"Privacy is dead for the uneducated, deal with it."
FTFY... Privacy is very possible if you have the education and IQ to do it.
I can set up a 100% private voice call to a friend right now that the Feds would have serious trouble cracking. If my pal and I took extra steps, they would not even know we were talking right under their noses. It's not hard to do, just tedious and requires education.
You can do that but you cant mask signal strength. I find a printer that is blasting CDMA or noise I have you nabbed. that is the value of the Spectrum analyzer, I can use the worlds most powerful computer to see that I am seeing significant RF energy coming from things that are not supposed to be doing that. Stick a red sticker to it and move on. Later dis-assembly will discover the bug or verify it as clean.
SMART spies will not broadcast all the time. My evil printer will never ever broadcast during the day. I would use a burst broadcast at night that did a lookup table of times and even dates to send the data. and honestly my "radio" would be a good old GSM or CDMA phone. you can get boards that are insanely tiny coupled with a raspberry pi in there and I can own the network at random times during the day and then store and forward at "random" times to avoid detection.
In fact I dont believe the NSA is using old 1950's "briefcase" collection systems. Send the traffic over the cellular network. easier and nearly transparent.
How I would look for what I just described is set up a multi point recording hardware setup. a PC based wideband analyzer and record for 30 days. with 5 antennas in the building on 5 analyzers. look at the data carefully looking for peaks of transmitters that are in the building. by using signal strength and position I can tell you the location of each transmission that is recorded. overlay this on the buildings floorplan and you have a map of what to watch closer. Yes you can do it with 4, but the 5th gives you greater accuracy for location.
100 watts is nothing for the short times it is in use. when mine sits idle it burns 5 watts. Which is 22 hours of the day. Meaning it uses less than yours does burning it's 10 watts 24 hours a day. Just set up proper power saving functions on the motherboard and the underlying linux install and power use is a non issue.
Go to best buy and buy one. Because that is what 99% of the people out there are capable of. If it doesn't exist at best buy, then it doesn't exist for them.
All of them are useless. a "good" bug detector is a RF spectrum analyzer and a guy that has the experience to look for and see RF being transmitted across the board. Frequency hopping is very common and will never set off a "bug detector".
You need a $25,000 piece of equipment and a guy you pay $150 an hour that knows what he is doing.
"First, show me *ANY* radio transmitter at *ANY* frequency that can convey a signal EIGHT MILES away with a footprint small enough to be hidden and completely unnoticeable. "
Not a problem. Look up baofeng ham radio transcivers. far smaller than a pack of cigarettes and I can easily hide one inside of a computer with a tiny arduino controller so it hops frequencies and transmits digital data that is harvested. I can easily get the antenna outside of the case through the power cord (modified of course) with the antenna hidden inside the power cord. All of this hidden INSIDE the PC's power supply. I then need to access the PC so run the wires from the duino to one of the internal usb ports and BINGO.
This is not hard at all to do and with off the shelf parts. if I had a $100,000,000 budget and a fab lab I can make something even smaller, or even make what looks like a PCI-E audio card that is actually my transmitter at 1-5 watts to easily cover 8 miles.
"In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user."
NO, in ALL cases this radio must be inserted. Honestly if you are a tech journalist and dont know crap about technology, please quit and go flip burgers. I am so tired of these "journalists" that colleges are pumping out.
"Netgear NeoTV which he wants to utilise for that."
He can, you pick it up, walk over to the trash bin and drop it inside. He wants to use a toy he got duped into buying, there is no happiness until he realizes that and get's rid of it.
XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.
and the side effect, the same XBMC pc can act as the media server so it is an all in one solution. but you can not buy one. You have to spend time to build it and you have to take the time to educate yourself on how to build it. He refuses to even spend time fixing his problem.
It's also a little fickle with things like the UI being smooth, oh and indexing all the media into the library. the media library database will outgrow the XBMC card in short order. I have 3 of them in the house, I will be replacing them with real XBMC pc's shortly due to how fickle they are.
"making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend."
There is no turn key no work involved media server out there. you can try a standard NAS and build yourself a XBMC playback box, but you can not buy one. You will have to invest an entire weekend if you are a novice, or an entire saturday if you are an expert to do what you want. You had better prepare to spend some hours on this.
"For the most part, Glass is a good prototype for this new kind of computer: but do we really need it, and are we ready for it?'
Wearable computers have been around for decades. I really wish that "journalists" would do some research before they write an article. Prof Steve Mann and Prof Thad Starner (who is the project lead on google glass) have had wearable computers since 1990's and the Aviation and military has used them since the mid 2000's. the only thing that is new is miniaturization and looking stylish.
