I sort of expected some people to react like this. I think you are blowing this out of proportion. It would be easier to write a new script to send out spam (eg: a simple bash script attached to smssend). And yes, some people are going to use this to annoy other people, but all other major cell phones have similar programs, and it obviously hasn't become a problem.
If anyone started spamming whole groups of numbers, I can almost guarantee that they would get in trouble with their carrier. This program doesn't do anything ground breaking, it just puts a pretty gui over something 5 lines in a bash script could accomplish (much like the aircrack guis do).
I'd like to think I'm pretty easy going, I don't think I'm blowing this out of proportion, but it's definitely possible. If I could ask what might be a legitimate use for such an application?
I don't think the comparison with aircrack is quite fair, there are a substantial number of legitimate uses for that, same with nmap, etcetera, though I understand what you are saying. It's a tool, it's how you use it.
Please don't mistake me for denigrating your effort, I'm not doing that at all, quite the opposite given the rarity of developers, I'd say anything written for the N900 is better than nothing written for it :-)
I'd like to think I'm pretty easy going, I don't think I'm blowing this out of proportion, but it's definitely possible. If I could ask what might be a legitimate use for such an application?
Just earlier in this thread someone said they used it to wake up their son, I think. I do think that that's a bit of an annoying use, and I have my own opinions about parental involvement in kids lives and kids simply accepting parental control, but that's beside the point - assuming the reason for doing so was a good one, sending message spam in bursts to another phone allows you to get people's attention who otherwise wouldn't notice one or two phone messages going off.
I've had plenty of cases where I was either worried about someone's wellbeing or needed someone to give me some bit of information relevant to an urgent decision, and they didn't have their phones within easily-audible reach, or weren't paying attention. Now, I'm not thinking sending hundreds of messages to one phone in such a case is okay. But sending 5-10 in 30-60 second intervals would be nice. It gets you more phone rings than calling might, and unlike calling or manually texting, it's something you can fire off and then put your N900 in your pocket until you get a response. More likelyhood they'll notice.
Also, I just thought of what could legitimately be considered 'research'. With phone networks being as black-boxed as they are from the users, this really helps you measure something like SMS-network throughput - both in terms of speed (I send 30 messages, one-per-minute; check time stamps later on receiving phone to see when they came in), and how likely a message is to just 'vanish' into the dark web that is cell phone networks - I've had plenty of instances of messages from my partner (girlfriend doesn't properly describe relationship, but we're not legally married or engaged either) to me or from me to my partner just never made it to the other phone.
Of course, open-source telephony + Phone-equivalent of NMap would probably be even better for such purposes, but people aren't working to make that a reality nearly as much as they should.
I'd like to think I'm pretty easy going, I don't think I'm blowing this out of proportion, but it's definitely possible. If I could ask what might be a legitimate use for such an application?
I don't think the comparison with aircrack is quite fair, there are a substantial number of legitimate uses for that, same with nmap, etcetera, though I understand what you are saying. It's a tool, it's how you use it.
Please don't mistake me for denigrating your effort, I'm not doing that at all, quite the opposite given the rarity of developers, I'd say anything written for the N900 is better than nothing written for it :-)
I don't want this thread to turn into a huge argument, and I do understand where you are coming from. I debated whether or not I should release this, but decided to so I could figure out how to package and release programs in the repositories.
The main reason I wrote this application was to teach myself how to use qt designer and python. It was an idea that popped into my head, and it seemed very straightforward to implement.
It's more for entertainment purposes (haha, I sent you ten text messages) than for actual malicious uses (I sent you thousands of messages, and your bill is going to be huge), but in the end people can use it for whatever they see fit.
A 5 line bash script can do the same thing this script does. All this script does is slightly lower the entry bar.
Can you try running it from xterm for us? Or is that what you mean - it runs and exits without any error?
Getting following error msg when running from console. Should I need to install PyQt4. Please advice.
~ $ smsbomb
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/smsbomb", line 4, in <module>
from PyQt4 import QtGui,QtCore
ImportError: No module named PyQt4
