Worse since they're expensive and pushed by the manufacturer to the point you cannot physically plug a 3.5mm male plug into a female adapter on the newer phones

Worse since they're expensive and pushed by the manufacturer to the point you cannot physically plug a 3.5mm male plug into a female adapter on the newer phones -- you are forced to buy a dongle. Meanwhile the intelligence agencies of the world siphon up signals like hungry hungry hippos because SDRs are cheap and ubiquitious, when ten-ish years ago they were poorly documented, expensive, and the encryption schemes used strong enough using 4g over wifi was a very practical security decision. Here's an old talk that references someone's deadname with good technical information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU8hg4FTm0g| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU8hg4FTm0g| And a more recent talk on similar subjects: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6249_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412271715_-_ss7_locate_track_manipulate_-_tobias_engel https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6249_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412271... | https://berlin.ccc.de/~tobias/31c3-ss7-locate-track-manipulate.pdf https://berlin.ccc.de/~tobias/31c3-ss7-locate-track-manipula... (Apologies to Kristin, if they see this: I had trouble locating JUST the slides, not audio or video, of the DC18 talk or I would have simply linked the slides.)