Wikileaks row Hacked Mastercard and Visa

Hackers have attacked the websites of credit card giants Mastercard and Visa.

The attacks came after the Anonymous group of hackers pledged to pursue firms that have withdrawn services from Wikileaks.

Mastercard payments were disrupted but the firm said there was "no impact" on people's ability to use their cards.

Visa's website also experienced problems. The attacks came after both companies stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing site.

Entries on the Twitter page of Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign, said the Visa site had been taken down.

Visa's website was later restored and spokesman Ted Carr said its processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, was working normally.

But in a day of fast-moving developments, the Anonymous Twitter page then went down, replaced by a message from Twitter saying the account had been suspended.

Twitter say they do not comment on "the actions we take on specific user accounts". However, a source told the BBC that the last tweet sent out by Anonymous included a link to a file containing consumer credit card information.

Paul Mutton at the security firm Netcraft, who is monitoring the attacks, said Visa is considered a more difficult target and the attack on it required a much larger number of "hacktivist" - politically motivated hackers - 2,000 compared with 400 for Mastercard.

Earlier the BBC was contacted by a payment firm linked to Mastercard that said its customers had "a complete loss of service".

In particular, it said that an authentication service for online payments known as Mastercard's SecureCode, had been disrupted.

PayPal's Osama Bedier: "Our policy group had to make the decision of suspending the account"
Other readers have also said that they have had problems with online payments. The scale of the problems is still unclear.

Mastercard acknowledged there had been "a service disruption" involving its SecureCode system, but it added: "Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk.

"While we have seen limited interruption in some web-based services, cardholders can continue to use their cards for secure transactions globally."

False account
Anonymous, which claimed to have carried out the attack, is a loose-knit group of hacktivists, with links to the notorious message board 4chan.

It said that it has hit several targets, including the website of the prosecutors who are acting in a legal case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

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Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets”

Coldblood
Anonymous
An Anonymous member told AFP news agency the group would extend their campaign to anyone with "an anti-Wikileaks agenda".

PayPal, which has stopped processing donations to Wikileaks, has also been targeted.

The firm said Wikileaks' account had violated its terms of services.

"On 27 November the State Department, the US government, basically wrote a letter [to Wikileaks] saying that [its] activities were deemed illegal in the United States," PayPal's Osama Bedier told the Le Web conference in France.

"And as a result our policy group had to make the decision of suspending their account.

"It's honestly, just pretty straightforward from our perspective and there's not much more to it than that," he said.

Other firms that have distanced themselves from the site have also been hit in the recent spate of attacks including the Swiss bank, PostFinance, which closed the account of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

The bank said Mr Assange had provided false information when opening his account.

Swamp site
Security experts said the sites had been targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which swamp a site with so many page requests that it becomes overwhelmed and drops offline.

Kristin Hrafnsson, from Wikileaks, condemned companies such as Mastercard for cutting ties with the website.
Noa Bar Yosef, a senior analyst at Imperva said the attacks were "very focused".

"It is recruiting people from within their own network. They are actually asking supporters to download a piece of code, the DDoSing malware, and upon a wake-up call the computer engages in the denial of service," he said.

Before the Mastercard attack, a member of Anonymous, who calls himself Coldblood, told the BBC that "multiple things" were being done to target companies that had stopped working with Wikileaks or which were perceived to have attacked the site.

"Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets," he said.

"As an organisation we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means."

"We feel that Wikileaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government," he said.

Some of the early DDoS hits failed to take sites offline, although that was not the point of the attacks, according to Coldblood.

"The idea is not to wipe them off but to give the companies a wake-up call," he said. "Companies will notice the increase in traffic and an increase in traffic means increase in costs associated with running a website."

DDoS attacks are illegal in many countries, including the UK.

Coldblood admitted that such attacks "may hurt people trying to get to these sites" but said it was "the only effective way to tell these companies that us, the people, are displeased".

Anonymous is also helping to create hundreds of mirror sites for Wikileaks, after its US domain name provider withdrew its services.

Coldblood said that the group was beginning to wind down the DDoS attacks so that it could concentrate on using "other methods which are more focused on supporting Wikileaks and making sure the Internet stays a free and open place".

