Last year at Thotcon the presenters were given what were purported to be faraday shielded backpacks - backpacks manufactured with fabric woven out of very fine conductive wires that are said to reflect radio frequency signals inside and outside. The idea is that if you have a cellphone and you put it inside the bag, you could be sure that the phone was not talking to any cell towers so it would be harder to track the person carrying the phone, as well as preventing any malware that may have been installed from phoning home. So the reasoning goes, even if …
From time to time I carp about how generally lousy our bandwidth is out here. Verizon (our CLEC in the Bay Area) has all but given up on maintaining their infrastructure out here, aside from the bare minimum to keep the copper from turning to verdigris. They gave up on deploying fiber some years ago (local mirror) some years ago, and from the poking around I've done on their side of the fence, their general stance in the Bay Area appears to be "Get everyone on celllar so we can ignore …
From the HacDCspace blimp meeting a couple of weekends ago: telemetry proof-of-concept.
Clockwise from left to right: Windbringer, HTX-202 hand-held ham radio, remains of breakfast, random PS/2 stuff from R. Mark Adams' workshop, keyboard, someone else's laptop, 35 watt linear amplifier, USB-to-serial converter, TinyTrak 4 TNC, LCD display for TinyTrak.
During my daily morning mainline injection of news on the Net this week, a couple of electronics projects caught my eye that I hadn't seen before. The first is a project from SparkFun Electronics that uses higher voltage than I'm used to working with - a Geiger counter kit with a USB interface. The kit is constructed around the popular ATmega 168 microcontroller, which means that the basic Arduino development kit can be used to write code that pulls samples from the Geiger-Muller tube (powered by a tiny high voltage power supply) and outputs numerical values over USB, where the 'counter …
For years, HERF weapons (high energy radio frequency) have been the stuff of science fiction and urban legends of the hacker underground. The underlying premise is simple: Integrated circuitry is vulnerable to various forms of radio frequency emissions, and such interference can either disrupt the functioning of or outright destroy circuitry. In theory, these weapons are relatively easy to construct with a decent grasp of electronics and high voltage electrical engineering with readily available parts, but actual examples of such are rarely verified. Personally, I've heard some tales coming out of a certain hacker con in the west (which was …
I think that it's safe to say that everyone's been annoyed at one time or another by someone in a restaurant, on a bus, or in a store by someone who was carrying out a loud conversation on their cellular telephone and refused to make any effort to leave the area. Now, there are some of us who sometimes don't have a choice in the matter (like those of us who are on call for work, though many of us at least make the attempt to get away from everyone else in an attempt to not be rude), but there …
It's not quite as good as a Faraday cage (or better yet, not putting up wireless access points at all) but it'll definitely be on the radar of IT and infosec professionals in the near future thanks to some very high profile network intrusions that used wireless networks as their beachheads: A thin, transparent film that is not only impact resistant, but filters RF emissions, so that signals from outside can't get in, and more importantly, signals inside can't get out. Supposedly, this stuff's been in use on the government side of things for a while now, and it's just …
He might not be Mr. Universe but Ken Jones, a volunteer at UHF television station 45 South in New Zealand is just as determined to make sure that an uplink signal hits the airwaves. Because the station either wasn't able to purchase a $20kus microwave uplink to get their signal to a full-sized broadcast station, Jones constructed a parabolic antenna to broadcast their signal using a $10us wok from a housewares store.
That's right, a wok. As it turns out, if you work the math behind parabolic reflectors, the particular kind of wok he bought works just as well as …
Wow.. the most outspoken anti-homosexuality priests and preachers are falling from grace^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hin droves. This time the reverend Lonnie Latham of Oklahoma was arrested for propositioning a male undercover police officer for sex last Tuesday.
