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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
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.
...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
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.
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?
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...
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Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
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
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!)
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
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.