Archive for the ‘Radio’ Category

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 239

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

Techmoan is kind of a fun channel, but one that I try to avoid overusing. I’m using it today because this video popped up, and it answers a question that’s been in the back of my mind.

Whatever happened to portable televisions? Remember the Sony Watchman?

Obviously, the digital transition killed off the old analog portables. But why don’t we have portable digital televisions?

Short answer: we do, but not from any major manufacturers, and they’re pretty much crap as televisions. (Some of them may be decent portable media players, but do they do anything you can’t do with a small laptop or tablet?)

When I’m out shopping in thrift stores and other odd places, and see one of those cool looking old portable devices with a TV built in, I think about picking it up and hooking up a converter box, just for the lulz.

Bonus: “Prison Tech”. Not really the kind of thing people in prison improvise, but rather what kind of tech you’re allowed to have (and can purchase) for prison use.

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in Geek, History, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 166

Saturday, September 12th, 2020

My current boss is an amateur radio operator, and has far more experience and knowledge than I do. Since the lockdown started, my work group has been holding virtual “happy hours” outside of the work context (consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors is allowed, but not required) and amateur radio is a frequent topic of discussion.

So I thought Saturday might be a good day for some radio related stuff.

First up, “What Happened to the Numbers Stations?”

(Numbers Stations Research and Information Center. Which is kind of a misnomer, because they cover things that aren’t numbers stations as well.)

Bonus #1: “HM01 – The Ultimate Radio Mystery”. HM01 is a numbers station broadcasting out of Cuba.

Bonus #2: “Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The first video above mentions the Lincolnshire Poacher early on, but if you didn’t watch it, LP is another famous numbers station.

Bonus #3: For something different, “Listening to Astronauts ON THE ISS with a Baofeng UV-5R”.

Baofeng UV-5R+ on Amazon. (Affiliate link.) It is a very slight exaggeration to say that you can get one of these with the change you dig out of your couch cushions.

Posted in Bookmarks, History, Music, Radio | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 105

Monday, July 13th, 2020

The high in Austin today is estimated to be 104. I think it is time to bring out something I’ve been holding in reserve.

“Land of White Alice”. No, this isn’t a Lewis Carroll thing. “White Alice” was a communications system in Alaska that used “tropospheric scattering” for over-the-horizon communications links.

The tropospheric scatter system operated around 900 MHz, and utilized both space diversity and frequency diversity, multiplexing a maximum of 132 simultaneous voice channels. The tropospheric hops used pairs of 60 ft (18 m) or 120 ft (37 m) parabolic, billboard like reflectors pointed at a low angle into the horizon. The radio waves were scattered by the tropopause, returning to Earth beyond the horizon, allowing communication between stations hundreds of miles apart. Having two antennas allowed for space diversity, meaning that if tropospheric conditions degrade on one path the second path might still be clear and communications would not be disrupted. For frequency diversity, each antenna transmitted two separate frequencies. Using both frequency and space diversity was called quad diversity. System power output for most shots was 10 kW and used 60 ft (18 m) antennas. Longer shots used 120 ft (37 m) antennas with 50 kW and shorter shots used 1 kW and 30 ft (9 m), round parabolic dishes.

The video makes it sound like White Alice was a major communications link for civilian traffic, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, it carried mostly military communications at this time (though it was used to coordinate between military and civil air traffic). The system went into place beginning in 1955: by 1970 or thereabouts, the military considered it obsolete, and transferred it to RCA Alascom for civilian use until the late 1970s.

I’m putting this up for two reasons: in addition to my interest in cold war tech, there’s also a lot of great vintage footage of Alaska. There’s even an Alaskan bush pilot, RoadRich.

Bonus: “Seconds For Survival”, from those wonderful folks at the Bell System.

The film tells how the North American Air Defense Command links NORAD, Sage, SAC, the DEW Line (Distant Early Warning), BMEWS, White Alice System, picket ships, Texas Towers blimps and air ships and air patrols into a single giant warning system to protect Americans from Soviet attack.

Posted in History, Planes, Radio | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 69

Sunday, June 7th, 2020

Science Sunday!

I’m drawing pretty heavily on AT&T/Bell System stuff, but they do have some of the best science videos on YouTube. Not just about phone stuff, either.

For example, lasers.

From 1969, “Lasers Unlimited”. If you want to skip the introduction, fast forward to about 2:25.

