On my most recent trip to Cambodia I bought a Cambodian SIM card so that I could both make calls and use the Internet on my smartphone. At the Moc Bai/Bavet border are a number of Khmer people (who speak Vietnamese) hanging around offering to change money into Cambodian Riel from Vietnam Dong (or US dollars). They also sell sim cards for around 60k VND ($3) which gives you a few dollars worth of calls. They can also cut the SIMs into microsims for iPhones.

I got a MetFone sim but my Vietnamese Mobifone sim actually worked while in Bavet and didn't lose signal until we were a few kilometers from the border. When I eventually lost signal and switched in the new MetFone sim, however, I wasn't able to get on the internet with either GPRS or 3G. And even when I arrived in Phnom Penh I couldn't find anyone who knew how to activate 3G and MetFone's website was not accessible.

Here are the instructions for anyone who wants to activate 3G on their MetFone sim card.

1) Send "3G ON" or just "ON" as a sms to the number 133. This enables 3G for your account. But you still need to set up your phone to use their APN.

2) You can have MetFone configure your smartphone by sending a special configuration file but you need to know the name of your handset according to MetFone. You can guess it but if you guess wrong you won't receive anything or you'll receive a configuration file for the wrong phone.

Send "MI " to the number 111. For a Sony Ericsson P900 the handset code is P900. For an LG Optimus Black the code is P970. It is the code name your manufacturer uses for your phone.

3) If you can't figure out the right handset code or MetFone doesn't know about your phone then you can configure it manually.

Go into your connection settings and set up an APN.

           Input information APN: Metfone
           Username:        Metfone
           Password:        No
           Input code 1111 ( if handset request) and reset again.


0) When you need to check your balance to see how many phone credits or how many kilobytes of data you can transfer, dial the code "*097#". This will send a command to your carrier and you'll get a message back immediately.

You may also need to reset your phone after enabling 3G or setting up your APN.

Note that 3G coverage in Cambodia is very spotty compared to Vietnam (even though MetFone is from Vietnamese military company Viettel). Speed can be decent but you may lose connection even without moving. This applies to Phnom Penh. Like Vietnam, most hotels have free wifi although many cheap guesthouses don't. When looking around for hotels in Phnom Penh be sure to ask first. My tips for finding a hotel in Vietnam also applies to Cambodia.

Hackation. That's what people are calling hackathons (sponsored hackathons!) away from home. It could be in NYC, Bali, Berlin. But a lot of people are moving to the Bay Area or quitting their good-paying jobs in the Bay Area and sticking around and building their startup product from there. There are a lot of good reasons to be near Silicon Valley when you're a tech startup. Access to capital, a local consumer market who's up for and used to using experimental products.

But not every product needs to be developed in Silicon Valley. Not everybody needs to submit themselves to the pumped up rental prices there right now. Not every product person needs to be in the echo chamber of tech startup talk. Not everyone needs to live in a van just so they can afford to bootstrap in the Bay.

Haters gonna hate. Hackers need to hack.

Why Vietnam?

Vietnam? Isn't there like a war going on there? Answer: No. But due to nearly two decades of disastrous economic mismanagement by the government the country, and its remaining people (those that didn't risk their lives to escape on boats), remained in a post-war stupor until the turn of the millenium when things really started turning around economically due to open market reforms culminating in entrance to the WTO. Today, Vietnam's economic capital Ho Chi Minh City (which you may call Saigon) has a sheen of modernity to it. Western fast food chains like KFC and Pizza Hut abound. Downtown Saigon is full of new shopping malls and department stores - great for window-shopping. Young people increasingly choose between carrying iPhones or Samsungs, although Nokia still dominates. Traffic, once dominated by bicycles and rickshaws, is now completely gas-powered - but mostly scooters, not cars. Wifi is freely available and 3G internet can be had for $2/month. Of course, underneath it all is a missing public transit network, lack of public safety controls, regular brownouts, streets that flood due to poor urban planning and rapid development, an Internet that is reliant on a handful of undersea cables, and a currency that is subject to periodic devaluations. For the Vietnamese citizenry all is not rose-colored.