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IE9 introduces anti-tracking tool

Microsoft's IE9 browser will have tools that control what data is collected about what a user does online.

The tools will let people stop a site they are visiting sharing information about what they do with other sites.

Users will be able to create lists stating that their data will only be shared with sites they want to see it.

The news comes as the US government criticises the computer industry for its slow progress on protecting user privacy.In a blog post, Microsoft said many people did not realise that when they visit a website what they look for, view or buy there is often shared with other companies without that user's knowledge.

In IE9, Microsoft is planning to introduce what it calls "Tracking Protection Lists" that it says will work like the "Do Not Call" lists that limit who marketing firms can cold call.

The lists will be defined by users and limit the sharing of data only to those sites which a user is happy to see the information. When switched on, the system might mean that some adverts or other features do not appear when users visit sites.

Anyone will be able to write a list and share it with others so they can get the same protection, said Microsoft.

It also plans to release the formatting and standards for the lists under an open licence so other browser makers can adopt them.

The tracking system will be turned off by default and users will have to "opt in" to use it.

Microsoft said early versions of the tools would be included in the version of IE9 due for release in early 2011.

It is not the first browser to offer such functionality. Chrome, Firefox and Opera also allow users to create lists of trusted sites.

The announcement comes in the wake of a report from the US Federal Trade Commission report into online privacy.

In it the FTC said that industry self-regulation of privacy was "too slow" and has "failed to provide adequate and meaningful protection".

It called for consumers to be given far more choice about the data being collected about them. It recommended the creation of a "Do Not Track" mechanism that would stop the wholesale collection of information about where people go online and what they are interested in.

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Operating Systems, Hard Drives, Partitions, and You!

Your operating system: it’s that collection of data and programs that makes all your desktop PC orlaptop computer hardware work together. Where your operating system is installed on your PC’s hard drive, as well as the type of drive it’s on, can have a big impact on your system’s performance.

Whether you’re starting with a fresh, blank hard drive or reinstalling, this Tech Tip will tell you where you should put your operating system and why.

Your hard drive is where most of your system’s data lives and, in most cases, it’s a critical component. Without a hard drive, you don’t have much of a system. Similarly, without an operating system installed on that hard drive, you’re not going to be doing a lot of computing either. Since your operating system is in charge of making your hardware work together, it’s important for it to have as few bottlenecks as possible. This means the best place to install your operating system is on your fastest hard drive on its primary partition.

Your operating system also borrows a certain amount of space on the hard drive for something called paging, which treats a portion of your hard drive as spillover for your system’s random access memory (RAM) in the form of a pagefile. When your RAM gets full, operating systems switch to using the hard drive as “virtual memory.”

Depending on how much RAM your system has, you’ve probably experienced this at one time or another. When you’ve got a lot of applications running and your system begins to hang, paging is usually the culprit. But paging is also necessary, so you can do your best to avoid it by running only a few applications at a time or adding RAM to your system, but for the time being, paging is always going to be there waiting. The secret to less painful paging is using a fast drive!

For disk-based hard drives, like most of the drives found in PCs today, speed is generally determined by spindle speeds, also known as rotational delay, measured in rotations per minute. Spindle speeds, in turn, are limited by the physical size of the disk and the power required to move it. You can compare other factors like seek time and transfer time, but the difference in spindle speeds, compounded by the many times you access a hard drive during usage, is the most noticeable difference when dealing with hard drives.

Spindle speeds range usually from 4,200 RPM in notebook hard drives and low-power computers all the way up to 15,000 RPM in high-performance servers. With higher spindle speeds usually come higher costs and lower capacities since the power requirements to spin larger disks are too high to be practical. When selecting the drive you want for your operating system, choose the one with the higher spindle speed. If you’re looking to upgrade with a different drive, make sure you go with a higher spindle speed that your previous one, but keep in mind, if power requirements are an issue (and in notebooks that depend on battery life, they are), you’re increasing your consumption with a faster-spinning drive.

