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U.K. Pirate Broadcasters Steal Car Radio Listeners
Ant sent it: A BBC News story about how illegal stations in the U.K. are exploiting the new Radio Data System (RDS) standard that is now used in Europe and South Africa, and is coming soon to Australia, China and the US, by using RDS signals to force nearby motorists's car radios to tune automatically to their stations instead of legitimate ones.
Every time I turn on the radio, within 5 minutes I'm listening to an old navy ad.
--Shoeboy
A long time? Ii i remember corectly RDS has been available in Europe for well over 6 years now. The coolest thing i saw with RDS was the Dutch station SkyFM(?) using RDS to do Traffic & Weather reports :) I can't believe the great & all mighty US of A doesn't have RDS yet?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
RDS is a somewhat cool idea. I think limiting it to traffic reports is a waste of a really great technology, enter the pirates of radio. I'm a fan of pirate radio just because I have radio experience, and I like the little guys who don't have to worry about sponsors and Arbitron ratings and all that schmuk. Their stations just plain sound better. Hijacking my radio isn't too cool, but more power to the radio pirates :-)
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
If this thing is possible with RDS I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner but I thought it was only the RDS signals from the station you were listening to that could change the frequency.
For those of you unfamiliar with RDS it is a feature built into most european car radios that allow additional data to be broadcast along with the audio. Most stations broadcast the stations name so if for example you were listening to Metro FM the display would say that rather than it's frequency. It also can transmit other data such as the type of music the station plays and alternate frequencies for the station so if it goes to a weak signal it can try for a better signal as well as the frequencies for related neighbouring stations. It can also interrupt tape or CS's when a traffic announcement is broadcast.
Those of you in Europe or UK, how aware have you been of this 'feature' in car radios?
Are there any laws specifically regarding the abuse of the RDS system (as opposed to just plain unauthorized transmissions)?
I can see the benefits for civil defense, but the abuse potential is staggering.
...though it seems that once a hack is employed by one commercial entity against another (at least for potential econimic gain of any sort), the prack aspect suddenly becomes criminal.
I more (or less, depending on your point of view) beneign prank would be a "War of the Worlds" style broadcast...
"We interupt this broadcast to bring you a live broadcast from our new alien overlords..."
(c:
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
*static*...."I am God and I have taken over your radio you shall now drive through that building up ahead at a very high speed, I will remove it for you" *!crash!*
- Trying to shut down as many hijackers as is cost-effective, and
- Making this "feature" optional.
If I had a radio which forced a station on me, I'd probably rip it out and put an old-fashioned radio in its place.-- $SIGNATURE
This is great! I've always dreamed of something like this so I could tell off that bastard in the next car. I gotta get it!
It's definitely an optional thing although most radios come enabled with it by default.
You can choose what exactly you want it to do, you may want to turn the traffic announcements off and the auto retuning off but may want to keep the station's name rather than the frequency displayed.
The licencing one is a real law, and for a good reason too. Just above FM radio on the spectrum are the avation bands. If some yutz with a pirate station in Boston starts broadcasting on 124.4 mhz, it is going to cause major problems, that is Boston/Logan Aproach control. Many other frequencies are being used for avation, both for communications and navigation.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I can see this as being usefull for true emergency broadcasts. Imagine you are driving down the road in your car listening to a CD or tape, normaly I don't want to be bothered, but for example if a tornado had been sighted 10 miles away, there would be a very good reason for letting everyone know *NOW*. but the set of cases in which you would want this to be used would be very limited.
Mostly things like "A Tornado has been spoted at place X if you are near there get to cover NOW!" ofcourse this is just a more fancy version of the EBS system.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Step 1: Come out with closed specifications for a "revolutionary" protocol that will allow people to have their radios jump to any "bulliten."
Step 2: Include no authentication, "ignore traffic broadcasts" buttons, or common sense auto-ignore if > N requests per time slot are made.
Step 3: Go after "evil radio pirates" who are abusing your "security, what security?" technology.
Yes, Viriginia, there are stupid beurocrats.
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--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I woke up to my clock radio today and the DJ's were talking about some list of the top 100 songs this century and complaining about some of the selections of artists in various places, but that same radio station would not deviate from their play list if you beat them with a fucking stick (I know, I've tried.) Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. At least there's one radio station around here that has some semblance of personality. Unfortunately even on that one there's no escape from the Old Navy ads.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It sounds like you have to turn this feature on. And it does sound usefull, when driving having your radio search out trafic reports for you. Even better if it could find the ones for the roads you are actualy going to be using. It does not sound like these pirates are a huge problem, just really annoying.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
All you need to do to make it impossible to hijack an RDS radio would be put an "off" button to the feature.
Usually broadcasters shoveling out anti-government propaganda are referred to as "clandestines," especially if they operate on irregular schedules from uncertain locations and appear to be allied with particular political movements. A few stations could fall into either category; certainly many US pirates are subversive in their point of view, even though they aren't backed by a political organization.
Pirates can be subversive in their own right as well. I seem to remember visiting an HMV shop in London over Christmas in 1977, and The Sex Pistols were at the top of their charts, even though their music was banned in the UK. I'm not sure exactly how this worked, but I seem to remember pirates had something to do with it.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
This'd probably be really easy to implement in hardware - drive the cost of the radio up a couple bucks, at most.
Why just help the broadcasters? How about coming up with countermeasures to help the listeners? Forgive me for sounding like an over-zealous culture-jammer; but does anyone else feel that maybe they should be concerned about the listeners that are having something they didn't ask for forced upon them? Rather than the corporations that are having business stolen from them?
There seems to be a bias here. More of a concern for businesses then human beings. If a rep from Pepsi stole my Coke and forced me to drink a Pepsi (no offence intended to Pepsi) I'd like to think the police would arrest him and press charges on my behalf rather than Coke's. They sound more concerned that a company is losing business than they are about people's rights being violated.
Just tune in at Radio Data System(RDS) WWW interface website and enjoy...
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
RDS is found on a miniscule # of stations in the US, and IIRC there is no 'traffic' feature. In the NYC area for example, IIRC 102.7 WNEW has it, as well as 88.3 WBGO. That might be it.
;)
I have RDS in a crap home theatre receiver of mine, and was psyched until I discovered how few stations had RDS in this bass ackward country.
BTW, teletext is just too neat, though when I was in Munich the RDS confused me somewhat as my German is quite rustig..
Your Working Boy,
I must say, i like the comment Those of you in Europe or UK...
;)
Last time i checked, the UK was in Europe. Although lately i wish we wern't
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Maybe I could finally get the dee-jay to play some Zappa for me...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
When will people learn to always think a "feature" through completely?
Any feature, on any system, can be used and abused. You have to think of the possible aspects of a feature before you design it.
Example: Macros in MS Office having so much power.
Reason: you can do some pretty amazing stuff with the right programming in a macro.
Actual usage (abusage?): Macro Viruses
This is just another example of someone not thinking ahead.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Limited, indeed. The BBC News article linked to by the Slashdot article said:
(emphasis mine). Read carefully first, and only then opine; yes, a radio that can always be forced to listen to station X rather than station Y would be bad, but that's not what RDS radios are.
First off, if your elected government grants licences for radio stations, then they are by extension giving your, or rather the population's, approval.
Second, there are only a finite # of frequencies with which you can put together a coherent national broacast system. Without licencing there would be chaos - what if your pirate station picked the police frequency? Ambulance? Fire? It doesn't bear thinking about.
Absit Invidia
1. RDS and RDS EON (Extended Other Network) is a great system for it's time. ie about 1981. That's why there is no security built-in - it just wasn't a design consideration (should of been, maybe?).
2. Very limited info is delivered to the user, including:
Station name
Station music type (Blues/Jazz etc)
Station Freq's
Traffic Flag
3. 'TP' (Traffic Programme) is OPTIONAL. You just hit the TP button to turn it on or off - it's not totalitarian! We're not that bad!
The Traffic signal is broadcast by any station delivering traffic info. The radio detects these signals and switches to that station, if you have selected TP 'ON'. The signal is not broadcast by the station you are listening to.
Absit Invidia
It's not really useful yet, but hopefully as more stations start using it it will be possible to quickly scan the radio stations for a specific type of programming.
I'd rather have something I can still build a reciever for without excessive numbers of chips. I *really* hope that the up-and-coming digital radio doesnt push the old analogue FM & AM stations.
You can make an AM reciever from some wire, some sheets of tin foil, a plastic bag and a lump of coal. Of course, you need headphones and a verra big antenna.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Um, aren't aviation bands on the AM side? I believe they are because I can set the radio in the cessna to a local station on 850khz. and sure, many other frequencies are being used - most locations have differing frequencies for obvious reasons. but I do believe they're mostly on AM
--onyx--
I also wanted to mention that this feature can easily be turned on and off by one of the buttons on the radio. This would be helpful in avoiding situations like those mentioned in the article.
:) Oh well.....
I also noticed a bunch of typos in the first message
The RDS TP (Traffic Programme) CAN be turned off. My home tuner has this feature, my car deck and my DTS reciever also has it. It's very standard in Norway. Whenever this feature is turned on, it says TP in the display.
...and NTSC for that matter. ;)
Also, there's a restriction here, a radio station cannot use this feature, unless it really involves a critical traffic situation.
There are several other interesting features to RDS, here's an example of what the Norwegian Broadcasting company (NRK) programme 2 contains: FM modulated sound (Duh!), GPS ground beacon time correction signal (For the naval traffic, it's used to adjust the signal from the satelites.), RDS (With RDS Text for displaying what the channel contains, RDS time, RDS PTY Programme Type (It can be Pop, Opera, Talk etc.), Channel ID and other digital control signals for special pagers etc..
Quite a lot, that is. I'm actually amazed that USA still use AM radio.
It seems to me the designers just thought it would be too tough or impractical to make it secure, or they just didn't think about security at all.
The bandwidth for RDS is 37.5 bits per second - so keys and digital certificates are out. Maybe in the days of digital radio, but not for RDS.
Actually, it was in limited use here in the states. A station here in Tampa used it some years back to broadcast news and weather blurbs. A very few televisions were built with teletext receivers in them (I think Zenith built one). But you'll never see it again here. The vertical blanking lines that were used by teletext are now allocated to Closed Captioning.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Not very closed then, eh? So your step one is kinda off.
So there is an "ignore traffic broadcast" button, huh? Guess that means your step two is off, too.
*sigh* Try reading the article.
This sig is false.
Geez. Whats with you people? This "feature" is optional. It has a frickin off button.
You don't have to turn it on if you don't want to.
If you're afraid of being sucked into a pirate station, or even a legit station, *you can turn it off*.
Please return to your normal comment posting.
This sig is false.
I'm so happy we have state-run radio in Canada as well as the commercial stations...
; }return(0);}
They keep eachother more-or-less honest (ok so both commercial and government radio are inherently biased) and the government radio (CBC) has no advertising. None. No crappy programming to grab listeners (stern) and some of the best people in the radio business (shelagh rogers and peter gzowski)
the us public stations are public, not state-run, and have those obnoxious we-want-money-from-our-listeners things.
#include <signal.h> \ #include <stdlib.h> \ int main(void){signal(ABRT,SIGIGN);while(1){abort(-1)
OFTC: By the community, for the community
First off, DrewMIT, who would hijack a classic rock station to broadcast nsync? :)
:)
Anyhow, back when I was incarcerated in high school (jonkatz fodder) a friend of mine rigged up a little transmitter that overrided the signal of FM radio. It cost a whopping $20 to build, it ran off the car battery and was about the size of an 8mm tape, not counting the little antenna he attached to it. We would amuse ourselves by driving on the interstate and scaring little teenyboppers in their VWs listening to (back then) nirvana or butt err pearl jam. The look on their faces when that would cut off for "Hey, you! You in the black VW!..." or something cool like underworld. Though the signal was mono and had a dynamic range worth shit, we mainly kept it to vocal hijinks. Now that you mention it, even "legit" FM has a horrible sound both from a technical and a musical standpoint. Hijacking a signal like this RDS thing isn't all that new, RDS just makes it easier
M.o. dun said:
Well, if memory serves, teletext in Europe has a lot more services besides closed captioning--for example, complete program listings, newspaper/news reporting feeds, online shopping on some systems, etc. (Comparing closed captioning in the US to teletext services is a lot like comparing, say, computerised news services to a full-featured BBS system or multimedia-enabled web site. Europe uses it FAR more extensively than we do.)
This is not to say that teletext-type systems are COMPLETELY unknown in the US (I'll give an example of one in a bit), but part of it is that Europe has dedicated the bandwidth for it for some time. In the US, if memory serves, text services including closed captioning are carried on the 21st or 24th line of the 525-line NTSC signal, which is not a hell of a lot of room to stick stuff.
