So I bought something at a thrift store, it's a “Cellebrite Touch”

&#x27;I tried hooking up the micro-usb cable to an older android phone I had sitting around and it goes &quot;OH YEAH THAT&#x27;S AN HTC ONE. WHICH MODEL IS IT?&quot; Scary.&#x27;<p>USB vendor&#x2F;product ids: very spooky? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-sz.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;usbid&#x2F;index.php?v=0x0BB4&amp;p=0x0DEA&amp;n=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.the-sz.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;usbid&#x2F;index.php?v=0x0BB4&amp;p=0x...</a>

Cellebrite in an Israeli company that specializes in extracting data from phones. The device bought in the thrift store appears to be a device to copy data from phones already unlocked and open, in other words, not the most interesting device they have, and it&#x27;s from 2014. Still a nice read though.

Used to work at Best Buy in Mobile. and used this POS all the time. It was good when it worked. A lot of the time it was not working because it had to get flashed by connecting to the Ethernet port. We used it to transfer information from one phone to another. It did work with almost any phone. You just had to Find the right kind of cable for every phone back then. Sometimes it would even connect and transfer via Bluetooth. Good times.

i heard about these things but never used one myself (although i had access to a similar if ess user friendly data extraction tool called a DM3 used for nokia and blackberry forensics etc)<p>they were mainly for forensic or data recovery and sometimes unlocking or password removal. i can tell you that the left side will almost certainly be for various data clips&#x2F;cables (usually over UART) which usually use an RJ45 although some older ones used the serial connector and a 3.5mm jack, use of RJ45 cables is still fairly common as some models can only be unlocked via UART<p>im also not sure the sim card slot is actually for sim cards as such but more likely a smartcard auth token for software licences, most unlocking solutions etc are sold as a &quot;box&quot; which is essentially a USB&gt;UART and a USB smartcard reader with a card for the software licence, it may even have accepted 3rd party licences such as infinity etc as i believe they were meant to be a sort of all in one solution. although it may have been for sims if it was recovering contacts and messages stored on the sim<p>as for why it was there i guess its just ended up unused then gotten chucked out in a clear out, old kit tends to fall by the wayside in this game despite it initially being quite expensive (ask anyone in the mobile biz for any decent amount of time and they almost certainly have an MTbox&#x2F;MXbox laying about) generally by the time its obsolete its more than paid for itself and is really pretty useless unless you work on a lot of very old stock<p>places ive worked at had dozens of old unused unlocking boxes and the like which eventually ended up in various tote boxes etc and when the business moved the majority ended up in the skip (where people soon came to try and dig out any potentially worthwhile bits) i suspect this found its way to the store in a similar fashion<p>it may not actually be much use in this day and age but its an interesting find

This was way more interesting than the title suggests, so if you don&#x27;t know what a Cellebrite is (like I didn&#x27;t), keep reading the thread. For people who do know what it is, the real question is &quot;what the hell was that doing in a thrift store?!&quot;

This device is used in commercial apple stores for transferring data off customers old, non-apple phones. Pretty straightforward service, hardly a curious device.

I used to work in a mobile phone shop and we had these to transfer data between old and new phones. With regards to the SIM slot, SIM cards can store around 100 phone numbers and many people that swap phones regularly do keep their contacts on a SIM card. SIM cards can wear out over time so this was useful for swapping phone numbers from an old SIM to a new one or a nanoSIM etc.

Up the build quality, but keep the hyper rugged design philosophy, round things off so it slides into a backpack easily, make sure there&#x27;s plenty of ports, and I&#x27;d consider buying tablet PC with about this form factor. (Yes, yes, I could just buy a tablet PC and put it in a paranoid-level ruggedized case.)

If it&#x27;s telling you to configure settings on the device, can it be considered forensic? Something about that feels off.

Grady Booch even gets in on the action: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Grady_Booch&#x2F;status&#x2F;1135459629658329090?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Grady_Booch&#x2F;status&#x2F;1135459629658329090?s...</a>

These devices are used heavily in telecommunications for transferring data from almost any model device to another. Very useful when customers transfer from an old Nokia to say a brand new iPhone.

You can find these on ebay...

What a ride.

Before people complain (like last time) on why Foone doesn&#x27;t just blog...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1135439789090574338" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1135439789090574338</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1100068394001256448" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1100068394001256448</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1066547670477488128" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Foone&#x2F;status&#x2F;1066547670477488128</a>

Does anyone have the link that turns a twitter thread in to a blog post? This is unreadable.

Thank you for the TLDR.<p>Terrible writing and Twitter is a fatal combo.

Anyone else read this and think &quot;Celibate Touch&quot;?