For solid-state hard drives(SSDs), there are no moving parts. That means greater durability, rotational delay, and much faster access times. Unfortunately, the cost per gigabyte of solid-state drives has kept them from completely knocking their disk-based predecessors off the market. You can get a couple terabytes (1,000 gigabytes) of disk-based hard drive capacity for the price of some of today’s solid-state drives. But what they lack in storage capacity, SSDs more than make up for in speed, and fortunately, you don’t need much more than 20 GB to install Windows 7 and even less for Mac OS X or popular Linux distributions. For this reason, solid-state drives normally play excellent hosts to operating systems. If you can’t afford a solid-state drive, a 7,200 RPM disk-based drive should hit your sweet spot between price, capacity, and performance return.

Once you’ve selected the type and speed of drive you’re going to use, you’ll go through the normal steps. If you’re reinstalling, back up your data to a separate drive first! Boot into an appropriate application, usually the disc you’re installing from is bootable. If you’re starting with a fresh drive, the drive is not partitioned and you must create at least one for files to be written to it. If you’re reinstalling, you’re going to wipe away the existing partitions (and the data they contain!) and create new ones.

Partitioning will let you keep your operating system separate from your lesser-used applications and archives, which, when stored on the same partition as your operating system, can decrease performance as the hard drive has all the data in one giant clump. Partitioning a drive tells your operating system to treat each division as a separate drive with their own drive letter. If you have to wipe away the data in a partition, you can easily format it without jeopardizing the other partitions. This is handy for quickly reinstalling operating systems while keeping the rest of your data safe and sound in other partitions. Additionally, you can install more than one operating system to a hard drive if it is partitioned properly to create a multi-boot setup. Unfortunately, partitions are not actually separate drives, so if your partitioned hard drive fails, all the partitions and they data they contain could be gone. For this reason, I recommend a second hard drive, whether internal or external, as a back up option for your other files.

In most cases, the software you’re booting up with will include some partition tools, but if not, I recommend GParted. It’s easy to use, works with all major operating systems and is free to download. It even gives you a few more options when partitioning, like resizing. If you’re just using one hard drive, create a small partition that will be used only for your operating system and a few of your most-used applications. If you’re using a solid-state drive, you can create a partition that uses the full capacity of the drive or reserve a small section for your most-used applications.

Check your operating system for the minimum hard drive requirements and add a few gigabytes on top of that for what I like to call elbow room. You can create another partition that will be especially for storing your pagefile, but I can’t say that I’ve noticed a significant advantage in doing that. Use the remaining hard drive capacity to create as many or as few partitions as you’d like. These will be where you will install your lesser-used applications, store larger files like music, photos, and movies, or even secondary operating systems. When you’re done divvying up your drive, format your partitions and install your operating system. Once the installation is complete, you can begin installing applications and generally filling it up with data again.

I like to keep separate partitions for music and videos. If you keep your partitions organized, your operating system should be able to perform better and you’ll be able to manage your data more efficiently.

I Hope you have enjoyed this Tech Tip on operating systems, hard drives and partitions. If you have a learned anything and would like to share it with everyone or just have a question please leave a comment!

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Why your 500GB hard drive only shows 465GB of space when you look under MY COMPUTER

In this tech tip, we expose the myth and reality surrounding some of the biggest trends in our technology-oriented world. Hopefully, this will shed some light which can help you better understand how these crazy gadgets work!

1. Why a cable Internet service provider's (ISP) advertised speeds are not actually reality

While it's attractive to see that ISPs advertise 10-15 megabits per second download speed, the reality is that you share the same network node as your neighbor (and neighborhood) when it comes to network logistics. So if you and 15 of your neighbors who have the same cable Internet provider are all online, that 10-15 mbps is split between each of you. What's worse is that if one of your neighbors is downloading 24/7, then you'll see reduced speed all the time. The highest chance of your network's peak performance is late in the evening when everyone else is asleep.

2. True or False - Your CD burner's 52X speed is
truly 52X speed

False-ish - The fine print here is that first, in order to achieve 52X speed, you would need a 52X compact disc. Second, when the cd burner starts, it begins at the inside of the disc and works its way out. That's why some burning programs that show real-time speed will say it's burning at 2.5X speed after 1-2 minutes. The 52X speed is achieved as the burner gets closer and closer to the outer edge of the disc. This is the same for burning DVDs.

