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Getting Past Censorship With Unorthodox Links To the Internet
An anonymous reader points out a short article at The Economist, which says "Savvy techies are finding ways to circumvent politically motivated shutdowns of the internet. Various groups around the world are using creative means like multi-directional mobile phone antennae and even microwave ovens to transmit internet traffic accross international borders."
Ham radio saves the day again !
This really depends on the country in question, but there are many way s to gain access to the Internet. If the country is connected to more free country by land, it should be possible to set up RONJA-devices for cross-border communication. (For more information about RONJA: http://ronja.twibright.com/ ). The devices might seem very conspicious but can be made to be less obvious. If using light outside the visible range, this might be a rather good alternative. Not easily blocked with radio-jamming neither.
One can further develop this with more links once inside the country - from location to location, without links that are easy to shut down without knowledge of their location available for the government.
Directional antennas for wireless devices is another alternative - but those are easier to jam with interference.
Now, it's a completely different ballpark if you don't have any friendly regimes close by. If you're an island nation (say cuba, australia, or others) - you might have to piggyback on existing communication links, and if the links themselves are completely severed - like they were in Egypt - it automatically gets more difficult. You'll need to piggyback on radio or satelite. I don't know the current state of packet radio, nor do I know how easy it is to trace or jam - but my suspicion is that it would be relatively easy to both track down and to jam.
Satelite, as pointed out in the article, is expensive. I do seem to remember some satelites having support for relaying messages for free for people using amateur radio - however - I suspect this is for voice communication and not for packet radio. It should, however, be possible to get tweets out if you can find someone to type them in outside of the country. Not easy to upload stuff to youtube using this, though.
Other ideas?
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Only if their number includes one of those capitalists to pay for it. Space is expensive, and is going to stay that way for a long time.
Any ideas where I can pick up a multi-directional antenna for my phone? The unidirectional antenna it came with is a huge pain.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Please correct this typo. You do not want people fiddling with microwave ovens and in the process getting first-degree burns and cancer. You are meant to say "Microwave LINKS"!
This is a start, but the tools are still firmly in geeks-only territory. Can't all us in the idealistic open-source community come up with new technologies? How about some program that lets mobile phones exchange data with people as they pass in the street, maintaining a shared high-latency store akin to Freenet? Or maybe some company would like to improve on the sat-internet antenna to make it even more strongly directional, thus making it harder to trace?
I'm extremely patient. I could wait forever, but I suspect that once the enlightened discover matter replication technology and how to spontaneously generate unlimited energy, space travel will be affordable because there will be no economy.
I notice someone voted my other comment down. I suppose that person wants humanity stuck on this rock forever, probably for the lulz, right? Stupid troll would keep us here even when our Sun supernovas. It's only a matter of time you know.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The last paragraph of the article describes a modified microwave oven.
Great !!
As soon as the DIY crowd gets wind of the microwave oven hack, it wont be safe to walk down the street without getting cooked.
it's correct actually
an American naval-intelligence analyst at a NATO cyberwar unit in Tallinn, Estonia, describes a curious microwave oven. Though still able to cook food, its microwaves (essentially, short radiowaves) are modulated to encode information as though it were a normal radio transmitter.
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Sorry. Our sun is to small to supernova. Just sayin'.
Point to point laser will also work in the right situation, and be almost impossible to detect.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's all well and good when it is done for the right reasons. Unfortunately, most people spouting those slogans are the ones whose performance-art grants have been pulled.
Sorry. Our sun is to small to supernova. Just sayin'.
That's only a theory. I want the crackpots to participate equally in this conversation.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
Well, good luck (to your descendants) when the sun turns into a red giant then. Although where the OP plans to send humanity at the heat-death of the universe I'm not sure.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Ok. A nova then?
What's this? You're called counter-trolling? Now it's getting confusing.
Are you like the troll who trolls the trolls or something? Cos this ^^^, my friend, is a troll.
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
Who'd look twice at some pigeons?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Not at all.. It's never too soon to resist... But unless we can neutralize their real weaponry, we're still fucked. The mesh won't save us from a 500 pound bomb falling from the sky.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
... would do well to use this window of opportunity to develop as many different means of working around censorship as possible and to disseminate that information as widely as possible before they come for us. After all, how much of what Homeland Security et al does, really protects citizens from outside threats as opposed to protecting governments from their citizens ? V was prophetic.
Troll?
Oh, so sorry.. didn't mean to offend your sensitivities.
What I meant to say was, relax, enjoy it, roll over and take it like a man..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Post some pictures to Flickr, facebook, or any other medium. Then post some with data embedded.
I'm curious to see how the microwave oven was modified. I imagine the modulation rate is poor due to a variety of factors, the primary one being that microwave oven magnetrons aren't designed to be switched on/off at high speeds and their centre frequency could be anywhere from 2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz - mostly due to thermal instability and impedance load changes. Modulating the signal as opposed to switching the magnetron would likely work, possibly by splitting the signal into two waveguides and adjusting the phase of one to create destructive/constructive interference, or by using phase modulation on the waveguide.
Another method of phase control is using an external low power RF source allowing one to control the phase of the magnetron. That would require opening up the magnetron (which is under vacuum), not exposing yourself to the beryllium coating on the inside (highly carcinogenic), adding a loop internally, then somehow closing it and getting it back under vacuum. Sounds like a serious pain-in-the-ass.