Low cost == Longer runway.

For foreigners though, late economic development, a huge population of underemployed people, cooling foreign direct investment sentiment, and a perenially weak currency means cheap guesthouses vie for customers, beers cost from 1 to 4 bottles per dollar, and a hacker can hack it in this country for $10-$20 a day. Are you consisting on ramen? Living in your car? Or otherwise roughing it to save money for your startup? Maybe I can convince you to reweigh your options.

Incubators, events, community

Vietnam is not particularly good at a lot of things. It's also not an Asian Silicon Valley - that's a title Singapore is trying way too hard to earn. There's no Y Combinator (okay, there was a V Combinator....) and no Google or Facebook. But we do have a scrappy and growing community of tech entrepreneurs. We have programs like Topica Founders Institute, shared work spaces like the Start Network, incubators like Officience, mLabs in the Saigon High Tech Park, annual events like Startup Weekend Ho Chi Minh and BarCamp Saigon, and smaller events like Start Me Up and Mobile Mondays.

It's not a lot but it may give you just enough sense of community to concentrate on building your own damn product. You won't overhear product pitches at every cafe (of which there's an order of magnitude way more of in Saigon than anywhere in the States).

But once you do need to hire help you will be able to do it affordably, whether for software development, testing, usability, marketing, research... While you're here, take advantage of the fact you don't have to pay Silicon Valley salaries.

Link to Silicon Valley

With all that said, there are a lot of reverse refugees from the Bay Area now living in Vietnam. After the Vietnam War (referred to here as the American War) ended and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, especially the educated and merchant classes, fled the new government, many of them wound up living in San Francisco and then San Jose. Others ended up in Orange County, Dallas, Houston, and other parts of the world. But today, a huge population of Vietnamese-Americans lives and works in Silicon Valley. Now that business opportunities are better in Vietnam, many experienced technology workers have returned to their birthplace to start companies. And so, thanks to their experience, today a large software industry exists in Vietnam. And many non-Vietnamese have come to join them. Maybe you'd like to be one of them?

Anyways, it may seem like a crazy idea at first. Moving to a foreign country and all. But if you're young, single, a bit adventurous, and determined to strike out on your own - or already have and are now ramen-profitable - then consider the costs: $1200 for cheap-ish rent in the Bay Area, buys you a round trip ticket from SFO to SGN. And every month of rent thereafter buys you two whole months of living nicely (all expenses) in Saigon. If you have a couple thousand bucks in the bank you can easily triple or quadruple the length of your runway by spending the time in Vietnam.

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Who the heck would retire in the Bay Area? Retire to Vietnam instead.

Gone are the days of whistling a 2600 Hz tone into your rotary phone. Or the era of using redboxes to get free calls from payphones - where can you find a payphone anymore nowadays? So where have all the phreakers gone? Who even remembers what phone phreaking means, and what the significance of Cap'n Crunch cereal is?

Vietnam, like many developing countries, is a country where wireless infrastructure, cellular networks and wifi, leapfrogged traditional wired networks: telephone, cable TV. Payphones (or "cardphones" which used prepaid cards since coins were inconsistently minted and still not always accepted as legal tender in Vietnam), which became increasingly common in the late 90s, are nearly extinct in Vietnam now due to mobile phones.

Throughout the world, phone systems have been converted from analog to digital. From a phreaking standpoint, it's easier for the phone companies to secure their systems as they don't need to use in-band methods (using the channel for system operators as what's used by customers) of managing their systems. Even the cellular networks are all digital and encrypted now so you can no longer just snoop in on your neighbor's conversations using a special phone (or clone another user's ESN on the old AMPS networks). Unfortunately, this means there is no tone or sound that you can play into your mobile handset in order to get free calls or anything else.