Vantage or Crestron for your lighting and power, you had better get it done by the electrician when you build.
anything else is simply an ugly add on hack that will not work very well. Give up the solid marble countertops and install a real lighting control system.
Yes it's 32 bit support under 64 bit is horrid at best. I have to run a windows 7 32 bit VM for a LOT of the support software we use for hardware like polycom video conference units.
Windows 7 32 bit is the least buggy as far as the user is concerned if they have to use legacy or vertical market software. If you can simply re-buy everything as 64 bit, then 64 bit is the way to go.
I want to waterboard the idiot at Microsoft that though it was a good idea to rearrange everything in the control panel. That person needs to be waterboarded for 16 hours then left in a small metal box in the hot desert heat for 2 weeks.
I love how you add words that absolutely nobody said to prop up your straw man.
You are simply reinforcing my statement that most IT staff are horribly under skilled in IT to begin with. As an IT person in 2014 if you can not maintain Windows, OSX and linux, you are corporate dead weight.
Even a fresh MCSE holder could maintain the setup I describe with proper documentation. And those guys are the bottom gutter of the IT world.
Note: it scales perfectly. the largest company in america has 1000 SCADA operated facilities. if that 1 person can not maintain all 1000 of the secure data gateways part time along with his other duties, then they need to hire someone that has a level of competency in Information Systems and Security.
Staff intensive as in 1 guy that has expert level knowledge and can document processes? yes. and I understand how this is unachievable in corporate america. Hiring experts or even competency is not a part of the profit plan.
the "programming device" was a usb drive that was never ever looked at to be sure that it was clean. yes even a low level non programmer can spot even an unknown worm on a usb drive by simply looking at the whole drive on a hex editor. Look at all this extra bytes, UNCLEAN, REJECT.
"Indeed. But in many cases they need to be done remotely."
there is NEVER a need to do it remotely across the internet. NEVER. If you need it remotely controlled, point to point secure encrypted T1 line. boo hoo if that is too expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
"Privacy is dead for the uneducated, deal with it."
FTFY... Privacy is very possible if you have the education and IQ to do it.
I can set up a 100% private voice call to a friend right now that the Feds would have serious trouble cracking. If my pal and I took extra steps, they would not even know we were talking right under their noses. It's not hard to do, just tedious and requires education.
You can do that but you cant mask signal strength. I find a printer that is blasting CDMA or noise I have you nabbed. that is the value of the Spectrum analyzer, I can use the worlds most powerful computer to see that I am seeing significant RF energy coming from things that are not supposed to be doing that. Stick a red sticker to it and move on. Later dis-assembly will discover the bug or verify it as clean.
SMART spies will not broadcast all the time. My evil printer will never ever broadcast during the day. I would use a burst broadcast at night that did a lookup table of times and even dates to send the data. and honestly my "radio" would be a good old GSM or CDMA phone. you can get boards that are insanely tiny coupled with a raspberry pi in there and I can own the network at random times during the day and then store and forward at "random" times to avoid detection.
In fact I dont believe the NSA is using old 1950's "briefcase" collection systems. Send the traffic over the cellular network. easier and nearly transparent.
How I would look for what I just described is set up a multi point recording hardware setup. a PC based wideband analyzer and record for 30 days. with 5 antennas in the building on 5 analyzers. look at the data carefully looking for peaks of transmitters that are in the building. by using signal strength and position I can tell you the location of each transmission that is recorded. overlay this on the buildings floorplan and you have a map of what to watch closer. Yes you can do it with 4, but the 5th gives you greater accuracy for location.
100 watts is nothing for the short times it is in use. when mine sits idle it burns 5 watts. Which is 22 hours of the day. Meaning it uses less than yours does burning it's 10 watts 24 hours a day. Just set up proper power saving functions on the motherboard and the underlying linux install and power use is a non issue.
DLNA is not a standard. if it will not play off of a SMB share it is not worth buying. I have seen more things fail with DNLA than anything else.
I say more hogwash.
Go to best buy and buy one. Because that is what 99% of the people out there are capable of. If it doesn't exist at best buy, then it doesn't exist for them.
where do you buy a preconfigured PLEX server? because he does not want to spent any time at all building one.
All of them are useless. a "good" bug detector is a RF spectrum analyzer and a guy that has the experience to look for and see RF being transmitted across the board. Frequency hopping is very common and will never set off a "bug detector".
You need a $25,000 piece of equipment and a guy you pay $150 an hour that knows what he is doing.
