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System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

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Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#71

Post by vvanders »

Fwirt wrote: post #56
Tomte wrote: post #7

If you're ever near Stuttgart, Germany, go and visit the university's computer museum! http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ Klemens usually feeds punched cards into one of his treasures and puts a radio on top. Playing music. So much to see! http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/cm003.html Including real core memory.

Living Computer Museums are fascinating. Anyone who's in Seattle for any length of time owes it to themselves to check out the Living Computer Museum: http://www.livingcomputers.org/Discover/At-The-Museum/Vintag... In addition to the working Alto, MITS Altair, etc. they have a dedicated cold room for working vintage mainframes. You can even request an account on one of 'em so you can remotely telnet in. You're also o…

Yeah, the amount of direct exposure you have to the collection is pretty stunning. If I remember correctly only the Alto was behind a display. Everything else you could touch/interact with.

Highly recommended.

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#72

Post by braythwayt »

mark-r wrote: post #31
braythwayt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first laid eyes on the "High Speed Job Stream" in UofT's Sanford Fleming building (that particular building has since burnt down and been replaced), students were running jobs in PL/1, WATFIV, LISP, SPITBOL, COBOL, and many others. In the labs, there were IBM Selectric terminals dedicated to APL. And there was a BASIC dialect over at what was then "Ryerson Polytechnic." There was a room with terminals and acou…

I said most programming for those particular machines . I agree that mainframes had largely moved on, and probably the larger minis too. My first exposure to programming was time-shared Basic in 1972.

You know, I think we've somehow fallen into _violent agreement_ on all subjects.

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#73

Post by lucas_membrane »

Tomte wrote: post #7

If you're ever near Stuttgart, Germany, go and visit the university's computer museum! http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/ Klemens usually feeds punched cards into one of his treasures and puts a radio on top. Playing music. So much to see! http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/cm003.html Including real core memory.

Yes, this was also accomplished on a PDP-10 at Caltech around 1972.

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#74

Post by c-smile »

xenadu02 wrote: post #67
c-smile wrote: post #57

Quite old trick actually. At Cold War time, in USSR, American spy device was discovered that was placed on the street outside the wall of main frame computer installation nearby drum printers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_(computing)#/media/Fil... ). The device was recording signals from them and retransmitted recording in compressed form to satellite.

Do you have a link to more information about this?

We were told about this by our lecturer in university (USSR). Discipline was "data protection / security" ("Защита данных" in Russian).

The device was masqueraded as a canned "Килька черноморская в томате" (Canned fish: Black Sea sprat in tomato) and was transmitting short narrow beams upstream on schedule.

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#75

Post by banku_brougham »

kabdib wrote: post #21

I debugged a boot issue on the Apple Newton this way. The latest flash image was a brick on production hardware (no available LEDs, GPIOs, etc.) but not on development hardware. But I could flash a new OS image. So I wrote some small loops that did different stuff on the bus (so that they sounded different) and salted the boot path with them, then listened in on my portable AM radio. Found the problem inside of an ho…

To a non-hardware guy this sounds like strange witchcraft. Very cool.

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#76

Post by qubex »

beamatronic wrote: post #43
dsign wrote: post #34

People had fanciful minds. They had expected the civilization to end in bio-warfare, or atomic bombs, or a blazing meteorite impact. No such luck. The end of the civilization came, rather anticlimactically, when the humans discovered that side effects and timing attacks made any form of cyber-security a joke. Their computers screeched to a halt bogged down by nightmarish security patches. By then, it was already too…

Or they just went back to using simple CPUs, and were content with solving smaller problems.

I know this is in good-natured jest, but wouldn’t the arrival of widespread quantum computing, which need to be absolutely decoupled from their environment so as to prevent decoherence, actually be an enormous step forward in almost all these “side channel” attacks? In the sense that decoupling must by definition limit any exchange of information that might constitute ‘observation’, and as such, the goings-on of a quantum computer become literally unobservable on the pain of nonfunction.

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#77

Post by nyreed »

phyzome wrote: post #69
kabdib wrote: post #21

I debugged a boot issue on the Apple Newton this way. The latest flash image was a brick on production hardware (no available LEDs, GPIOs, etc.) but not on development hardware. But I could flash a new OS image. So I wrote some small loops that did different stuff on the bus (so that they sounded different) and salted the boot path with them, then listened in on my portable AM radio. Found the problem inside of an ho…

Reminds me of the CHDK hackers trying to dump firmware off a Canon camera. They could get the altered firmware to activate and could read memory and control an LED, so... they blinked the firmware out through the LED, and read it with a ball mouse's optical sensor attached to a microphone cord. :-)

I half-remember reading that someone dumped the firmware of an older iPod by listening to hard disk noises.

Thinking back this doesn't make much sense.

EDIT: I was maybe ⅓ right https://web.archive.org/web/20070613032334/http://www.ipodli...

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#78

Post by cgb223 »

kabdib wrote: post #21

I debugged a boot issue on the Apple Newton this way. The latest flash image was a brick on production hardware (no available LEDs, GPIOs, etc.) but not on development hardware. But I could flash a new OS image. So I wrote some small loops that did different stuff on the bus (so that they sounded different) and salted the boot path with them, then listened in on my portable AM radio. Found the problem inside of an ho…

Thats probably the most commitment I've ever seen for fixing a bug like that

Thats awesome

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#79

Post by Theodores »

braythwayt wrote: post #5

In the 1970s, I read about people doing this at MIT or some such, on real computers. Our high school had a Nova 1220 minicomputer, but we had no access to assembly for it, so all I could do was write programs in BASIC. After a bit of experimentation, I was able to produce two or three distinct tones of discordant buzzing with loops. Computer music!

With the ZX81 and hardware of that era you kind of knew a lot more about what was going on with the radio waves as you would listen to a radio and have interference from television and computer kit, e.g. loading and saving programs off tape decks. The whole spectrum that was a bit more accessible with things like CB radio, nowadays we are deaf to analog signals and would not 'notice' and interference.

Re: System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware

#80

Post by DKnoll »

gtufano wrote: post #40
cestith wrote: post #35

Back a couple of decades, my alphabetic pager was going off but the messages were gibberish. It turned out the CPU in the PC I'd been asked to look at was a Pentium running at 150 MHz. I'd set my pager directly on top of the case, and the nominal frequency for it was 150.5 MHz, frequency modulated. The lines in the motherboard can be used as antennae and the CPU pins can produce a clock pulse and modulate it. There u…

Years ago I was in the same building during the installation of a "NATO standard" (whatever that means) environment suitable for developing sensitive software, and the air gap was indeed pretty large, the entire 2 rooms were air gapped from the building (at 4th floor), enclosed in a Faraday cage and with special precautions (out of my clearance level) for electricity going in. It was very quiet inside (even cell phon…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)
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