Nowadays, free long distance calling - for decades the big prize for phreakers - is ubiquitous. PBXs are freely downloadable software that anyone can run. And we don't even need physical phones to make phone calls anymore - we have software phones using Voice over IP (VoIP) which can call the plain old telephone system or simply call other softphones on the Internet.

So what does modern phone phreaking mean?

Answer: VoIP hacking, virtual PBX hacking, voicemail hacking (not really phreaking, just unauthorized access of systems), femtocell hacking for the truly adventurous, and GSM decryption for the cryptos with a lot of computing resources.

Caller ID spoofing

Caller ID is a feature that's in all cell phones, and many land lines also have this ability to see the phone number of the person that's calling you. This is how you know to answer your mother's phone call and ignore your girlfriend's, or the other way around. But did you know you could control what number is seen by the called party?

How? Example: One way is to have a real phone company set your forwarding number, which is a fake origin, and then it will be used as your caller ID value when you call out from your (VoIP) phone. Another way is to route calls through your own PBX (Asterisk).

PBX hacking

Back in the day when PBXs were only affordable to large corporations and getting access to one meant you had great resources available to you like calling out to long distance numbers for free. But now there are cheap and even free open source virtual PBX solutions that run on normal PCs running Linux like Asterisk. And of course these can be hacked. If you're running Asterisk you run the risk of remote hackers DoSing your server or hacking the Linux server that's running Asterisk. Once they're on there they can also have their way with the PBX.

Femtocell hacking

Femtocells are stations that are set up to provide buildings or rural areas which have weak signals with access to cellular networks via internet connections. Subscribers can buy femtocells from their phone companies and set them up themselves - and can even take their femtocell with them to a foreign country (yes!) and have access to their home country's phone network without incurring roaming charges. These femtocells, whose manufacturer varies by telco, may be running Linux and may be hackable (rootable) and if so can be used to eavesdrop on calls and SMSs as well as spoof and use credits from subscribers' accounts without authorization. It's like taking over a cell tower. But not all telcos even offer these for sale and it's not enough for you to just get one from a manufacturer.

GSM encryption cracking

In the old days of cell phones you could easily listen in on calls made around you. But since GSM the call traffic is encrypted from the phone to the cell tower. However, it can be possible to crack weak A5/1 GSM encryption using something called COPACOBANA. Or you could probably use Amazon EC2 to affordably and instantly bring up the enormous CPU resources combined with some rainbow tables needed to crack the cipher. Don't assume that your mobile phone calls are secure.

Voicemail hacking

Voicemail (VMB) hacking isn't that new. And not all phone providers even offer voicemail services on their lines. But for those who do it's often easy to get into another subscriber's mailbox. Spoof your caller ID to look like theirs and often you won't be asked for any passcode to enter your voicemail. Other ways are to guess or social engineer the PIN code which you can then use to access the mailbox. Old voicemail systems used to have default codes which you could use to have fun like creating your own VMBs.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal

Another kind of hacking: mobile phone rooting and modification

Generally, when I use the word "hacking" above it refers to unauthorized access of systems. But sometimes the system you want to "hack" is your own property. Mobile phones today are powerful computers running advanced software based on open source code. But it doesn't mean that the manufacturers want to give you free reign or access to what's inside. Fortunately, hacker communities exist to find holes in our phones which enable them to be "rooted" after which we can control the software running on them and by controlling the software we can control our hardware.

As always, especially in Vietnam, protect your accounts and privacy when online with an encrypted connection to a VPN.

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My situation

I'm a career programmer who has suffered from pain in my hands and arms for several years. Like carpal tunnel syndrome, this pain is from damage to tissue (including tendons) caused by lots of use - repetitive use. Thus the problems are collectively called repetitive stress injuries (RSI, also called repetitive strain injuries). For those who have carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), the diagnosis is fairly easy - you can basically check yourself - and so is the treatment. The treatment is an invasive surgery that snips something inside your wrist (in the carpal tunnel) and this relieves the pain. Carpal tunnel surgery is regularly done with successful results. But my case was not CTS.