The receiver would likely need to be custom as well, and making this a two way communications link without introducing ridiculous amounts of noise on the near-by receiver would be tough.
Maybe accepting a modulation rate of 2 kHz is acceptable to some people though.
Not worried about a nova. I'm more worried about some stupid rock blundering into us. The real worry seems to be that we might just kill ourselves here without any intervention. The greenies think we're killing ourselves with CO2, lots of people think we'll kill ourselves with radiation, and lots more people think we'll just go out in an orgy of violence. Then, there is the possiblity of some new (or ancient and forgotten) disease wiping us out.
I'd kinda like to see colonies established before all that.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If we haven't figured out time travel by that time, along with interdimensional travel, then we deserve to be extincted, right along with our universe.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Perhaps if you replaced the magnetron with a custom built klystron of similar size, it would work.
There are any number of "Extremely small" CRT devices you can get for pennies. (Like the eye-pieces of old VHS camcorders) These are basically a vacuum tube type electron gun, and which with some modifications, could be used to drive such a tiny klystron quite effectively.
[really blurry image I found on the internet depicting the tiny size of the CRT in question]
Amusingly, you could probably use the already existing magnetic deflection system of the CRT to help modulate the beam inside the klystron waveguide.
Obligatory wikipedia on Klystrons
Using one of those as the transmitter of your directional antenna would net you a VERY long distance connection.
802.11S is a game changer. Its sometimes called 'darknet' or a backhaul network, but it does get the job done, so long as you have people willing to maintain it. Two routers on either side of a border, can connect to one another. If you have one that is solar powered, near a border, then its self maintaining. All you need then is another router within a kilometer or so of that router. If someone then has an 802.11S router connected to their computer, plus the 'official' wired internet, and the outside world is on the 802.11S side, then everyone on the wired side is connected to the 802.11S side. I have a feeling 802.11S will never be officially sanctioned in a place like the United States, where the government has gone all draconian and 'post 9/11' and 'homeland security', and 'gitmo' and 'patriot act' all over everyone. Since 802.11S allows for preservation of civil liberties, the absolute control of corporations and the government over every aspect of peoples lives could come into question. The gover/corp would never allow it.
heat-death of the universe
Another Theory, No matter how educated, very few can actually grasp the concept of mass existing without humanities demarcations of 'beginning' or 'end'.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
>Using one of those as the transmitter of your directional antenna would net you a VERY long distance connection.
But wouldn't it be just a one way connection?. For whatever effort it'll take to modulate a signal with a cooking tool, it'll be orders of magnitude more difficult to rig the same as a receiver sensitive enough to decode a strong but still poor quality signal. It is really too bad that the article itself offers this short tease without anything substantial for the curious to follow up on. Any googlers out there willing to track this down?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
The guy got $8.7M for one night of being sodomized,. That's a lot more than Charlie Sheen pays.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Yeah, there's these laws of thermodynamics and Einstein to contend with there. Most people can't grasp the concept of four-dimensional spacetime, either. You seem to forget as well that the universe is finite and bounded, or ignored all evidence to that effect. Heat-death is the most likely scenario given the accelerating expansion of the universe. But I'm sure that you knew that, too.
But go ahead and believe whatever you like. Be an intellectual rebel, or whatever farcical role you prefer.
The beauty of a klystron is that it can serve as an amplifier. In the bunching section of the homebrew klystron, you insert a generic USB WiFi dongle. The signal from the dongle does the initial attenuation that causes the bunching in the klystron-- that is to say, it is the source of the reference signal.
The output cavity is then directed outward, away from the wifi dongle, and toward your target with a waveguide. The wifi dongle's reception ability should be mostly unaffected by this.
magies are frequently modulated by switching the cathode voltage on and off to produce pulses or by varying the current to cause an amplitude modulation or by varying the voltage produce an FM modulation. An other possibility is constructing a waveguide with a flash tube through it, when the flash tube fires, the waveguide shorts out and causes the power output to shift allowing for modulation of the RF output. Magnetrons is notoriously frequency unstable, this usually isn't a problem in radar where a portion of the output of the transmitter RF is fed into the receiver's magic T mixer for frequency tracking. Personally I'd stay with FM modulation, the infinite sidebands will mitigate a lot of the carrier frequency instability.
OBTW I was a missile guy not a radar guy, it was 30 years ago and certainly a long way from being a microwave engineer so anything I said may be full of shit.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Can you extend a wifi network originating from a mobile device such as a mifi or iPhone (w/ iOS 4.3)?
Good effort, but you're not evil enough.
Allow me to change about seven words from the draft bill floating around congress:
"Any unathorized viewing of any copyrighted item is a felony."
And since everything that exists has an instant copyright from the moment it was created, the first 1000 "country destroying IP-terrorists" made an example of will go way past chill - it will be cultural nuclear winter.
"Wheel Of Fortune 2.0! Is that screen of data in front of you the single authorized copy? No? You lose! Thanks for playing!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The guy got $8.7M for one night of being sodomized,. That's a lot more than Charlie Sheen pays.
Okay, but Charlie Sheen's cock probably doesn't cause perforated colon.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan