Finnish Hacker Isolates Helicopter GPS Coordinates From YouTube Video Sounds

An anonymous reader sends a post by Finnish electronics hacker Oona Räisänen, who heard a mysterious digital signal in the audio accompanying a YouTube video of a police chase. The chase was being filmed by a helicopter. Räisänen wrote: "The signal sits alone on the left audio channel, so I can completely isolate it. Judging from the spectrogram, the modulation scheme seems to be BFSK, switching the carrier between 1200 and 2200 Hz. I demodulated it by filtering it with a lowpass and highpass sinc in SoX and comparing outputs. Now I had a bitstream at 1200 bps. ... The bitstream consists of packets of 47 bytes each, synchronized by start and stop bits and separated by repetitions of the byte 0x80. Most bits stay constant during the video, but three distinct groups of bytes contain varying data." She guessed that the data was location telemetry from the helicopter, so she analyzed it to extract coordinates. When she plotted them and compared the resulting curve to the route taken by the fleeing car in the video, it was a match.

Comments

If anyone needs me...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be in the kitchen, making this woman a sandwich.

What she doesn't tell you

[93 Escort Wagon]

She washe one driving the car being chased by the police.

Re:what an ep1c hack

[rvw]

i think i'm in love with this women.

Steal a car and make sure it is at prime time!

Re:what an ep1c hack

[artor3]

And make sure to set up a speaker to broadcast your proposal in FSK ascii characters.

Re:Am I missing something?

[TheGratefulNet]

thanks for calling it morse code.

when I see people refer to it as 'morris code', I feel the need to remind them that that's a secret language, known only by cats.

Re:This woman is smarter than I.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How come I only see technical women smarter than me on the Internet?

Selection bias. By means of comparison, only beautiful girls get caught in the storm of events in modern action movies, ugly slobs are always safe. (Well, I'm being somewhat facetious here, but you catch my drift.)

Re:what an ep1c hack

[mwehle]

If your logic is correct, that might just clean up itself nicely when more women start "doing something". Either that, or your logic is wrong, seeing as humanity survived for many millennia without women doing nothing.

I'm going to have to go with possibility two here. I believe humanity survived for many millennia "without women doing nothing". I would in fact go so far as to moot the proposition that should women begin doing nothing humanity may indeed not survive.

Re:what an ep1c hack

[gstoddart]

Ever tried to work while staring at a womans boobs?

Not since they put in the network filters. ;-)