The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
newyorker.com
The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#2I'm an American going to Havana tomorrow until Friday. Here's to hoping my head doesn't get long-range microwaved...?
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#3Is it just me or does it seem this would be trivial to detect with tangible proof? One or several software-defined radios can be set up to listen to the full breadth of the radio spectrum. If an incident like this is ever reported again, correlate the waterfall view with the time of the incident, and see if there were any increases in activity in that period. I currently believe this was a mass hysteria.
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#4Is it just me or does it seem this would be trivial to detect with tangible proof? One or several software-defined radios can be set up to listen to the full breadth of the radio spectrum. If an incident like this is ever reported again, correlate the waterfall view with the time of the incident, and see if there were any increases in activity in that period. I currently believe this was a mass hysteria.
It's not trivial. Beams could be narrow and could only be on for short periods of time. Combine that with all kinds of noise, stray signals, and other false positives, and you'd still be searching for a needle in a haystack. It's not clear what frequency to even look for...
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#5So the first “victims” were CIA officers, and the CIA the first to start pushing to close the embassy and return to the status quo developed and favored by the CIA for decades.
No evidence exists to suggest anything actually happened to the victims, and what limited scientific evidence does exist is being criticized.
And all of this just happened to directly support the official hard line position taken by the new US government.
What a remarkable set of coincidences!
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#6> The name is a pseudonym, which she requested in order to protect her privacy.) Her life in Havana was fascinating but orderly. She lived with her husband and their twelve-year-old twins
This is the problem with "anonymizing" a person by just changing their name, or exchanging a name in a database with a number.
There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is precisely one. We already know she works in the embassy in Havana, which means she's one of a couple hundred people, she's female, which cuts that number in half, she has twins, which cuts that number by about 100.
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#7Is it just me or does it seem this would be trivial to detect with tangible proof? One or several software-defined radios can be set up to listen to the full breadth of the radio spectrum. If an incident like this is ever reported again, correlate the waterfall view with the time of the incident, and see if there were any increases in activity in that period. I currently believe this was a mass hysteria.
SDR radios generally have a somewhat limited spectrum. A few MHz to a few GHz is fine for most data transmit/recieve projects, but there's no great reason to use those frequencies for this.
Also, one thing you pay for through the nose when buying a spectrum analyzer is scan time. If you want narrow buckets and a broad frequency, a cheap SDR is going to take on the order of one second to scan from 1 MHz to 6 GHz. If your radio pulse lasts for a few milliseconds and has a bandwidth of a few kHz, you're unlikely to see it unless you have a big FPGA, big RAM buffer, and high-end filters on a $XXXXX scope.
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#8> The name is a pseudonym, which she requested in order to protect her privacy.) Her life in Havana was fascinating but orderly. She lived with her husband and their twelve-year-old twins This is the problem with "anonymizing" a person by just changing their name, or exchanging a name in a database with a number. There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is preci…
How do you know the fact that "she" had a husband and twins is not also made up?
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#9> The name is a pseudonym, which she requested in order to protect her privacy.) Her life in Havana was fascinating but orderly. She lived with her husband and their twelve-year-old twins This is the problem with "anonymizing" a person by just changing their name, or exchanging a name in a database with a number. There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is preci…
Unless the real one doesn't have twins, and they added it in the story to protect his/her identity.
Re: The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
#10> The name is a pseudonym, which she requested in order to protect her privacy.) Her life in Havana was fascinating but orderly. She lived with her husband and their twelve-year-old twins This is the problem with "anonymizing" a person by just changing their name, or exchanging a name in a database with a number. There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is preci…
How do you know the fact that "she" had a husband and twins is not also made up?
That's a good point, but why add it in the first place?