3. True or False - Megabits and Megabytes are
the same thing

False - Keep in mind that MEGABITS (Mb) is a unit of measurement for network transfer speed. Megabytes (MB) is a unit of storage such as hard drives. That's why when Internet service providers pitch their fast speeds, they always reference megabits. Therefore, a 1 megabit transfer speed does not mean being able to move 1 megabyte across a network. 1 megabit is about .125 megabytes.

4. Why your 500GB hard drive only shows 465GB of space when you look under MY COMPUTER

Your computer reads information in different ways.

So for example:

BASE 2

1 Megabyte (MB) = 1024 Kilobytes (KB) - BASE 2 (2 ^ 20 = 1,048,576 bytes)

1 Gigabyte (GB) - 1024 Megabytes (MB) - BASe 2 (2 ^ 30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes)

BASE 10

1 Megabyte (MB) = 1024 Kilobytes (KB) - BASE 10 (10 ^ 6 = 1,000,000 bytes)

1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1024 Megabytes (MB) - Base 10 (10 ^ 9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes)

Because we know that 1024 Megabytes (MB) => 1 Gigabyte (GB) => BASE 2 (2 ^ 30 = 1,073,741,824), 500 GB equals 500 x 1,073,741,824 bytes or 536,870,912,000 bytes.

We also know that in BASE 10, 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes

So let's look at what we have:

536,870,912,000 (500GB IN BASE 2)
--------------------- = 1.073741824
(500 x 1,000,000,000) (500GB IN BASE 10)

And if we multiply 1.073741824 x 465, we get 499.28994816, which, if rounded up equals 500 GB

Hard Drive Manufacturers use the binary method when manufacturing their drives but Windows reads the information in the decimal format to show the size. However, which would be more attractive? Buying a hard drive advertised as a 536,870,912,200 byte drive or having it say a simple 500 GB?

5. True or False - The 750 watt power supply you
just purchased for $22 is really putting out 750 watts

False-ish - Similar to how a car with 236 lb-ft of torque provides 100% of it at a certain engine rpm speed, PSU manufacturers know that power supplies hit their max wattage at certain points in time.

For example, 750 watts might be attained with 1 hard drive and 1 optical drive while the computer is idling. Also, it's a dead give-away if you paid only $22 for a high-powered PSU. Look for a PSU that certifies their wattage. So if you see an Antec TRUE 550W power supply, it's Antec's way of saying that the PSU provides 550 watts of power at any given time. Another way to tell that a PSU is reliable is if it’s heavy. Quality-made PSUs are engineered with heavy-duty and longer-lasting capacitors.

6. True or False - Buying a larger-screen size
notebook automatically equals more viewing space

False - Between 15.5" and 16" screen sizes, most entry-level notebooks have a resolution of 1366 x 768 which is fine but doesn't offer more space. Most 17" notebooks have 1440 x 900 resolution.

If you're looking for more viewing space, opt for a higher resolution.

In other words:

15" - 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1080

17" - 1600 x 900, 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1080

The images, icons and text appear crisper and you can fit browsers side-by-side along with being able to simultaneously view all folders without having to press Alt-Tab to switch windows/folders.

7. Buying a computer with more cores (more
than dual-core) equals much faster performance

False - Mathematically-speaking, more cores would theoretically yield better performance but the issue is that many simple, everyday programs like Microsoft Word, FireFox and Excel won't know to use the extra cores to run the program faster. However, gamers and graphic designers whose programs will see (and utilize) the additional cores will benefit from it. If you want more performance, focus on optimizing the hard drive such as defragmentation, reducing programs that run on start-up (which slow the system down), adding more RAM and cleaning the Windows registry. So ultimately, you really won't see much of a speed difference between a dual-core cpucomputer and a hexacore (6-core) computer both running FireFox and Microsoft Word simultaneously.

In Conclusion

The common denominator for these tech myths is that their “validity” is usually exaggerated marketing hype and manufacturer/retailer buzz words in order to entice customers to buy their products, thus adding confusion to the reality. So the next time you’re in the market for a new cheap laptop, digital camera, phone, discount mp3 player, etc., don’t automatically digest the excessive marketing that salespeople throw to close the sale."