"First, show me *ANY* radio transmitter at *ANY* frequency that can convey a signal EIGHT MILES away with a footprint small enough to be hidden and completely unnoticeable. "
Not a problem. Look up baofeng ham radio transcivers. far smaller than a pack of cigarettes and I can easily hide one inside of a computer with a tiny arduino controller so it hops frequencies and transmits digital data that is harvested. I can easily get the antenna outside of the case through the power cord (modified of course) with the antenna hidden inside the power cord. All of this hidden INSIDE the PC's power supply. I then need to access the PC so run the wires from the duino to one of the internal usb ports and BINGO.
This is not hard at all to do and with off the shelf parts. if I had a $100,000,000 budget and a fab lab I can make something even smaller, or even make what looks like a PCI-E audio card that is actually my transmitter at 1-5 watts to easily cover 8 miles.
"In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user."
NO, in ALL cases this radio must be inserted. Honestly if you are a tech journalist and dont know crap about technology, please quit and go flip burgers. I am so tired of these "journalists" that colleges are pumping out.
" Cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional"
pick only 2 from that list though.
you seem to not understand how things really work out there. You can not have all 4, it does not exist.
"Netgear NeoTV which he wants to utilise for that."
He can, you pick it up, walk over to the trash bin and drop it inside. He wants to use a toy he got duped into buying, there is no happiness until he realizes that and get's rid of it.
XBMC on a low end core duo throwaway PC and a mild out of date nvidia video card will blow away any device you can buy to play back media on your TV. utterly blow it away.
and the side effect, the same XBMC pc can act as the media server so it is an all in one solution. but you can not buy one. You have to spend time to build it and you have to take the time to educate yourself on how to build it. He refuses to even spend time fixing his problem.
It's also a little fickle with things like the UI being smooth, oh and indexing all the media into the library. the media library database will outgrow the XBMC card in short order.
I have 3 of them in the house, I will be replacing them with real XBMC pc's shortly due to how fickle they are.
"making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend."
There is no turn key no work involved media server out there. you can try a standard NAS and build yourself a XBMC playback box, but you can not buy one.
You will have to invest an entire weekend if you are a novice, or an entire saturday if you are an expert to do what you want. You had better prepare to spend some hours on this.
when we run out of Whiskey...
When it comes to cops? yes. as that is the only thing they understand.
Just put the old fart in the general prison population with announcing to all inmates that this is a COP.
The problem will solve it's self within 7 days.
They are no different than Street gang thugs. Even retired they believe they are above the law.
"For the most part, Glass is a good prototype for this new kind of computer: but do we really need it, and are we ready for it?'
Wearable computers have been around for decades. I really wish that "journalists" would do some research before they write an article. Prof Steve Mann and Prof Thad Starner (who is the project lead on google glass) have had wearable computers since 1990's and the Aviation and military has used them since the mid 2000's. the only thing that is new is miniaturization and looking stylish.
Vantage or Crestron for your lighting and power, you had better get it done by the electrician when you build.
anything else is simply an ugly add on hack that will not work very well. Give up the solid marble countertops and install a real lighting control system.
Yes it's 32 bit support under 64 bit is horrid at best. I have to run a windows 7 32 bit VM for a LOT of the support software we use for hardware like polycom video conference units.
Windows 7 32 bit is the least buggy as far as the user is concerned if they have to use legacy or vertical market software. If you can simply re-buy everything as 64 bit, then 64 bit is the way to go.
I want to waterboard the idiot at Microsoft that though it was a good idea to rearrange everything in the control panel. That person needs to be waterboarded for 16 hours then left in a small metal box in the hot desert heat for 2 weeks.
I love how you add words that absolutely nobody said to prop up your straw man.
You are simply reinforcing my statement that most IT staff are horribly under skilled in IT to begin with. As an IT person in 2014 if you can not maintain Windows, OSX and linux, you are corporate dead weight.
Even a fresh MCSE holder could maintain the setup I describe with proper documentation. And those guys are the bottom gutter of the IT world.
Note: it scales perfectly. the largest company in america has 1000 SCADA operated facilities. if that 1 person can not maintain all 1000 of the secure data gateways part time along with his other duties, then they need to hire someone that has a level of competency in Information Systems and Security.
Staff intensive as in 1 guy that has expert level knowledge and can document processes? yes. and I understand how this is unachievable in corporate america. Hiring experts or even competency is not a part of the profit plan.
the "programming device" was a usb drive that was never ever looked at to be sure that it was clean.
yes even a low level non programmer can spot even an unknown worm on a usb drive by simply looking at the whole drive on a hex editor. Look at all this extra bytes, UNCLEAN, REJECT.
"Indeed. But in many cases they need to be done remotely."
there is NEVER a need to do it remotely across the internet. NEVER.
If you need it remotely controlled, point to point secure encrypted T1 line. boo hoo if that is too expensive.