06-26-2013 STAR-K Discusses Kosher Certified Cellphones

hello and welcome to starkey's monthly webinars we're in the star k offices in baltimore maryland i'm robert sv goldberg your host and to my right is rabbi ellie rydler thank you for coming hi me every radler is our system management director um today we're going to talk a little bit about a new certification for star k the the kosher phones i would like to hear from you if you have any comments or or questions you can chat them to us at the bottom of your screen as a chat box um we do have moderation turned on so uh our moderator mashiach will uh we'll we'll look at the chats and sort of let them through if you want to join us by phone maybe you're driving or maybe you your sound doesn't work on your computer you can reach us at 218-895-1203 again 218-895-1203 and it's a passcode 20 20 pound so if i could just have a response from people listening um through the internet if you can just let let us know that you hear us okay and uh that's that would be helpful if you can chat with us um we have this this class at the end of every month the last wednesday at noon at the end of every month next month in july we are off for summer break and we will see you again the last wednesday in august god willing this is being recorded taped and recorded thanks to our our two helpers uh rebruven chapman and debbie rosenstein and you can find the recordings afterwards and all our archived recordings at kosher classes dot org k-o-s-h-e-r-c dot org and click on click there on uh podcast i believe so uh this is a an interesting topic a little bit off the beaten track of a rivalry uh we have certified a a kosher phone let me hold it up to the camera it's a lot kosher so you can shift it in the right way um a few months ago rabbi goldberg came and asked said someone approached the star k asking to have us approve a cell phone and right and all we took off from from there um so let's discuss why why uh why a person might want a kosher phone and what this kosher phone does and doesn't doesn't do i i was thinking about this ruby radler and i i think it's an apt uh martial a parable that starkey is not saying you you must have this phone you can only use this phone uh just like if we give a certification to diet food we're not saying you need to eat this food you need to have only you know this particular type of food or flavor it's an option right we're putting out the option out there there are people that are going to want this there is a market for it and um we actually toyed with the idea behind the scenes we'll give the story that of calling it a starcase certified safe phone without internet um but uh then and it was decided to call the kosher phone because that's really the the the you know that's what people are familiar with but we're not saying that the other phones are we're not saying they're traif whether or they're you shouldn't have one that's not really our place really to get involved it is an issue of course the internet has become the dangers of the internet are becoming more well known as time goes on there have been big meetings about it lots of discussions in the uh jewish and non-jewish world that's not really our you know we're not uh here to tell you that that it's a problem i mean there are issues and um the schools the schools a year and a half ago or so started holding parent meetings discussing the dangers of cell phones and texting and internet on cell phones um the school base yankov here in baltimore once had mr phil rosenthal who's who works for the new york city and he does he's tasked with this position and he he was telling us that in a cell phone today there's more power in the cell phone than the computers that landed the first man on the moon oh really that's interesting okay so all right so you mean if i have a cell phone i can send someone to the moon that's that's good to know another i don't think we're certifying that this kosher phone can do that so uh so yes like you say i mean i mean there are in baltimore at least there are uh required meetings parents have to go if you have a kid in in schools here you have to go to a meeting to learn parents have to be they have to be um taught what what the dangers are of internet and cell phones and you know what the issues are so that they can you know you can't get your kid in school without going to that meeting right as we discuss this you'll see that there certainly are things that are dangerous for children to have or maybe maybe some adults want to curb themselves as far as texting and internet goes and that's what uh the purpose of this phone is and we'll get into that right so uh someone's asking me already how how does a uh how does the person get one of these phones um there is a the the producer of the manufacturer is uh the website is kosherphonewireless.com that's his company kosher phone wireless and he has a website of course you can't get that on this kosher phone but i suppose people watching this on the internet already have some sort of access to the uh to the internet so that's how you can get it um if you want to email him it's kosher at kosherphonewireless.com his phone number is 914-752-8073-914-752-8073 and in a few minutes we'll put up uh the website so you can see it from from here so again so what what these phones do um what what the manufacturer did was he took a cell phone that's readily available on on the market you can go out and buy it and he programmed it that he that he can't get to the internet can't text you can't send pictures you can't attach a bluetooth it hasn't got any cameras so it doesn't come with a camera so it can't take uh can't take any uh can't take any pictures um and um really as far as we're concerned uh we could have certified it let's say in other ways as well we we we would have been willing to entertain even an internet uh capable phone that that is you know that that's protected that you can't get to uh sites that are unsavory we would have been willing