Slashdot Mirror

quietnet: Simple chat program using inaudible sounds

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Simple chat program using near ultrasonic frequencies. Works without Wifi or Bluetooth and won't show up in a pcap.

Note: If you can clearly hear the send script working then your speakers may not be high quality enough to produce sounds in the near ultrasonic range.

https://github.com/Katee/quiet...

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- Installation

Quietnet is dependant on pyaudio[1] and Numpy[2].

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/hu...
[2] http://www.numpy.org/

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Better Projects

Quietnet is just a toy! Take a look at minimodem[3] or gnuradio[4] if you need something robust.

[3] http://www.whence.com/minimode...
[4] http://gnuradio.org/

quietnet: Simple chat program using inaudible sounds

##

Simple chat program using near ultrasonic frequencies. Works without Wifi or Bluetooth and won't show up in a pcap.

Note: If you can clearly hear the send script working then your speakers may not be high quality enough to produce sounds in the near ultrasonic range.

https://github.com/Katee/quiet...

##

- Installation

Quietnet is dependant on pyaudio[1] and Numpy[2].

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/hu...
[2] http://www.numpy.org/

##

Better Projects

Quietnet is just a toy! Take a look at minimodem[3] or gnuradio[4] if you need something robust.

[3] http://www.whence.com/minimode...
[4] http://gnuradio.org/

quietnet: Simple chat program using inaudible sounds

##

Simple chat program using near ultrasonic frequencies. Works without Wifi or Bluetooth and won't show up in a pcap.

Note: If you can clearly hear the send script working then your speakers may not be high quality enough to produce sounds in the near ultrasonic range.

https://github.com/Katee/quiet...

##

- Installation

Quietnet is dependant on pyaudio[1] and Numpy[2].

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/hu...
[2] http://www.numpy.org/

##

Better Projects

Quietnet is just a toy! Take a look at minimodem[3] or gnuradio[4] if you need something robust.

[3] http://www.whence.com/minimode...
[4] http://gnuradio.org/

As per usual, the answer to the title is "No", but flow-based programming has its uses. I've recently come across GNU Radio, in particular its Companion (GRC) and the flow model is a perfect match for signal processing. Take a look at these GRC screenshots. With the advent of RTLSDR, more people are discovering this programming model.

I disagree. I have been playing around lately with GNU Radio Companion, designing SDR (software-defined radio) tools using a cheap DVB dongle. The transformations of the signal into a human-digestible format is made very easy. I am a software engineer -- I have written a lot of code. But there is a certain class of problems that lend itself to flow-based programming. GRC is one. And ETL tools are another. That is not to say that one does not, from time to time, have to write one's own code block. I have done that for GRC and for some ETL tools. But for 99% of what I have needed, a simple flow graph was all that was required.

I would imagine that if this evolves it will end up having constraints attached to it along the lines of the prohibitions on retransmitting or relaying information from other protected radio frequencies. While there are useful reasons to translate and distribute general flight tracking information, I'd be willing to bet that either these services are forced to omit law enforcement transponders altogether, or there will be automated gag orders on such sites regarding to drones under certain circumstances such as pending activity (selective availability on drone tracking data?)

In any case, I would imagine that if you want accurate local drone data you'll have to collect it yourself.

As others have now posted this is possible on the cheap: RTL-SDR software over DVB-T dongles based on Realtek RTL2832U (supposedly as cheap as $20) provide a receiver, and GNU Radio with gr-air-modes gives you decoded ADS-B data streams on a decent PC.

You're welcome. Amateur radio folk have been on the forefront of DSP and SDR development for many years now. If you want to fool around with digital signal processing but don't want to invest in hardware, you can use the GNURadio package, along with the GNU Radio Companion to create DSP chains using an IDE and signals to/from your soundcard or arbitrary sound files.

For very little cash you can get a USB TV dongle that can be used as a signal source for GNU Radio. Search around a bit and you'll find sources - some are mentioned on the GNU Radio site.

If you're interested in doing DSP/SDR 'for real' over the air, consider getting a Technician-class Amateur radio license. You have all privileges above 30 MHz, and can do really nifty stuff. No Morse code required anymore - all theory and regs.

There are a few methods, that I am aware of, that might, although the legality of such methods I am unsure of, still allow for cell phone use while preventing this sort of spying from occurring.

One method, is to get a GNU Radio ( http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki ) device and operate it as a cellphone carrier firewall. This would accept connections from your cell phone, log and allow you to filter what is being sent, and then communicate with your carrier.

The other method, would be to use a cellphone data device / mobile hotspot, and then operate your cell phone using encrypted VOIP to an Asterisk server in your home / office.

If there are other methods, by all means let everyone know about them.

this shopping season could prove to be very interesting for Forest City thanks to Ettus research, Gnu Radio, and the same wanton disregard for the privacy of major conglomerate shopping centers as the shopping centers themselves display toward private citizens.

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki http://www.ettus.com/products im not saying each cellphone is uniquely identifiable and that these characteristics could easily be script generated for an open source transceiver project that fits into a backpack with a netbook at a crowded shopping center, or that transmitting billions and billions of said cellular signatures may cause a cellphone tracking system to cave just as it would had you transmitted millions of malformed cellular signatures. Im just merely implying that once this system which is accessible through the malls ethernet and wireless network folds like a chair, it would allow various interesting exploits to be performed and data to be collected. and we all love to test the anonymity of data declared anonymous by a third party who collects it using their proprietary closed source appliance.