Bonus video #1, since that one was short: a 1978 interview with Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, right after their Nobel Prize was announced.

If you don’t know the story, Penzias and Wilson were Bell Labs employees working on microwave receivers, specifically ultra-sensitive and cryogenically cooled ones. Since they were trying to pick up really really weak signals (bounced off Echo balloons), they eliminated all the noise they could from their equipment. But there was still some noise that persisted and that they couldn’t find a source for. Finally, and with the help of some astronomers, they figured out that what they were hearing was the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is taken to be evidence in favor of the Big Bang theory. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. (It was shared with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, who was awarded the prize for unrelated work on low-temperature physics.)

I know it’s talking heads, but I think the Penzias and Wilson story is a great one. You go chasing faint radio signals, you come back with one of the keys to the universe. How cool is that?

(Apparently, their receiver was quite cool. Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal and remember to tip your waitress.)

Bonus video #2: This one is equally short, and silent: “A Computer Technique For the Production of Animated Movies”. This is how computer animation was done…in 1964.

Posted in Geek, History, Radio | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 61

Saturday, May 30th, 2020

Here’s something a little different and shorter. “Coast Guard Lighthouses”, a film about…Coast Guard lighthouses, as of 1960.

Bonus: since the theme today is “something a little different”, here’s a promo film from the American Radio Relay League, also from the 1960s: “The Ham’s Wide World”. Noted: one of America’s most famous hams, Barry Goldwater (K7UGA and K3UIG), shows up at about 15:40.

Posted in History, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 14, 2020.

Thursday, May 14th, 2020

Joel Kupperman has passed away at 83.

The name probably doesn’t ring any bells with you unless you are really old:

For a time, during World War II and its aftermath, Joel Kupperman was one of the most famous children in the country, and also one of the most loathed.

More specifically…

From 6 to 16, Joel was a star on “The Quiz Kids,” a thunderously popular radio program that later migrated to television. He captivated Marlene Dietrich and Orson Welles by performing complex math problems, joked with Jack Benny and Bob Hope, charmed Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Ford. He played himself in a movie (“Chip Off the Old Block,” in 1944), addressed the United Nations and was held up as an exemplar of braininess to a generation of children. (Hence all the loathing.)

…

“All of us on the program experienced to some degree ‘child star letdown,’ but we remembered the actual experience fondly,” Richard L. Williams, the show’s other math whiz, now a retired diplomat, said in a phone interview. “It was a high for us. But Joel said it destroyed his childhood. When he was 6, I was 11. The program put stress on the smallest kids. They got the most attention and were the least equipped to deal with it.”
He added: “Once the show went on television they kept Joel, because he was so well known, but the general age got lower and lower. I’m guessing that experience was pretty sour for him. No real competition and no real comradeship.”

After he left the show, Mr. Kupperman went to the University of Chicago: a professor there suggested that he leave the country.

Professor Kupperman earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Cambridge in England and joined the philosophy department of the University of Connecticut in 1960, remaining there until his retirement in 2010. His scholarly focus was on ethics and aesthetics, and he was an early champion of Asian philosophy at a time when Eastern traditions were considered more akin to religion or mysticism than philosophy.
He drew from a variety of traditions, many of them ancient, which made his work cosmopolitan and original, said David Wong, a professor of philosophy at Duke University.
“The tone of much of Joel’s work is that of a gentle and wise interlocutor who refrains from lecturing to us on what the good life is,” Professor Wong added, “but rather assists us in our individual and collective endeavors to live a good life by articulation of much good advice and well-taken cautions.”

He was extremely reluctant to discuss his time as a Quiz Kid: his family says he’d walk away if anyone brought it up.

He met Karen Ordahl in Cambridge, Mass., after she had earned a master’s degree in history at Harvard University, and they married in 1964, settling down together in Storrs, Conn., near the University of Connecticut campus.
“When we were dating that first summer, if a store clerk heard his name, they would invariably say, ‘I hated you when I was a kid,’” Ms. Kupperman said. “He was really determined to reinvent himself, and by college he was already thinking of himself as a philosopher. He wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, and in many ways he succeeded. He really lived in his head.”
And yet when his wife decided to pursue her Ph.D. in history at the University of Cambridge, Professor Kupperman took a sabbatical for a year followed by another year without pay so that she could do so. In England he cared for Michael and Charlie, then 7 and 4, while she worked toward her doctorate — not typical male behavior for the times, Ms. Kupperman said.