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Multi-GPU: SLI & CrossFireX – Who, What, Why?

If you’re not a dedicated PC gamer, chances are you haven’t been paying attention to the advancements in video card technology over the years. In a short time, video cards have gone from simple add-on cards with a single graphics processor, a tiny heat sink, and some RAM chips, to full-on computers in and of themselves. You may also not be aware that you can install more than one video card in a desktop PC so their graphics processing units (GPUs) work together to provide what’s known as “performance scaling.” In this week’s TechTip, I’ll discuss some different multi-GPU solutions available, why you might want one, how can go about getting one, and why you might be using one before you know it.

Desktop Solutions

Traditional multi-GPU solutions, ones that involve two physical add-in cards, are available from the big two video card developers, NVIDIA and AMD, with each using their own method of implementation. Generally, the two cards split the workload and render frames as a team to provide close to double the performance as a single GPU system. NVIDIA’s solution is called SLI, which stands for Scalable Link Interface, and AMD’s is called CrossFireX. To use either solution, you need at least two PCI Express x16 slots on your motherboard and a supported northbridge chipset. With this being the case, a multi-GPU setup is something you need to plan for before building a desktop system, it’s not something you can easily fall back on for an upgrade if you don’t already have an SLI/CrossFireX-ready motherboard. For an NVIDIA-based multi-GPU system, you need two cards with identical GPUs. You can use cards from different manufacturers, but if you have a GeForce 9800GT, you need another GeForce 9800GT to go with it. CrossFireX allows for a little flexibility in its pairings, letting you to pair cards that are within the same subseries (e.g. HD 4870 will pair with HD 4850). Unfortunately, these traditional solutions are can be buggy and are not widely supported. That makes traditional multi-GPU solutions an expensive venture for something you might not even be able to fully utilize. Video cards can be expensive enough, buying two or more can be left to the bleeding edge enthusiasts.

Mobile Solutions

Luckily, multi-GPU solutions have evolved to overcome the hindrances of the traditional setup. Each solution offers a Hybrid variant (Hybrid SLI, Hybrid CrossFire) that is designed to incorporate the use of an integrated graphics processor already on the motherboard to handle light-duty graphics tasks along with the much better performance of a GeForce or Radeon GPU. These hybrid solutions are perfect for notebook systems that usually are already using low cost integrated graphics, providing extra graphics processing power when it’s needed. You can find these multi-GPU solutions in place in a number of notebooks already on the market, but, like traditional SLI, these hybrids are not without their drawbacks.

The first drawback is that powering two GPUs at all times when you’re only really using one can drain your battery quickly and the second is that you’ll often need to reboot your system when you enable or disable the extra GPU. This second drawback will probably be overcome by technologies like NVIDIA’s Optimus and Apple’s “automatic graphics switching” found in their current generation of MacBook Pros. These multi-GPU solutions will seamlessly switch between energy-efficient and performance modes without the need to reboot by powering down the unused GPU. This gives you the convenience of a virtually instant performance only when it’s needed, consuming less power, and translating to better battery life for mobile applications. This best-of-both-worlds solution is definitely something I am interested in and I expect to see solutions like this to become widely available in the near future.

The rest

If seamless multi-GPU switching doesn’t take over, it will be due to the fact that integrated graphics are gradually being moved from the motherboard’s northbridge chip to the CPU itself. Technically, it can still be a multi-GPU solution, but the hardware is much different and the GPUs aren’t working together. Intel’s Core i3 and i5 CPUs already feature a graphics processor integrated onto the die and AMD is planning on releasing the Fusion series, their incorporation of Radeon technology with AMD CPU microarchitecture. As CPUs have hit a ceiling as far as clock speeds and moved to including more cores, you can expect GPUs to take a similar path. There have already been a few high-end video cards released with two GPUs stuck together, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re small enough to fit many GPU cores alongside the multi-core CPUs of today.

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Plane-tracking phone app is a boon for terrorists?