GNURadio is so powerful yet so poorly documented. The USRP2 hardware is wicked-expensive (and now end-of-life), but really powerful. The N210 is its replacement.

Not only that but I was initially excited when I saw the words "Linux Radio" and thought that someone had finally made some interesting ham-radio stuff for Linux...

like for example a software defined radio - preferably could handle raw IQ via multiple channels on open sound cards with AD-DA upto 192 bps ... for a start

or that someone had finally made an open implementation of STANAG 5066 ...

and what about open mobile base stations?

or write some open FPGA code to to get wider bands of actual RF and electrically tuning steering the antenna array...

trouble is nice development hardware is expensive ...

Anyone got an extra 100,000 USD for a fun open radio project?

According to TFA, the (more) open system is actually relying on a number of not-so-open protocols and formats.

* Open source system. Royalties are paid by the transmitter manufactures only (and do date, most major US transmitter manufactures have already paid these). There is no royalties paid by the broadcaster to install DRM or by the consumer when purchasing a DRM capable receiver. One company does not own the rights to the modulation system for all the broadcasters in the country.

It's good that no royalties have to be paid by broadcasters or consumers, but given that I was just at the Open Hardware Summit and have a curiosity about things like GNU Radio, hopefully the amateurs won't be shaken down if they build their own receivers or transmitters.

* The CODEC is HE-AAC 4, which is widely used world wide.

AAC is patented, and they make you pay money.

In addition to that, DRM30 station have the ability to transmit low frame rate H. 264 video.

H.264 is patented, and they make you pay money.

The thing is, even if this isn't a completely open format, it's entirely plausible that this is the closest that anyone has gotten. While we could consider using this for now, we should always look forward and try to figure out how open we want the next set of standards to be.

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio and http://www.ettus.com/ see also http://kks.cabal.fi/GNUSaunaradioaallot :P

The group said that hackers intent on illegal eavesdropping would need a radio receiver system and signal processing software to process raw radio data, much of which is copyrighted.

Yes, that's right. Their main weapon in defending your privacy against crackers who don't care about the law at all is copyright.

Yep, it's copyrighted alright. By the Free Software Foundation.

no kidding, same thing i was thinking, his radio's are shit, he just has enough of them to get the EQUIVILANT of a decent radio unit for a hell of a lot more money. (kinda a stupid way of doing it) besides, if i had 25k to put (more) radios in my car (i already have 2m+cb in my 03 mr2), i'd get a nice yaesu unit for normal use, and one of these hooked up to my carputer. http://gnuradio.org/

Damn straight. There's Free Software that can do it!

They are probably using GnuRadio, a software-defined radio software.

You probably can't make ICs in your own home, but if you're willing to invest some money it's getting (relatively) cheap to produce quite small runs. Last time I looked, you could get runs as small as 100 done on a 130nm process for as little as $10K. Out of reach of most individuals, but maybe not a hobbyist club (it's only $100/chip, after all...). You can get incredibly powerful FPGAs now, and things like the OpenSPARC development board let you test microprocessor designs easily before you send them off to be produced.

I wonder how much clout it would really take to do a multi-technology MVNO that opportunistically selects the cheapest carrier or the one with the best signal, and stops trying to be a "phone company." EVDO, 3G GSM, WiMax, WiFi... all in one handset?

that's exactly what the cellphone companies want to make sure you can't do, so if you want to route calls over wifi or USB on your phone then you'll probably want something like OpenMoko which doesn't impose restrictions on the software you can run.

The Neo only has one SIM card though, so if you want to route over multiple cellphone networks then you might want a phone built in batches of 10 in a garage in hong kong.

p.s. don't forget you can run your own GSM base station and route that over the internet. http://www.gnuradio.org/trac/wiki/OpenBTS

Or judging from your tone, anything I want it to that you will denigrate should you find out about it.

http://gnuradio.org/trac

sorry, make that
http://www.gnuradio.org/trac

I've thought abt this, since it wud become an ideal solution for communication in rural areas (forgetting the spectrum issues!), with handset costs at an all time low !! Well, Vanu http://www.vanu.com/ has come up with a good solution, wherein high performance commodity PCs are used for software DSP. In the open domain, we have GnuRadio http://www.gnuradio.org/trac/ doing great work in developing algorithms. Also a project is underway for decoding GSM signals off the air http://www.thc.org/gsm/. May be someday, it can build up into a really working opensource BTS !! Cheers..

You've seen http://gnuradio.org/trac and http://www.ettus.com/?

Please don't even bring up the notion of a freely distributable binary/closed source driver - that's what things like NDISulator basically workaround, they're nasty ugly kludges that are a REALLY REALLY bad idea for a large number of reasons (I won't get into them here, just like I won't go into why FCC arguments are a red herring). Closed binary firmware isn't ideal, but it's what we've dealt with for quite a while already (only, as mentioned before, it shipped on flashmem built into the hardware, not as a binary loaded by a driver).

As an aside, you mention the prospect that some of these chipsets are SDR's. If one of these vendors -did- open up the firmware binary or provide some sort of SDR chipset SDK, just think of what projects like GNURadio could accomplsih affordably and ubiquitously. THAT, unfortunately is probably a pipe dream for now, but would be WICKED cool (think affordable GNURadio, mixed with MythTV maybe). That sounds like another activism campaign worth fighting for someday for GNURadio. Today, let's just stick to the issue at hand and try to get these firmware binaries licensed in a manner that would allow OSS vendors to ship them out of the box.