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Anonymous' Airchat Aim: Communication Without Need For Phone Or Internet
concertina226 (2447056) writes "Online hacktivist collective Anonymous has announced that it is working on a new tool called Airchat which could allow people to communicate without the need for a phone or an internet connection — using radio waves instead. Anonymous, the amorphous group best known for attacking high profile targets like Sony and the CIA in recent years, said on the project's Github page: 'Airchat is a free communication tool [that] doesn't need internet infrastructure [or] a cell phone network. Instead it relies on any available radio link or device capable of transmitting audio.' Despite the Airchat system being highly involved and too complex for most people in its current form, Anonymous says it has so far used it to play interactive chess games with people at 180 miles away; share pictures and even established encrypted low bandwidth digital voice chats. In order to get Airchat to work, you will need to have a handheld radio transceiver, a laptop running either Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, and be able to install and run several pieces of complex software." And to cleanse yourself of the ads with autoplaying sound, you can visit the GitHub page itself.
They're anonymous, so they don't need to respect your frequency assignments.
This is almost certainly illegal in the UK. Encrypyted comms over citizen/public radio bands is not allowed. Steganography would be required to carry an encrypted payload without being caught, but you'd still be breaking the law.
Maybe he should call it "Talking".
So the NSA couldn't necessarily snoop your data - but the FCC could (and if you pissed the NSA or FBI off, probable WOULD) come after you for these types of violations. They couldn't get your by IP address - but if your were operating this from a fixed-base - they could find you.
10-4, good buddy!
Hmmmm... might have to dig out my 150W linear amplifier I used to use to drown out obnoxious truckers with, when they needed a smackdown.
Packet radio is done every single day on HF on up. With APRS, you can get messages from one coast to the other and back again without any internet or phone connection.
If you DO have an Internet connection, http://www.aprs.fi/ even shows you where all of the beacons, digipeaters, and stations are at a given time, and allows you to see all of the packets that are sent.
I was active with ax.25 packet radio 20 years ago. What is actually useful is the ability to do this on HF radio. Here in South Texas I can connect to a gateway node somewhere in the country practically at any time and get a message out. Since the gateways are sometimes several hundred miles away, it would be impervious to any local disaster, provided I can get 12v at a few amps to run my gear.
It's a great idea, I'll accept that, it's also not new - this has existed in some commercial form one way or the other (various calculators could communicate images & chat freely via the airwaves, Nintendo DS could also seek players within a certain range to do some picto-chatting or game with each other). Radio Amateurs have done this since the 80s, me too... I did it with a Commodore 64 + a home made 1-transistor modem and a walkie talkie, worked like a charm, but hey...it's good to see the kids of today doing something else than chatting on the internet.
1). You may want to check with the laws of your country, transmitting on most bands are illegal and could potentially disturb or disrupt ambulance communication, police or other important communications. Becoming a licensed Radio Amateur the legal way, is a good step in the right direction.
2). There are existing options you can use to chat & send files via radio today, Ham Radio enthusiasts knows all about this, visit your local (ARRL or equal ham-radio club in your neck of the woods).
3). If you want to chat worldwide, you could get a shortwave radio - or satellite antenna with the appropriate transceiver and a packet modem, with this - you can chat digitally, send pictures, send files as long as you have a radio amateur license to do so. Basically you need this to operate on the bands, in most countries you can listen in on radio amateurs communicating via packet-radio without a license, but you DO NEED A LICENSE TO TRANSMIT.
There are many more things you can do, there are a lot of commercially available radios, digital radios and much more. And none of them require the internet.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Long range WiFi >10 miles using highly directional Yagi antennas (& of course microwave transmission) is already possible and sometimes for really low cost, though primarily line of sight.
I'm sure they're probably using Baofengs like everyone else who likes to freeband.
Armature Extra here, how can I help you get licensed? It's not that hard and these days you don't even need to learn Morse code like I had too. Entry level license requires only basic understanding of Ohms Law and Power calculations, a little about RF safety and some basic things about the rules (like what privileges your license gives you, who the FCC and ITU are.)