An application for the iPhone and Android-running devices that allows users to establish the exact location of an airplane by simply pointing it in its direction while it glides through the sky has made a lot of security expert call for a ban.
The application - called Plane Finder AR - was developed by British company Pinkfroot and is currently being sold on online app markets for the cheap price of £1.79. It shows the current position, height, speed, airline name, flight number, departure point and destination, and the probable course of the targeted plane, and it manages to do so by intercepting transmissions from the Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcasts (ADS-B) located on most passenger planes to a satellite tracking system.

According to the Daily Mail, many security experts are worried that the application can be used by terrorists to target commercial planes with missiles - a thing they have been known to do in the past - and the U.S. DHS is already looking into the problem.

Lee Armstrong, the director of Pinkfroot, says that they have not received any objection from governments, and that they have simply "packaged information that is freely broadcast". Also, he points out that the application provides the data that is not exactly precise - it delays the information by 30 seconds, so that the risk for misuse is reduced.

"If someone really wants to do that [shoot down a jet] they could buy their own ADS-B or radar," he says. "This application might be new but the ability to track aircraft isn’t," said the spokesman for the U.K. Department for Transport.

And, in the end, maybe the whole hoopla about this application might be a little overdone, since it can't detect planes that don't have ADS-B equipment, and doesn't work in areas where the company has no feeds.

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Stalkers Exploit Cellphone GPS

Phone companies know where their customers' cellphones are, often within a radius of less than 100 feet. That tracking technology has rescued lost drivers, helped authorities find kidnap victims and let parents keep tabs on their kids.

But the technology isn't always used the way the phone company intends.

One morning last summer, Glenn Helwig threw his then-wife to the floor of their bedroom in Corpus Christi, Texas, she alleged in police reports. She packed her 1995 Hyundai and drove to a friend's home, she recalled recently. She didn't expect him to find her.

The day after she arrived, she says, her husband "all of a sudden showed up." According to police reports, he barged in and knocked her to the floor, then took off with her car.

The police say in a report that Mr. Helwig found his wife using a service offered by his cellular carrier, which enabled him to follow her movements through the global-positioning-system chip contained in her cellphone.

Mr. Helwig, in an interview, acknowledged using the service to track his wife on some occasions. He says he signed up for the tracking service last year. "AT&T had this little deal where you could find your family member through her cellphone," he says. But he didn't use it to find his wife that day, he says. Mr. Helwig, who is awaiting trial on related assault charges, declined to comment further about the matter. He has pleaded not guilty.

The allegations are a stark reminder of a largely hidden cost from the proliferation of sophisticated tracking technology in everyday life—a loss of privacy.

Global-positioning systems, called GPS, and other technologies used by phone companies have unexpectedly made it easier for abusers to track their victims. A U.S. Justice Department report last year estimated that more than 25,000 adults in the U.S. are victims of GPS stalking annually, including by cellphone.

In the online world, consumers who surf the Internet unintentionally surrender all kinds of personal information to marketing firms that use invisible tracking technology to monitor online activity. A Wall Street Journal investigation of the 50 most-popular U.S. websites found that most are placing intrusive tracking technologies on the computers of visitors—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time.

The cellphone industry says location-tracking programs are meant to provide a useful service to families, and that most providers take steps to prevent abuse. Mike Altschul, chief counsel for wireless-telecommunications trade group CTIA, says recommended "best practices" for providers of such services include providing notification to the person being tracked.

Mr. Helwig's wife had received such a notification, by text message, from AT&T. A spokesman for AT&T Inc. says it notifies all phone users when tracking functions are activated. But users don't have the right to refuse to be tracked by the account holder. Turning off the phone stops the tracking.

Cellphone companies will deactivate a tracking function if law-enforcement officials inform them it is being used for stalking. Mr. Altschul says authorities haven't asked carriers to change their programs. He adds that carriers have long supported programs to give untraceable cellphones to domestic-violence victims.

In Arizona this year, Andre Leteve used the GPS in his wife's cellphone to stalk her, according to his wife's lawyer, Robert Jensen, before allegedly murdering their two children and shooting himself. Mr. Jensen says Mr. Leteve's wife, Laurie Leteve, didn't know she was being tracked until she looked at one of the family's monthly cellphone bills, more than 30 days after the tracking began. Mr. Leteve, a real-estate agent, is expected to recover. He has pleaded not guilty to murder charges, and is awaiting trial. The law firm representing him declined to comment.