SOME teletext-type stuff besides closed captioning does exist in some areas, though. ABC stations carry program schedules sometimes on the text mode of a closed-caption signal (yes, with closed captioning there are two different modes and anywhere from two to four channels in each mode--regular closed caption mode and "text" mode which is essentially stripped-down teletext--yes, Slashdot readers (at least in the US) can test this on any TV made after 1993 or so with a 13" screen or larger--federal law mandates now that all TVs 13" screen or more have closed-captioning built in, and all of 'em have the text mode, even the cheap-arse models :). Some other stations will do this too, and on the other channels of text or regular CC mode may have captioning in other languages (I'd expect most stations in Miami to offer closed-captioning in Spanish too).
Possibly the neatest use I've seen for "text mode" in US-style closed captioning is how The Kentucky Network or KET, our statewide PBS network, does an agricultural teletext service called AGTEXT in cooperation with the University of Kentucky's agricultural school...basically has weather info, stockyards reports, agricultural hints, agricultural-related weather, etc. In the Louisville area it can be picked up on WKMJ-68 (KET 1; channel 13 on Louisville-area Insight Cable) on channel-1 text mode; I'm pretty darn sure the other KET affiliates statewide (with the exception of KET-2 (WKPC-15) in Louisville, which was formerly an independent PBS affiliate till they were bought out by KET--yes, we actually have TWO public broadcasting channels in Louisville, with different scheduling and double the Britcoms :) also carry the AGTEXT teletext feeds.
I'm not aware if anyone else is doing the AGTEXT thing or similar feeds like how is done in Kentucky, but it'd be very interesting to find out just what CAN be found on other channels/text mode across the US and Canada...maybe a list ought to be done. :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
RDS isn't meant for normal stations to *force* you to listen to their music format - Top40, whatever - but just to zoom you in when they're broadcasting TRAFFIC reports. I doubt any station would get away with constantly broadcasting the RDS signal along with their normal one 24 hours a day, trying to hijack listeners. People would revolt. Transmitters would be torn down, DJs lynched.
:)
Hmm... there's a thought...
I can't disagree with you on the "left of the dial" comment, though. But consider that many of those stations, who broadcast traffic, will probably also spit out an RDS signal... though I can't think of any stations of that sort in my area that DO broadcast traffic... *shrug*
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
The Original Bobski dun said:
Actually, if US-based teletext is the same thing as "text mode" on modern closed-captioning equipped TVs (all TVs with diagonal screen measurements of 13 inches or larger built since 1993 must have built-in CC by law; every CC-equipped TV I've ever seen has the "text mode" in CC along with regular mode, and usually two to four channels of both regular and text mode per TV channel at that) then not only is it not dead but has sort of been blended in with CC in general.
The largest use in most areas for "text mode"/US teletext seems to be in program listings for the hearing impaired (I know ABC occasionally lists these in text mode); in Kentucky, the public broadcast system works with University of Kentucky ag-school and county extension offices in running AGTEXT which is a full system for providing agricultural info (everything from weather to stockyards prices to insect infestation alerts to farming tips) on KET stations. (I discovered it accidentially on Louisville's main KET affiliate when I got a TV with CC [when they were first requiring them by law] and was playing about with the different modes--and was quite suprised to see the teletext in text mode on WKMJ-68 :)
I don't know if anyone else is doing anything similar to AGTEXT anymore, but I'd imagine so in states which are still largely rural and also have statewide public broadcast networks and/or big ag-schools like UK has. I think AGTEXT is neat as hell, anyways :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
I see a lot of people saying something to the effect of "When will RDS be available in the states" (I thought they had it already a long time but hey).
:)
RDS is pretty cool because you get extra digital info. But wait! DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) is already around the corner. DAB is already broadcasting in pilot projects in Europe (and probably in other places too) and has interference free "CD quality" (mpeg layer 2 200kbit/s) audio. Of course, there will be a host of other goodies (and not so goodies) like the ability to incorporate "pay-radio" etc.
The fun part is this: (taken from the dab faq)
What are 'additional services'?
DAB was developed with the aim of improving radio reception. This is why audio transmission was at the forefront of the development process. But DAB, as a digital transmission system, can transmit other data as well as audio. In principle any type of information can be transmitted by DAB, provided simply that it is available in digital form and does not exceed the maximum available DAB data rate (approx. 1.7 Mbit/s). Examples of such additional services are still pictures accompanying radio programmes, digitalised traffic messages (Traffic Message Channel), electronic newspapers, software updates and even animated video. This process leads to 'multimedia broadcasting' in which all forms of information can be conveyed via the common transmission medium DAB. In this context DAB could be described as the 'cordless information highway'. In contrast to multimedia applications via TV/cable, DAB additional services can also be received in-car and with portable equipment.