How I got there

As a software developer, I spent most of my day at work typing or otherwise using a computer. At home, it was the same (most of my colleagues, myself included, often worked from home as well). One day, while typing, I suddenly felt fatigue in one arm, and after a short while of compensating with my other arm it happened in the second arm as well. As the weekend was coming up, I just laid off typing for awhile but then the next work week started and I had to do something. My arms had still not healed. In fact, they would stay like that for a long time. The feeling was similar to having rock climbed for a few hours, leading to extreme muscle fatigue and swelling.

I went to see several doctors at several hospitals in two different states. But the doctors weren't sure what it was and blood tests and MRIs weren't helpful either. Some doctors thought it was tendonitis - pain and swelling around tendons, similar to "tennis elbow" (another RSI) caused when people practice tennis for too long. Treatments included over-the-counter pills for reducing inflammation, physical therapy to strengthen arm muscles, sonar massage (which feels quite nice actually), and wearing braces to support the hand.

What I've learned

RSIs are becoming increasingly common. They are a work-related injury, like cutting yourself as a cook or injuring yourself on some machinery at a factory, and so businesses need to take measures to lessen the likelyhood of them happening. When I worked at Hewlett-Packard, there was an on-site ergonomics expert who would come and fit your chair and desk to be more ergonomic. More and more people are working in offices and using computers all day at work. And tablet computing is a rising trend, but the iPad was NOT designed to be ergonomic and it's clear in the way people hold them while using them.

What you should do to prevent repetitive stress injuries

1) Stretch your arms and hands in the morning. Use one hand to pull your fingers back, then switch. You can also massage your arms and hands. Make sure blood is flowing through your hands and be aware of any cool skin temperatures which may be a sign that blood isn't flowing.

2) Take breaks periodically. Use a software timer to remind you to take breaks at least every half hour. If you are working by the Pomodoro method then this should happen naturally. You should also rest your eyes by looking out the window and focusing on something far away since you're focusing on your screen just inches away the rest of the time.

3) Use the right mouse and keyboard. Some people switch to using a keyboard for everything and not using the mouse since they feel moving their hand to use the mouse causes strain.

I've tried many different keyboards and mice trying to find what worked for me, including some very expensive and exotic keyboards (which didn't work for me). In the end I found that the light touch of a laptop keyboard (short depress height, light spring) suited me along with a large and responsive trackpad. Just remember that not all laptop keyboards and trackpads are the same.

4) Type and mouse less.

You can setup macros and shortcuts to type out long phrases. If you're not an accurate typist, try to improve that to cut down on the number of mistypes and pressing backspace/delete.

My trick is to use a foot mouse. I've bought a few different foot pedals for this and they're all expensive. But I've found that a foot mouse for actually controlling the cursor doesn't work well and isn't helpful. The big win is being able to click with your feet. And you actually don't need a special foot mouse for that. I've found a $5 Mitsumi USB mouse (you can connect several USB mice to a computer at the same time and they all work) set on a pad on the floor is just as easy to click with my big toe.

5) Use speech recognition software. I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for years. It's not perfect and you need a fast computer (the faster the better) but it's nice for drafting out long emails and posts.

Google and Microsoft are both working on speech recognition technology so it should soon be very accurate and ubiquitous. Android has it built into their phones and Apple has Siri which doesn't transcribe but at least understands natural speech.

6) Warm up before working. In the cold regions of the US, you will come into the office on cold (and dark) winter mornings. Let your fingers warm up before you force them to dance across the keyboard.

7) Strain from using computers can happen in other parts of your body as well. So make sure you have a nice chair with adjustable height, arm rests (arm rests are optional, sometimes it's better to do without them, but if they are on a chair their height should be adjustable), and you should have a keyboard tray. Adjust your monitor so you are staring straight at it rather than having to look down. When typing, your elbow should be down by your sides and bent at a 90 degree angle. Your feet should be flat on the floor.