Ask Eric Blossom about Software-Defined Radio

Eric Blossom is an electrical engineer with a history of working with radio and communications security. He gave a presentation at the recent H2K2 conference about his work with GNU Radio, which is, bar none, the single most exciting software project in existence today. (Imagine computing devices that communicate seamlessly across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.) As usual, we'll forward some of the best questions to Eric and post his responses when we receive them.

Comments

Don't steal cable

[yerricde]

Hook your computer up to your digital cable system, and have it do the QAM demodulation. Then, pump the results to an MPEG transport demux and MPEG decoder. Boom. Instant digital cable box.

Boom. Instant jail time. Digital cable systems are scrambled with 3DES or Rijndael or RC4 or some other cipher. This is what the DMCA was actually intended for: to prevent piracy of cable and satellite television service.

so all copy protection schemes become hackable

By people who don't mind being sexually assaulted in the anus. Homosexual rape is one of the biggest problem in American prisons (and I'd imagine, prisons worldwide).

and, having said that, this is not a new concept - winmodems have been doing this for a while now

That was my first thought: "What the heck? A winmodem for 802.11? And it's actually endorsed by the FSF?"