I wonder how long it will take for pirates to tap into this flexible resource, full of possibilities
look at http://www.worlddab.org for more
Yay. The Empeg. Let's discuss this...
NOw, a year and a half ago, I think it was around then.. I thought it was pretty cool, and the price was okay.
They said by March 1999 they would be in full production.
It's almost March 2000 and they still aren't in full production. They have shipped beta units.. whee. ANd the price is too much.
Go look at the price of SBC's, and the price of drives, etc.... it's *NOT* that expensive.
A chip containing a full stereo mp3 decoder I can pick up for $5. Now, I'm not saying it's cheap, or can be done in 2 days.... but if I can build the exact same thing in my shop for arond $300-$400 bucks, there is no reason for a mass-produced version to cost over a thousand.
There are a few stations that already support RDS in Australia (eg: TripleJ), and systems are available here that support the RDS standard. It's been running here quite a while, it's just that not many radio stations have picked it up. I have already accidently tuned into one radio station here that was transmitting someone elses RDS signal. It didn't last long though, they vanished pretty quick.
RDS is a very old technology, and it's a real wonder this hasn't happened before. RDS is carried on a "subchannel" on the FM signal, and digital data such as the station name, time signal, etc, is transmitted. My car syncronises the inbuilt clock with that of the radio station every 2-3 minutes. (It did take TripleJ about a month to adjust to daylight savings however).
But it's not hard to fake another stations RDS signature. If a station transmits someone elses RDS signature, and your radio is set to tune to the strongest station with the same RDS sig, well.. you can guess the result I think. The original idea is to allow for movement between different locations/states that have the same station broadcasting on a different frequency, and having your car radio follow the signal automatically and seamlessly. It's just an abuse of the system that no one bothered to cater for, and even if they did, it'd be hard to implement, as the data is all one way. You could capture the data and simply re-send it, or even receive their signal and then re-transmit it. It may have even been considered, and deemed simply not worth the trouble of worrying about it.
If anything, this will lead to more publicity for pirate stations, but that also means that the people designated for tracking down pirate radio stations might hear about it a lot sooner than normal. And if they have a list of authorised frequencies that a particular RDS signal is transmitted on, then it's just a matter of singling out the ones that have a valid RDS signal but the wrong frequency. For the pirates, I'd count this as a two-edged sword.
I have had every new Pioneer Unit that they have come out with since '93 (ex-dealer perks), and they were the first in the US to use IDlogic and RDS. Too bad here in NY it really isn't used for what it was designed for, the stations just display call letters and tag lines.
Pioneer Car Stereo w/ RDS @ pioneerelectronics.com
BTW: They do have on/off settings
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
Traffic news is good but there is an increasing amount of advertising and promotion of their other shows creaping into the traffic announcements and I would hope their licenses prohibit this.
Sig is taking a break!
HA! It was bound to happen. Already some stations in the Netherlands use the car radio displays to not only display the station name, but also the weather and ads. These ads even have phone numbers in them! Imagine driving at 100Kph, steering with your knees, eyes fixed firmly on the car radio display and taking down a phone number. Talk about road safety...
Half a year ago I heard about a related application of RDS: the Dutch police are dicking around with automated speed cameras that can read your license plate. They wanted to combine this with RDS to warn speeders: "Hello RB-VH-97, you were just caught doing 140KPh in a 100Kph zone. The Hfl 450,- fine is in the mail. Have a nice day". Kinda cool isn't it?
This news article bears a great resemblance to the current DVD crypto debacle. They're both examples of engineers assuming that no one will figure out their proprietary scheme because they're proprietary, instead of using a good design with strong crypto.
But if you think that the RDS situation is bad, wait until someone figures out the EAS system. This is the emergency warning system in the US that replaced the old EBS system. Having worked in college radio, I've had a small amount of experience with it. From what I understand of it, the network is basically a big tree structure with the FCC on top. They have a super secret code that can transmit across the network that will allow the President to interrupt all TV and Radio broadcasts and transmit what he wanted. I'm just waiting for a modern-day "Captain Midnight" to figure this out and hijack every single broadcast across the nation. Heh.
For more info on the EAS check out:
http://www.fcc.gov/cib/easfact.html
co-ordinated by whom?
Absit Invidia