely write his or her own tools, as I have just proven with fc-simtool. If we ever get to a point of usable FreeCalypso fw running on either Motorola C139 or Pirelli DP-L10 (or any other pre-existing phone hw model), our FC fw will most definitely NOT share any FFS with that phone's original proprietary fw - our FreeCalypso FFS in such aftermarket hack configurations is always our own. Therefore, any "on the phone" contacts *cannot* be shared between the phone's original proprietary fw and future FC fw - neither fw will grok the other's ad hoc formats for storing user data. But if you have contacts stored on your SIM, those contacts are accessible to every fw on every phone, by the very design of GSM and the whole concept of SIM cards. I do take the opposite stance for SMS storage though. Contacts are long-term data: I have some contacts in my SIM phonebook which were created many years ago and are still active. In contrast, all message stores for SMS (whether SIM-based or phone-based) are transient by nature: the message store fills up with received and sent SMS, its capacity is limited, and the user has to clean it out. In my personal workflow, I also strongly prefer to transfer the content of my message store from the phone to my full-size computer for longer-term storage (years) before cleaning it out. All of these flows can work the same whether the message store is SIM-based or phone-based, but my plan for FreeCalypso fw is to implement a local FFS-based SMS store that follows the same data model as the standards-defined EF_SMS on SIMs, with only minor extensions. Having this local FFS-based SMS store to replace the SIM-based one for everyday usage will give us the following benefits: * SIM SMS store capacity is up to the SIM card issuer - my legacy T-Mobile SIMs have room for 30 records in their EF_SMS. Our own local FFS-based SMS store will be able to hold all the way up to the architectural limit of 254 records. * One really unpleasant limitation of the standard SMS storage data model as implemented in EF_SMS is the lack of timestamps on sent messages. Received messages have their network (SC) timestamps, but not sent ones. Pirelli's fw does not use SIM storage for sent SMS (received ones can be stored on the phone or on the SIM, but sent ones are only stored on the phone), but its proprietary "on the phone" storage format for sent SMS has the same data model: you can see the message content and whom you sent it to, but not when you sent it. My idea is to implement our own message store for SMS whose data model would be almost exactly the same as the standard SIM-based EF_SMS, but with one extra data field added for a local timestamp, based on the phone's own user-controlled notion of date and time. * Not constantly writing to the SIM for SMS storage and deletion will help prolong the SIM's internal flash write endurance. Right now I use a Pirelli DP-L10 running its original proprietary fw as my "daily driver" phone, and I have it configured to store all SMS on the phone, not on the SIM. It stores up to 50 messages, and when this capacity fills up, I use fc-fsio to read out the relevant parts of Pirelli's proprietary FFS before cleaning out the message store. Far from perfect, but it is my current interim solution in the absence of a usable FreeCalypso phone. But if someone does have SMS stored on their SIM, then you can read them with fc-simtool: use the tool's save-sms-bin command to save the content of EF_SMS in a binary file, then run pcm-sms-decode from FC host tools (a utility I wrote earlier for decoding Pirelli's /pcm/SMS which has exactly the same format) to fully decode and display the message content. Finally, one more project I am working on is trying to get our own SIMs. Some day soon we will need to start running our own GSM networks to replace the big carrier-based ones which are being shut down left and right, and we will need to issue our own SIMs. Back when Sysmocom sold their peach-colored sysmoUSIM-SJS1 cards, I was thinking of using those peach SIMs for our own issue - they weren't perfect, I would much rather have classic SIM only (no USIM) and a 2FF-only cut rather than 2FF+3FF - but those peach SIMs seemed acceptable to me at that time. But now those peach SIMs have been discontinued, and their successor sysmoISIM-SJA2 are even worse: * The very name "sysmoISIM" (or anything-ISIM for that matter) is rather offensive to me, glorifying that abominable 4G/LTE technology that is the root cause of 2G shutdowns - ISIM is a thing for VoLTE, and VoLTE implies LTE underneath. * The new cards are triple-cut in 2FF+3FF+4FF, which is even worse than the previous 2FF+3FF deal. * The brand printing on Sysmocom's previous peach and mint-colored SIMs was reasonable and non-offensive in my mind: just a company promoting its products and services, nothing wrong with that. But the printing on the new black cards gives advertising and promotion to newer-than-2G technologies, as well as unfair advertising and promotion to the Osmocom organization to the exclusion of other community projects in the cellular telephony arena that aren't Osmocom and live under different domain names - not OK for me. As a result of these developments, I feel that it is time for us to bite the bullet and make our own SIMs. I did inquire with Sysmocom about making a batch of SIMs customized for us, as in 2FF-only cut, our own FreeCalypso brand printing, and application customization to remove USIM and ISIM, leaving only classic SIM. I was told that what I seek would be quite doable, but the price is rather steep: we would have to order a minimum of 1000 cards (certainly enough for our needs for many lifetimes) at the cost of around 4 kUSD. Needless to say, 4 kUSD is a rather high price for a venture driven purely by personal passion, without any expectation ever of any profit or return. If I am unable to find any more affordable options, I *can* spend the 4 kUSD, and I will do that if I exhaust all other avenues. However, since the end of January I have been in a discussion with Grcard in China (a rather well-known major vendor of SIM cards) about getting the kind of programmable SIMs I want (2FF-only cut, SIM-only functionality without USIM or ISIM), and they did offer me very affordable prices. Their asking price for 1000 SIMs (with custom printing included) is less than half of Sysmocom's price, and they also allow smaller quantity orders - right now I am considering buying 300 SIMs initially. The problem, however, is extreme uncertainty: they were going to send me a few sample cards for technical testing, but the shipment hit some snafu with Chinese customs, and now we have to wait till the end of their Lunar New Year holiday before they can even begin another attempt at resending the package - and then it will be gawd knows however much longer before I actually receive the cards. And until I receive some sample cards for testing, we have no way of knowing whether or not these SIMs really are what we want in technical terms, i.e., whether or not they will actually work for our needs - thus uncertainties all around. But I am confident that even if it takes a long time, we *will* eventually have our own SIMs, whether cheap Grcard-based ones or expensive Sysmocom-based, and they will be fully programmable with fc-simtool without needing any Python tools. Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela aka The Mother _______________________________________________ Community mailing list Community@freecalypso.org https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community