Great hobby with lots of interesting things to look at. We do community service like weather spotting for the NWS, event and emergency communications. Don't like talking on the radio? There are lots of computer based things to play with, Digital modes like PSK, packet or HSMM stuff. We have software defined radios you can build and program too. I'll bet we can find something of interest for you to play with.
Don't like taking tests? Well, what if I told you all the questions and the correct answers are published in advance and the test is multiple choice. 35 questions are asked and you only need 26 right. You can practice online (usually for free) and know almost for sure if you will pass or not before taking the test. Tests are likely given regularly and very close to you, no matter where you live and cost $15 for as many as you can take and pass. Pass all three to get your Extra and enjoy the full set of Armature privileges available. If you pass, your license will be good for life as long as you keep requesting renewal every 10 years (renewals are currently free if you file yourself online).
Go ahead.. Take a look!
http://www.arrl.org
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I thought they were best known for making grandiose claims that never came to fruition? Remember how they were going to destroy facebook?
I thought they'd done that? They logged on to Facebook, decided it was already rubbish and left it as-is. Job done.
"Is the Chief Priest an Offlian? Do dragons explode in the wood?"
Only if you do it on a band that's popular enough to have people notice your transgressions. If you either use a sparsely-used band or use a band that amateur radio is a secondary user of, and it's quite likely that you could operate or some time without anyone reporting you. If you were to use the 900MHz/33cm band it's likely that your usage would be chalked up to some proprietary part-15 device and wouldn't be given much priority.
Thing of it is, leaving the medium of the Internet and actually operating in meat-space is not where most l33t h4xx0r types want to be. They're not going to spend the money and go through the physical effort of setting up antennas, running cables, and dealing with things in the physical world when they don't really have to. It's a lot of work and probably won't result in anything more secure than using new methods on an existing medium.
After all, the boot-CD and the wireless ethernet PCMCIA card kept in a safe deposit box somewhere near a coffee shop with open wifi would probably work just fine for a long, long time.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
See, when I was a kid, we had this thing called the postal service. It was great. If you had a piece of paper, a writing implement, and a stamp, you could communicate without even needing a computer, let alone a phone or internet. It was even possible to encrypt your communication using a variety of methods so that even if intercepted it wouldn't be obvious that it was some form of secure communication, let alone actually be read by the man in the middle. There were even good methods of detecting if communication had been intercepted, which this new-fangled method lacks. And yeah, there were even people who played chess via this method.
If these kids are gonna reinvent the wheel, they should at least make it work as well as the old wheel.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
Considering the current generation of geeks is developing all the software defined radios used by Amateurs and with digital modes becoming a whole new area to play with, there's a lot of younger people involved.
The older people have the contacts in government departments to get things done, the younger have the equipment to do a lot of the tracking all automatically.
I know this from helping a group deal with some people being abusive on some bands in my area. They now have no radio gear and a few thousand dollar fine that gets remarkably large if they ever do it again..
That being said, if they stay off the used areas and are courteous to other users of the spectrum.. THEN no-one will care enough.. You can get away with a lot, if your discrete and do it somewhere no-one cares.
Obscenity and talking in code is legally frowned upon, but almost everything else is fair game as long as it's not business related on the ham bands, at least between two US stations. International communications are usually limited to technical discussions or communications of a personal nature (how the kids are doing in school, the weather etc), but if you think about it, that makes good sense. Most hams do stick to noncontroversial topics, but that's not legally required. I've heard some pretty heated debates over religion and politics at times, but it's like standing on the street corner and yelling at people when you do that. You can start some lively debates, but nobody but the debaters will care. Not to mention, HF spectrum is a world wide resource, and using it to argue with somebody is a waste.
But all that aside, the issue is the band they used, not that they gave the CBers spectrum space. I'm complaining about the spectrum they selected. It should have been higher frequency, well above 6 meters, say where FRS is now would have been great. It would have avoided lots of the troubles we have with CB radios, allowed for smaller antennas and better overall usefulness because they could have easily increased the legal power output to make local communications much less difficult. As it stands, CB is a total wasteland, with little real purpose, that takes up valuable HF spectrum.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
First off, in a war zone where there is anarchy, "everything is legal" unless the local warlord or the country or entity firing bombs in your direction says otherwise.