to entertain that we would have been certainly willing to entertain the phone that has texting uh but no internet um but this is what this is what the phone is the phone is certified as not having internet and not having uh not having texting so you were saying about children before that that's that's a very good market for the for the phone the schools my i have some i have two children that are in out of ten schools and the rules are that they may have phones however they may not have internet abilities and as well as they don't want them to have texting abilities either that would be the perfect market for this for this phone right so if you have a child you want to give him a phone because in today's day and age you want him to be safe you don't want him to go out at night walking down the street he wants to go out riding his bike right you want to give him a phone in case something happens but you don't want him to you know when he gets around the corner to take his phone and start uh doing who knows what so you can give him a a kosher phone and uh and you know then then he can be protected so the phone how you identify the phone uh you can see on the cover there is a there's a star k sticker but besides that when you turn on the phone and we'll do that and i'll show you what happens when you when you turn it on you can see it's gluing up cluster you could you could if you could see that it was a starkey symbol uh when you boot up the phone and when you turned it down um it is a samsung sgh a157 model which you can buy again in the marketplace but it wouldn't have these capabilities so that's the phone that he that he that he modified okay it's like is asking why can't the person just buy a basic phone and not enable internet of texting why does anybody have to pay for a certified phone that's a very good question and we knew someone was going to ask that that was the first question we asked when this project came up right okay so so um basic phones nowadays come with internet and text but what i believe the question is that you call your cell phone provider and you tell them i want to disable the internet and or text um which which you which you may be able to do um the answer to that question is as follows number one it doesn't always work i did that with my kids phones and and my daughter was still getting text messages and i called him up and they said oh you're right we see that we only turned off this particular button we had to hit the other button too in order to get everything disabled so they don't always get it right right we had the same issue there's different types of text there's regular text and there's mms texting and we had the same thing we were being charged because we didn't have service for mms those that's for picture mails picture texting we didn't we were getting billed and i said how could we be billed we have it turned off and they told us the same thing we forgot to push that button right so and uh so it doesn't always work and also with the internet i've had the same problem i tell them to turn it off turn off the access and enter them on my on my phone meaning through the there shouldn't be any service for internet and it just doesn't work or if you change your rate plan or if you change your phone sometimes it just sometimes it doesn't work um the other thing that we discovered is that if you have a prepaid plan so you know you're just paying you're buying us a sim card and you are um you're on or you're buying a certain amount of minutes right you're not on on a post paid plan uh we call t-mobile they don't offer that service to turn off uh internet and text right you call them i just called them and they it was it was complicated and they said they did first they didn't understand the request and they said oh yeah we can turn off texting but it depends which plan you have some plans they can turn it off and some plans they cannot the typical let's say a couple of dollars they planned they weren't able to do it uh so there's different plans out there again this is not necessarily for for for everybody uh elio is saying i have sprint and block internet i have not had a problem okay that's that's definitely a possibility um so one is that it doesn't always work sometimes it does work so it doesn't work if you can do it so fine the other is that uh let's say for your for your uh uh for the schools right that require this uh required children to have kosher phones they don't they only want phone only talk only funds you know you can walk in there with your with your iphone and you can tell them it doesn't have any internet i turned it off my parents maybe you really did but how is the way for them how would they be able to know they're not going to go around to everybody's phone and start seeing texting and and that's impossible for them to to determine so this is a solution that they bring in this phone with the staircase sticker they turn it on you see the staircase symbol uh so they would know right away that this is this is a this is a kosher phone it's it's certified so uh that's another use um so you know so again a person has to know that this is this is what he wants okay um just uh just as as a another explanation of what kind of phone it is it's a phone that uses a sim card not every phone uses the sim card uh like t-mobile tnt i think some verizon now come with with sim cards which which you put into the back of the phone so basically you can go out and you can get any sim card that you want you know you put you put a certain amount of money on it or you have maybe you already have a plan and you want to add on a child onto this plan all you need is a sim card you put it in and that's all they can they can access so that's the difference between this particular kosher phone and other kosher phones that are already out there uh we believe that all the other kosher phones you also have to buy a kosher plan so it comes along with the phone you have to buy their plan and those can be