Ms. Kupperman survives him, as do a son and a daughter. His son, Michael Kupperman, is an artist who wrote a graphic novel memoir of his father called All The Answers (affiliate link).

Posted in Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 30

Wednesday, April 29th, 2020

Here’s a little bit more Bell System history for you.

“Challenge of Change”, from 1961. I think this is noteworthy as a very early depiction of the first modem (among other things). That punch-card dialing system is pretty neat for 1961, too.

Bonus video #1: This goes out to all the radio people and “Mannix” fans out there: “Mobile Telephones”, or: what cell phone technology looked like in the late 1940s. Show this to your children.

Bonus video #2: “The Far Sound”, a Bell Labs history of the development of long distance service.

Posted in History, Mannix, Phones, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 28, 2019.

Saturday, December 28th, 2019

Don Imus. Not much to say: I was never an Imus listener.

Sue Lyon. She did some TV and movies, but was most famous as the nymphet in Kubrick’s “Lolita”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

A slightly belated Christmas present…

Wednesday, December 25th, 2019

The CBC Radio adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd.

There’s a lot of good stuff (if you’re a plane buff) linked from that page and elsewhere, including:

If you are a plane buff, I commend both the CBC links and Forsyth’s work to your attention.

(For those who may be unfamiliar with the story: young pilot is flying home for Christmas and suffers a total electrical failure over the north Atlantic. He has virtually no instruments, fog has set in, and if he bails out, he’ll probably freeze to death in the ocean. At the last possible moment, he’s led to a safe landing at an old RAF base by a Mosquito. And then the story goes in some unexpected directions from there.)

Posted in Books, Christmas, Heroism, History, Planes, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 12, 2019.

Thursday, December 12th, 2019

Philip McKeon, who you may remember as Alice’s son Tommy on “Alice”. I had no idea he lived in Wimberly (which is a short drive from where I live), or that he was doing a radio show. (Hattip: RoadRich.)

Leonard Goldberg, noted television producer. He collaborated with Aaron Spelling on “Fantasy Island” and “Charlie’s Angels”, and went on to produce “Blue Bloods”.

I don’t watch much TV, especially network TV, but I have a feeling I should start watching “Blue Bloods”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Tatsuo Umemiya, Japanese actor. I’m not familiar with his work, but he was highly prolific in Japan: 203 credits as an actor between 1959 and 2013.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Please refrain from tasting the KNOB.

Friday, August 16th, 2019

As a Bluetooth guy, and as someone who just posted a bunch of DEFCON 27 stuff, I feel compelled to say something about the Key Negotiation of Bluetooth Attack (aka KNOB) which has been getting a lot of attention the past few days.

Here’s the actual paper from the USENIX Security Symposium.

The attack allows a third party, without knowledge of any secret material (such as link and encryption keys), to make two (or more) victims agree on an encryption key with only 1 byte (8 bits) of entropy. Such low entropy enables the attacker to easily brute force the negotiated encryption keys, decrypt the eavesdropped ciphertext, and inject valid encrypted messages (in real-time). The attack is stealthy because the encryption key negotiation is transparent to the Bluetooth users. The attack is standard-compliant because all Bluetooth BR/EDR versions require to support encryption keys with entropy between 1 and 16 bytes and do not secure the key negotiation protocol. As a result, the attacker completely breaks Bluetooth BR/EDR security without being detected. [Emphasis in the original – DB]

Here’s a higher level overview of how the attack works.

Also of interest, also from USENIX, also getting some media attention: “Please Pay Inside: Evaluating Bluetooth-based Detection of Gas Pump Skimmers“. What’s cool about this is that the authors have developed Bluetana, an Android app that scans for Bluetooth devices in the area (every five seconds), displays a list of devices it found, and highlights ones that show characteristics similar to those of Bluetooth skimmers.

First, the app checks the device’s class. All skimmers studied within this work, whether discovered by Bluetana or not, had a device class of Uncategorized. If the device class is not uncategorized, the data is saved for later analysis. The device’s MAC prefix is then compared against a “hitlist” of prefixes used in skimming devices recovered by law enforcement. If the device has a MAC that is not on this hitlist, it is unlikely to be a skimmer, and the app highlights the record yellow. Next, if the device name matches a common product using the same MAC prefix, the record highlights in orange. If all three fields (MAC prefix, Class-of-Device, and Device Name) indicate the device is likely to be a skimmer, Bluetana highlights the record in red. The highlighting procedure is the result of a year of refinements based on our experience finding skimmers in the field, and Bluetana includes a remote update procedure to account for these incremental changes.