Second, during times of disaster many communication rules are waived, particularly on frequencies that don't cross national boundaries and which don't cause harm to other emergency or government services.
Third, there are unlicensed frequencies that can be used for ad-hoc metro-area connections if you have good directional antenna. CB radio works tens of miles, maybe over 100, with a good directional antenna and that's without "skywave." Highly directional WiFi antennas can give you tens-of-miles communication over "no special license required" frequencies. If you can go above RF and use visible light or near-infrared, you can either use pulses or if you are really sophisticated and the distances aren't too long, you can use lasers to do "fiber optics without the fiber." As far as I know, there are no radio authorities that regulate the use of visible light, but you may run into safety-related laws if you use laser beams.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Most posters here seem not to have read the details on the Github page, and are missing the point.
This is a way to have encrypted point-to-point communication or (in some cases) network using any radio (or other) transmission equipment that will transmit/receive audio signals and allow you to tap-into the analog audio circuit of the transmitter and receiver. You could use it with:
- telephones (landline kind)
- mobile phones
- radio transceivers (legal or illegal - the protocol doesn't *require* that you break the law!)
- optical communication equipment - free air/fibre
- etc. etc. etc.
It just defines a common protocol and means of modulation/demodulation.
They take a whole lot of words to say this, and throw in a lot of revolutionary rhetoric.
And yes, it's very similar to amateur packet radio, except encrypted. So, lots of existing code to draw from.
It's well within the capability of any PC or smartphone today. Although I let my ham license lapse many years ago, I do have a couple of receivers squirreled away somewhere, and a few years ago I experimented with listening-in on amateur packet radio. You just run the output from your receiver into the input of a Soundblaster card (I SAID this was a few years ago...) and the application handles the decoding.
An interesting side-note: If you're near an airport, you can use similar software to decode VHF ACARS transmissions. (The kind that hasn't helped much in locating MH370). Just install some open-source software, hook your scanner up to your PC, tune to the right frequency, and it turns the squawks into somewhat-readable messages.
It's biggest drawback is it's biggest strength, IMO. It DOESN'T define a common frequency, some complex frequency-hopping or spread-spectrum scheme, or even common transmission media. It would be extremely hard for it to gain critical mass. On the other hand, it means there are an awful lot of places one would have to look to find it. It's up to whatever group that wants to communicate to settle on a transmission media and (if applicable) frequency.
Me and my group of peers have been experimenting with this for a long while. We were on IRC via telnet over packet radio and drop to the max distance to our setups. Fluid chat was impossible as the massive delay and data transfer rate was vastly sub par. I was complementing doing a project using a transceiver modal in the 433mhz range with a LNA (Low noise amplifier) and a custom designed directional antenna or a 2.4ghz transceiver using the nrf24l01. This would be controlled via a AVR micro controller to handle the interfaces wither it be tactile buttons and a small LCD screen, or USB interface into a computer. There are drawbacks to each, distance vs data transfer rate. If this was purely for sending text messages to people the first would be the better option.
Tracking down illegal transmissions is a mix of Geritol & Viagra for these 'Fox Hunters'.
If done on the 11m CB bands, no one will care.
Since no one uses the 70cm frequencies, it could be done there and still no one will ever notice.
The thing is though? The truth is typically someplace roughly in the middle.... EG. In Bundy's case, the truth is somewhere between his idea that federal land ownership is "unjust", and the idea that federal govt. should buy up huge swaths of land and just sit on them (for over 100 years at a time, in this instance, and probably many others) -- and then selectively enforce rules with an iron fist, when they suddenly deem it worthwhile.
So the "anarchy" brings attention to the initial problem, and *hopefully* brings about an end result of some modification to existing regulations, to improve things in the future for everyone.
It's pretty well documented in historical records that when the United States fought for freedom from England and the Revolutionary War began, there was a lot of this "over the top" behavior involved too. British soldiers, ordered to simply stand guard in certain areas, were spit on, had beer bottles thrown at them from nearby taverns, etc. -- in an attempt to provoke one of them to give in and fire a weapon. Bottom line? You can't really create effective change if you just sit quietly by and follow all the rules. The protesting/anarchy isn't usually 100% right, but it serves as a catalyst for change.