costly so this hope the the manufacturer here is hoping that it will be cheaper for the people who may already have a plan and want to just add their child for ten dollars extra a month so this would make it more affordable using this phone right so you don't have to that's you don't have to hook yourself up to any particular plan that's um and it's it's an unlocked phone so you could use it uh worldwide with your with your sim card i mean that works that you pay for it worldwide uh so that's that's an advantage also for some people that i can just um i don't if i want to get a coaching phone i don't have to sign up for two years with a plan i already have a plan i can just add a sim card on my plan um do we want to talk about he's hoping to sell this in in israel as well yes he's hoping to sell this in israel that it will work with the with the kosher uh uh phone with the kosher sim cards over there see in israel you they're certainly their own it's more complicated there's only certain numbers like prefixes that are kosher prefixes um and and and the manufacturer of this phone here claims that they were only working israel with those that it was a kosher phone in israel too it would be considered kosher we haven't certified that as of yet but that's what that's what uh that's what uh that's what he claims um now how did we certify this what's the process of certifying this i think we should talk about that anyone that you want to mention do you want to start off right so we we you know like how do you certify a phone so we um we looked at it we tried to see if we could and you know try to see if we can get any texting on it get the internet obviously it's not there's no options for it um so we were worried well what if somebody buys this phone and he wants to be able to display the star k symbol but let's say that person is able to re-engineer the software and now when you open it up it actually can he can get the internet back where this was texting back and but nevertheless he's showing the schools that he's in that it is a kosher phone so just like you take the ability off to get to the internet maybe somebody could put it back on so we approached a number of of expert hackers and um we gave him the phone and we said you know do your best job on this and uh and hack it and we'll give you a bonus if you get the if you get the internet back and texting back on the phone they came back to us and they told us that it's it's it's a solid phone they were unable to do it now that's not saying and we don't certify that it's impossible because there's nothing impossible with enough time and resources and determination you can break through anything i mean banks you know you could have chase bank or bank of america their website goes down from hacking there are even though they spend as much money as they can i'm sure to keep people out but you can break through if you try enough we're saying it's reasonably difficult to re-engineer this that's that's certified right everyone said give us more time and we'll do it well you know like how much more time you know right so it's uh that's that's what our certification is um so you know there are certain things that the phone um uh doesn't do um for instance it doesn't block you from calling certain numbers that the person is trying to call adult adult services it doesn't block those now uh the i i imagine that that other kosher uh services might might might yes block that right in israel it's easier to do that because they have more control on on the number systems and how they just say no they know which calls you mean which places but in america well you know other services might do that this phone does not so if that's what the person is concerned about um then then uh it wouldn't it wouldn't block that but if he's concerned about that he also has to be aware at home when he's away from home you know his home phone can do that too so yeah you sort of have to be on top of that anyway um another thing it doesn't do is prevent you from buying another phone obviously right so let's say you give your kid a phone let's say a typical thing he's going away to camp or whatever he's going somewhere he's going riding his bike like we mentioned before and you want to give him a kosher phone you buy a cheap sim card you go to t-mobile you buy a sim card for uh ten dollars you put ten dollars worth of time on it so the whole thing is twenty dollars you buy the phone you tell them this is for emergencies um it doesn't prevent him from going into the store and buying another phone and taking your sim card and putting it in there or but for that but it doesn't prevent him from you know there's nothing you can do to prevent the kid from going to store and buying a sim card and buying a phone and buying it he can buy his own phone and service as well so that's something that a parent has to be aware of um if he's giving to a child but you know people also want this kind of phone for themselves some people they want to have they don't want a phone that will allow them that ability they're not worried that they're going to go into um store and buy another phone they just want this is all they want right and this is a monetary reason too because this you can get this phone you get a cheaper plan i believe i believe kosher phone wireless offers a an inexpensive talk only plan i saw that they're offering a uh 25 uh plan so if you're talking about money already uh rightly people want to know how much uh does it cost which of course we have no control over no no no saying but i believe that it is between 30 or 35 and 50 but they can go and they can of course we don't have anything to do with that we don't get any cut or anything from that never do we take no we never set up any certification where if you sell you know a thousand boxes of cereal you pass a certain amount we certify for our work and our effort that goes into it our time and really doesn't make any difference we're not in business with the companies um people in there to sell often have two phones a coach your phone to show and a regular one to use okay okay yes i mean that's a that's a possibility any anyone can do that as well they can you know they want to you know it's like the the hazard i guess right he has he has his feet that are folded under underneath him um and he's showing that he's really a kosher but look there are definitely people who find this to be a use and we're providing the service let me bring up the website where where you can see where this is all about what this is all about let me just i just want to see let me bring that up i just want to say we have people from here joining us from the east coast mostly west coast um and europe air to swirl people all over the world let me let me see if i can bring up that website for you your screen is going to change just a little bit okay reuben do you see this uh website okay so you can see the uh the the uh this is the the website of cash the controllable controls click so you can see over here the uh this is the website that the manufacturer um put together kosher phone wireless and there's the telephone 914 75208073 no no texting no internet and no camera okay and let's see what did he put over here um you can see pictures of the phone again this is the samsung sgh1a157 he talks a little bit here about the kosher phone and it describes over here what is a what is a kosher phone so um that's his site let me go back to our to our screen okay okay um right why is this from pesach asking why is this phone better than the kosher phones already available we're not claiming that it's better just like if we uh give a certification on food we don't claim that this food that tastes better or is more healthy or whatever than other food we could just explain to you the difference the difference is again that this is an unlocked phone and you put in your your your own sim card so let's say you already have a family plan and to add a line it's i pay five dollars a month you might pay ten dollars or whatever a month to add another line um you put that sim card into the into this phone and you just paid for the phone and the whatever service you wanted you want to put in um the other kosher uh phone providers you you you must hook up with their monthly plan you mentioned this before right i mean it's also good you know if you want to put it on your own plan then the parents can see you know they'll get their bills at the end of the month they'll be able to see the logs to be able to see what was you know what was going on right um you know what in preparation for this early regular i uh i took i took a look at some of the issues of of texting um and there is a very serious problem of of text bullying going on and this is this article is is in general not necessarily about uh about jewish schools but it is definitely a problem from what we've heard from from uh rabbani men and from principles it's definitely a problem in in jewish schools as well so what is text bullying which is when bullying including sending mean embarrassing untrue or hurtful message to or about someone use someone using cell phone text messaging um and these statistics that they have say that one in five of teens will be a victim of a text bully i hope that that's not true in in in the juris schools um but it does happen and they point out why this is why this is particularly painful it can happen 24 hours a day even at home which usually a person who gets bullied can go home and and be safe text bullies are often much meaner because they don't have to see their victims right you can do it anonymously and they may not even know who you are um the teens may think that text bullying is anonymous and they can't get co-op that's not true they can be tracked and they can be actually they can be prosecuted and arrested victims often respond by sending mean messages back and then so they it starts a whole process of bullying back and forth um and so this is this is this is a problem that that the schools are dealing with you know we spoke to a couple of of uh principals and you know they're all grappling with this uh with this with this issue you know so texting is good i you know i the fact that i can send a message to my son and you know it takes me 20 seconds and rather than having to call them and get them and trying to reach a conversation the problem is is that i spoke to someone yesterday who said that when teenagers get their hands on them they get addicted to it and they'll text even to someone sitting in the same room as them just it's just you know they're addicted to texting back and forth and it over overtakes the person right i mean we've heard about the kids who can text while they're looking at the teacher they don't have they have their thumbs underneath the table and they can text without you know just looking the teacher thinks that they're paying attention um again we're not we're not you know we have no power to advocate it we're not saying that you must get this we're just saying there is a use for it and you know for a reasonable uh use for this product on the market um zeb says texting is like a knife in one person's hands it's used to launch another it's very dangerous that's a very good example uh again we would have certain had we been approached to certify phone as not having internet but does have text that would be as a matter of fact i think i would like to see that i'd like to see a phone you know offered two services right you can either get it with only only internet removed or internet and text removed as well right uh you know there because there would be a market for that as well i believe yeah so um let me see if there's anything else so did we did we uh speak about this process as much as we have to go let's see if there's any elio saying why starkey certifying them i'm not sure what the question is because there's a market for it there's a there are a lot of people who who again right like robert ryden mentioned