Less Radiation

That’s right folks. Software radio just became mainstream. Up until last summer you paid £1000+ for a USRP, then came along the £120 Funcube dongle. Now you can learn all about SDR for £20.

You can now use a £20 USB DVB-TV Stick to receive any frequency from 64-1700MHz at a high bandwidth sample rate of 2.8MS/s. Required chipset is RTL2832U & Elonics E4000 tuner combo. Known good units are EzCapTV 668 & 666 units, along with a host of similar boards.

sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr

What has been successfully tested so far is the reception of FM/AM radio, TETRA (police, ambulance, fire), GMR (sat phones), GSM (mobile phones), ADS-B (aircraft data) and POCSAG (pagers).

Go and type RTL-SDR into Youtube and you’ll find loads of great demo videos – like these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0hEquzLsWU

Here’s another good page : http://www.rtlsdr.com/

Some useful Windows SDR# software here

Interesting stuff on the Guardian website today about ONDigital.

Once upon a time there were two pay TV systems in the UK, Sky & ONDigital. Sky worked through a dish and ONDigital through your TV aerial.
One day pirate viewing cards for ONDigital appeared, long after Sky had eradicated hacking of their own cards with the launch of the series 10 card from NDS.

ONDigital couldn’t build a real service if they couldn’t raise subscriptions, and they couldn’t raise any money when everyone in the UK was watching all their pay content for free.

Rumblings on the web today alleged that NDS (Israeli company who provide card technology to Sky) may have paid hackers to research the vulnerability of the systems used by ONDigital, and that the research may have found its way outside NDS, again allegedly.

Read the full story from The Guardian here and here.

Watch the BBC Panorama documentary here

Read all about NDS here

It’s possible to read out the details of a recent Barclaycard without making a physical connection to it – according to Channel4 News.

The latest Barclaycard includes a contactless RFID type chip, which works in a similar way to an Oyster card (UK London Underground Travel Card). Some of the latest mobiles can read these chips too. It’s now been shown that the card number, expiry date & card holders name can be read just by holding a smartphone against someones wallet. Those details can then be used to order something through Amazon, even though you still don’t have the 3 digit security code.

Full article is here.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/19513

Fibre optic network for Smart Meters

Responsible department: Department for Energy and Climate Change

To protect the long term health and security of UK citizens, and particularly the health of our children, we the undersigned demand the Government adopt a wired fibre-optic network for Smart Meters. Consumers should have the option of wired Home Area Networks at no additional cost. Provision must also be made for people with Electro-Sensitivity to keep their analog meters and be supplied with shielding materials where necessary.

4G TV interference: Up to a million homes ‘need filters’

Read report at BBC here.

How to catch an IMSI catcher. Catchercatcher. Don’t get tracked by your GSM phone.

Using a £10 Motorola C115, a USB cable and a laptop running Linux.

For IMSI catchers to achieve their goals they will need to show behavior different from normal base stations. We distinguish between yellow, red, and black flags. Yellow flag are an indication that you might have been caught; red flags are a very strong indication; and black flags tell you: “You are being tracked down; throw away your phone and run.”

Read the CatcherCatcher tutorial.

List of speakers & talks

Links to live video streams

OFCOM launches new maps site for 2G 3G Mobile Broadband signal coverage

Mobile coverage map and stats

OFCOM Sitefinder locate masts by postcode.

Want to know how World War III really starts?

The control centre for the remote UAV drones (that’s unmanned American surveillance planes that fly by remote control) has been hit by a virus!

Although not connected to the internet, someone has stuck a USB pen drive infected with a virus into one of the PCs that run the remote control system for the Predator planes. Seemingly they run Windows XP – see photo. (this really happened in the last month).

Hypothetically speaking of course, if these PCs were connected to the internet, they might now be under the control of a bot-master, for sale to the highest bidder on the internet crime forums. Got a dispute with a business associate? Don’t send round a bruiser with a baseball bat, instead bomb the f**k out of them!

Okay, it didn’t happen yet, but it might quite soon. Imagine, in the very near future, when China own all the infrastructure and buildings within the EU (because of our own financial stupidity) – World War III could be easily sparked by UAV drones under the control (seemingly) of some 3rd party hacker bombing Beijing. What a great get-out clause for the real culprits… and a release from all our financial obligations. (great James Bond movie plot, if nothing else)

These drones are obviously able to act autonomously when not in radio communication with HQ (think about your own smartphone that already has GPS, a gyroscope & inertia sensor), but they still depend on radio signals to operate remotely. Imagine someone in a cheap plane with an array of radio jammers… What is the UAV to do next?

These UAV’s are just turning war into a video game for the remote operators – would you want one of your children running this remote control killing room? If you’re brought up killing people successfully on-screen in video games, then it’s a very small leap to doing it for pay from the US military in some remote server room (Remember, champions of justice, your opponents have families & children, who also dream of a better world).

Follow the Drunken UAV on Twitter.

Yes, that headline is correct. One of the original authors of Elite for the BBC Micro, has started a non-profit company with the stated aim of bringing a $20 PC to every kid in the country.

David Braben believes that teaching of ICT is diverting focus away from learning all those real computer skills. Like hacking together your first script or Python program, or making an Arduino open your garage door from a smartphone. He’s right too.

The USB stick Raspberry Pi computer has a HDMI port on one end, so will connect to any recent HD ready TV. The other end attaches to a USB hub, which can have a keyboard, mouse, or USB ethernet port attached. The stick runs an ultra-cheap ARM processor & Ubuntu Linux. When you consider it will drive a 1080P TV at full HD resolution & surf the internet, that’s a pretty exciting proposition. I’d buy one just to play with – I’d donate one too, come to that, if they decide to mirror early attempts at spreading the cheap PCs to less well off countries.

This all makes running Ubuntu from a USB memory stick look pretty lame! Now the whole computer is on the stick.

David Braben thinks we’re about a year away from being able to own one. In the next 12 months prices of Android & Chrome tablets PCs are going to fall significantly, but I still love the idea of the £15 USB stick PC. If it could let you watch BBC iPlayer in HD on your TV, how great would that be!

If you want to read about how David Braben got his start with computers – aged 18 he received a £120 Acorn Atom kit for Christmas, which he soldered together himself (yes, these are the skills that helped him design a £15 USB PC, today) – then read the book ‘Backroom Boys’ by Francis Spufford, ISBN 0-571-21497-5. It’s also full of other great electronic engineering feats. You might have to settle for a used copy. Also contains the stories of the rise of Concorde, Vodafone/Cellnet & Mapping the human genome. Brilliant read.

If you don’t want to wait 12 months, you can start to learn a little Python programming today at KhanAcademy.org
Python lesson 1 – lesson 2 – lesson 3 – lesson 4