In a suspected murder-suicide last year near Seattle, a mechanic named James Harrison allegedly tracked his wife's cellphone to a store. After he found her there with another man, he shot to death his five children and himself, according to the Pierce County Sheriff's Office.

Therapists who work with domestic-abuse victims say they are increasingly seeing clients who have been stalked via their phones. At the Next Door Solutions for Battered Women shelter in San Jose, Calif., director Kathleen Krenek says women frequently arrive with the same complaint: "He knows where I am all the time, and I can't figure out how he's tracking me."

In such cases, Ms. Krenek says, the abuser is usually tracking a victim's cellphone. That comes as a shock to many stalking victims, she says, who often believe that carrying a phone makes them safer because they can call 911 if they're attacked.

There are various technologies for tracking a person's phone, and with the fast growth in smartphones, new ones come along frequently. Earlier this year, researchers with iSec Partners, a cyber-security firm, described in a report how anyone could track a phone within a tight radius. All that is required is the target person's cellphone number, a computer and some knowledge of how cellular networks work, said the report, which aimed to spotlight a security vulnerability.
The result, says iSec researcher Don Bailey, is that "guys like me, who shouldn't have access to your location, have it for very, very, very cheap."

That is, in part, an unintended consequence of federal regulations that require cellphone makers to install GPS chips or other location technology in nearly all phones. The Federal Communications Commission required U.S. cellular providers to make at least 95% of the phones in their networks traceable by satellite or other technologies by the end of 2005. The agency's intention was to make it easier for people in emergencies to get help. GPS chips send signals to satellites that enable police and rescue workers to locate a person.

To a large extent, that potential has been fulfilled. Last year, for example, police in Athol, Mass., working with a cellphone carrier, were able to pinpoint the location of a 9-year-old girl who allegedly had been kidnapped and taken to Virginia by her grandmother. In December, police in Wickliffe, Ohio, tracked down and arrested a man who allegedly had robbed a Pizza Hut at gunpoint by tracking the location of a cellphone they say he had stolen.

Mr. Altschul, of the cellphone-industry trade group, says the tracking technology has been of great help to both law-enforcement officials and parents. "The technology here is neutral," he says. "It's actually used for peace of mind."

But as GPS phones proliferated, tech companies found other uses for the tracking data. Software called MobileSpy can "silently record text messages, GPS locations and call details" on iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android phones, according to the program's maker, Retina-X Studios LLC. For $99.97 a year, a person can load MobileSpy onto someone's cellphone and track that phone's location.
Craig Thompson, Retina-X's operations director, says the software is meant to allow parents to track their kids and companies to keep tabs on phones their employees use. He says the company has sold 60,000 copies of MobileSpy. The company sometimes gets calls from people who complain they are being improperly tracked, he says, but it hasn't been able to verify any of the complaints.

Installing such programs requires a person to physically get hold of the phone to download software onto it.

GPS-tracking systems provided by cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. are activated remotely, by the carriers.

Domestic-violence shelters have learned the consequences. As soon as victims arrive at shelters run by A Safe Place, "we literally take their phones apart and put them in a plastic bag" to disable the tracking systems, says Marsie Silvestro, director of the Portsmouth, N.H., organization, which houses domestic-violence victims in secret locations so their abusers can't find them.

The organization put that policy in place after a close call. On Feb. 26, Jennie Barnes arrived at a shelter to escape her husband, Michael Barnes, according to a police affidavit filed in a domestic-violence case against Mr. Barnes in New Hampshire state court. Ms. Barnes told police she was afraid that Mr. Barnes, who has admitted in court to assaulting his wife, would assault her again.

Ms. Barnes told a police officer that "she was in fear for her life," according to court filings. The next day, a judge issued a restraining order requiring Mr. Barnes to stay away from his wife.

Later that day, court records indicate, Mr. Barnes called his wife's cellular carrier, AT&T, and activated a service that let him track his wife's location. Mr. Barnes, court records say, told his brother that he planned to find Ms. Barnes.