before in the schools are requiring kids to have uh coach your phones if you want to give your kid a phone and not be worried about where he's going with it uh there's definitely a a for sure a market for it correct me if i'm wrong but even if you tell your carrier to shut your internet access you can still access it via wi-fi i can tell you that that's true on on some of the phones in my family uh yes you can shut you can tell your carrier to to shut the phone but you can still access it uh via wi-fi so if you're in an area that has open wi-fi right it's this is a problem even if a parent doesn't have if he has a smartphone but he turned off his internet he needs to be aware that if he's in the kid says i want to play a game on your phone and he's in an area where there's open wi-fi the kid may be going and surfing right these phones do not have that wi-fi either they don't have any wi-fi right no they don't allow wi-fi i don't think they come with wi-fi to begin with right do they no these phones are not these these are top of the line up to date phones for what they for what they're accomplishing you know for feature phones but they're they're not old phones they're just they're they're new phones that were made recent they're up to date this is actually if you look up the model number you'll find out that this is a highly regarded model um it's just that they come without the camera and with that wi-fi or he and the rest of he he actually removed the bluetooth he removed right um is it possible to have a kosher phone with these with with apps okay so so this this phone doesn't allow any internet access and it does it's not a smartphone anyway i don't think it would allow apps even if it even if it didn't have the internet removed it's not that kind of a phone so no it's only it's i'll tell you what it's good for it has talking it has i think a calendar right scheduling you can put a schedule in there although it might be difficult to put in it doesn't have a keyboard so you put it in one digit one letter at a time um it has an alarm uh let's see what else the menu has um you can make it into vibrate only you can see your recent calls an address book and so on so i i mean it's it's a basic phone basically you get it if you want to have only the ability to talk uh there would be a market in it the market for filtering app that could run an iphone and filter out bad sites apps so rich is bringing up a good point yes uh and we would consider certifying such a such a phone right the phone we are not against certifying a phone that has uh that has um filtered internet and protected internet protected apps uh right i mean we'll certify it we'll just tell the user what you're getting this is what you're getting right you know you're getting you're getting a phone that has it and if that's what you want you know you can make the decision when we were when we were researching this we did find out that these things are in the works uh in the future there will be smartphones available with these with some restrictions but they're obviously much more difficult to enable right for sure what is the problem with bluetooth is i'm not talking about the safety issue but bluetooth allows talking um i think the reason that he disabled the bluetooth was that model if you connected with bluetooth that might allow you to reprogram the phone i'm not sure right you can also transfer files using bluetooth and things like that but yeah does it have a port for for a uh for a headset yes it does it has a you can use one of the old you can use a um it has a little symbol here of a headset so i assume that you can use a a headset um okay so let's just see real quick if there are any last questions um just to review we're here the last wednesday of every month at dot learnkosher.cookwebinar.com forward slash kosher and if you want to sign up for the alerts that tell you exactly when and where my topic you can go to stardashk.org and sign up there for our alerts if you have any questions on this or any other topic you can email us info at stardashk.org or call us 410-484-4110 and again the the website for this particular kosher phone is kosher uh kosherphonewireless.com that's the name of his company kosher form wireless um okay is there any other i mean any other questions about it is there anything that we didn't uh cover sam says nary still uses a company that addresses the issues yes they use they use a company um that the boys they're only allowed to to sign up to have a phone with with that company that company allows i think calls and texting at certain times i believe it limits the times that you can that you can use it so that the boys don't um in the middle of their studies don't get a whole bunch of texts that will interrupt them from the concentration that's a different service you know it's a different feature you pay a monthly fee for that certainly right right my son has the same thing the school we got uh we received letters from my son's school and uh telling us that if they have a phone it has to be a kosher phone and they offer a kosher phone though they're as we said before they're slightly expensive and the plans they require the plan of that phone which is a bit expensive so these phones will allow you as we said to get achieve a plan we do have also a reminder on the phone when you turn it on not to speak lotion hara not the gossip so in case you needed a reminder that is there that's a added free bonus um so if there are any other questions we'll we'll we'll uh we'll wrap it up here thank you for joining us we appreciate we had quite a number of people to to join in it's it's a it's an interesting topic i think uh a lot of you know this the discussion can be very long and and um involved about about internet about texting about all the all these subjects we again we won't be here next month end of next month but we will be back on willing at the end of august last wednesday in august at noon thank you for joining and have a great day