I’m fascinated by both of these papers, just based on a preliminary skimming. I’m hoping to do a detailed reading at that mythical point in the future when I have more free time…

Posted in Android, Bluetooth, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

Black Hat/DEFCON 27 links: August 16, 2019.

Friday, August 16th, 2019

Apologies for being behind on this: I’m also working on another project that’s taking up a lot of my blogging time, but I hope to be done with that soon.

Posted in Bluetooth, DEFCON, DEFCON 27, Locks, Radio | Comments Closed

Black Hat/DEFCON 27 links: August 13, 2019.

Tuesday, August 13th, 2019

I had a lot of trouble finding this on the site, but: the DEFCON 27 media server is here.

I’ve got to wrap this up for now, as my lunch hour is almost over. I may try to do a second post tonight, if I find enough additional material to justify one. Otherwise, please share, enjoy, comment, and thank any presenters whose work you found particularly enjoyable or valuable.

Posted in DEFCON, DEFCON 27, Photography, Radio | Comments Closed

Lock, lock, baby, baby.

Wednesday, August 7th, 2019

I missed these the first time around, but the Hacker News Twitter linked to them a couple of days ago. I thought I’d blog them for the benefit of all my lock/computer security/Internet of Broken Things fans.

There’s a type of lock called the FB50 smart lock. It’s manufactured by a Chinese company, and sold “under multiple brands across many ecommerce sites”. As you might guess, it has Bluetooth and an app.

And, of course, it’s vulnerable. Once you get the lock’s MAC address (which, you know, you can get just by looking for Bluetooth devices in the area), you can use a series of HTTP requests to get the lock ID and the user ID, and then disassociate the user from the lock and associate yourself.

Discussion and proof of concept code here.

And the footnotes on that led me to another Pen Test Partners lock exploit (these are the folks who brought you the Tapplock one). This time the target is something called the Nokelock, which is apparently popular on Amazon (“…they do a number of different formats in a number of different body types, sometimes with other unlocking devices, such as a fingerprint sensors. There are other brand names they get repackaged as, such as Micalock.”)

So the Bluetooth packets are encrypted. But…

…the key can be obtained from the API by two methods. All the API requests need a valid API token, which can be obtained by simply creating a user with a throw away email address.

And:

…all traffic, including the user’s traffic is sent via the unencrypted HTTP protocol.

And there’s no authorization for API calls. All you need is a token, which (as noted above) you can get with an email address. Once you’ve got a token, you can grab the information about any lock, “including email address, password hash and the GPS location of a lock”.

And the password hash is unsalted MD5. “This is a cryptographically weak hash type that can be run through very quickly.”

Extra bonus points: the footnotes for the Pen Test Partners entry point to yet another lock exploit, this one for something called the Klic Lock.

An authentication bypass in website post requests in the Tzumi Electronics Klic Lock application 1.0.9 for mobile devices allows attackers to access resources (that are not otherwise accessible without proper authentication) via capture-replay. Physically proximate attackers can use this information to unlock unauthorized Tzumi Electronics Klic Smart Padlock Model 5686 Firmware 6.2

I don’t think I can put it any better than icyphox did:

DO NOT. Ever. Buy. A smart lock. You’re better off with the “dumb” ones with keys.

Posted in Bluetooth, Locks, Radio | Comments Closed

DEFCON 27/Black Hat 2019 preliminary notes.

Thursday, August 1st, 2019

DEFCON 27 starts a little later than I’m used to this year (August 8th, so a week from today.) Black Hat 2019 starts August 7th. Black Hat schedule is here. DEFCON schedule is here.

Again this year, I’m not going. While I feel like I’m moving closer to the point where I’m ready to return (expenses paid or expenses unpaid) I’m not quite where I want to be yet to go on my own dime. And as far as the company paying for me to go…not this year, for reasons I won’t go into. (Nothing bad. At least I don’t think so. Just don’t want to run my mouth about internal stuff.)

So, as usual: what would I go to, if I were going?

Let’s look at the DEFCON schedule first.

(more…)

Posted in Apple, Bluetooth, DEFCON, DEFCON 27, Radio, SDR | Comments Closed

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