The cellular carrier sent Ms. Barnes a text message telling her the tracking service had been activated, and police intercepted her husband. Mr. Barnes, who pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife and to violating a restraining order by tracking her with the cellphone, was sentenced to 12 months in jail. A lawyer for Mr. Barnes didn't return calls seeking comment.

Another source for cellphone tracking information: systems meant to help police and firefighters. Some cellular carriers provide services for law-enforcement officers to track people in emergencies. Using such systems requires a person to visit a special website or dial a hot-line number set up by the carrier and claim the data request is for law-enforcement purposes.

Cellular carriers say they try to verify that callers are legitimate. An AT&T spokesman says an office is manned around the clock by operators who ask for subpoenas from law-enforcement officials using the system.

But federal law allows carriers to turn over data in emergencies without subpoenas. Al Gidari, a lawyer who represents carriers such as Verizon, says such location-tracking systems can be easy to abuse. Police, he says, often claim they need data immediately for an emergency like a kidnapping, and therefore don't have time to obtain a warrant, in which a judge must approve an information request.

In Minnesota, Sarah Jean Mann claimed last year in a county-court petition for a restraining order that her estranged boyfriend, a state narcotics agent, followed her by tracking her cellphone and accessing her call and location records through such a system. The court issued the restraining order. The boyfriend, Randy Olson, has since resigned from the police force. He didn't respond to calls seeking comment.

Mr. Gidari says law-enforcement's easy access to such data makes the systems easy to abuse. He says carriers would like to have a system in place requiring agents to get warrants. Without such a requirement, there is little carriers can do to resist warrantless requests, say Mr. Gidari and Mr. Altschul of trade group CTIA. Federal law says carriers may comply with such requests, and law-enforcement agencies have pressured them to maintain the tracking systems, Mr. Gidari says.

The easiest way for stalkers to locate a target—and perhaps the most common, say therapists who work with victims and abusers—is by using systems offered by carriers. When cellphone users sign up for a "family plan" that includes two or more phones, they have the option to contact the carrier and activate a tracking feature intended to allow them to keep tabs on their children.

The AT&T FamilyMap program, for example, is free for 30 days and requires only a phone call to activate. "Know where your kids and loved ones are at any time!" says AT&T's website. The system is for parents, says an AT&T spokesman. He says the company hasn't received complaints about FamilyMap being used by stalkers.

The system provides an on-screen map on the smartphone or computer of the person doing the tracking. A dot on the map shows the location and movement of the person being followed. The carrier sends a text-message to the person being tracked that their phone is registered in the program.

These add-on services can be lucrative for carriers. AT&T debuted its FamilyMap system in April 2009. It charges $9.99 a month to track up to two phones, $14.99 for up to five. FamilyMap users must agree to "terms-of-use" stating that they may not use the system to "harrass, stalk, threaten" or otherwise harm anyone.

In Corpus Christi, Mr. Helwig and his wife, who had been married since early 2008, bought phones under an AT&T family plan. Mr. Helwig says he activated the feature last year. His wife says she received a text message that a tracking function had been activated on her phone, but wasn't sure how it was activated. Her husband, she says, initially denied turning on the tracking function.

She says she eventually came up with a plan to flee to the house of a family whose children she baby-sat. Her husband "had no idea where they lived" or even their names, she says. As she was packing, her husband confronted her. They argued, and, according to her statements in police reports, Mr. Helwig dragged her around by her hair.

The police came. She says she told them she didn't want them to arrest Mr. Helwig, that she simply wanted to leave. The police told Mr. Helwig to stay away from her for 24 hours, she says.

As she drove to her friend's house, she says, she made sure her phone was off so Mr. Helwig couldn't track her. But she turned it on several times to make calls. The next day, Mr. Helwig was outside in a rage, according to police reports.

Mr. Helwig forced his way into the house, pushed her to the floor, took her car keys and drove away in her Hyundai, according to police reports.

Police arrested Mr. Helwig a short distance away. Mr. Helwig, a firefighter, is facing charges of assault and interfering with an emergency call. His trial is scheduled to begin this summer.

Mr. Helwig and his wife divorced, and she left Corpus Christi. She says she doesn't want to testify against him. She says she is more careful about trusting her cellphone now.

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