[HN Gopher] The Circumnavigators (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
The Circumnavigators (2017)
Author : typpo
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-02-05 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (qrp-labs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (qrp-labs.com)
| codazoda wrote:
| I would love to do this but have never considered it an option
| because of all the regulations I imagine exist. Could these
| interfere with an aircraft? What if you fly one over a military
| site? What about flying over other countries? The rules seem
| complex, but I'd love to build one.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| It could interfere with an airplane but so can any bird. Should
| it be forbidden to release birds into the air?
|
| There's a cost and benefit to everything. But I'm not exactly
| sure what is the benefit of these balloons except perhaps
| entertainment.
|
| Leave it to Beaver I would say
| pcrh wrote:
| Awesome!
|
| I found this site which tracks current amateur radio balloons:
| https://habhub.org/
| ianburrell wrote:
| It is important to realize the difference in scale between
| amateur balloons and the Chinese spy ballloon. Some amateur ones
| are less than ounce of payload, the Chinese one was thousands of
| pounds.
|
| The ham radio balloons mostly just transmit position. It is
| impressive that they do that in small size and can make multiple
| circumnavigations.
| robobro wrote:
| Can we call it the Chinese big balloon instead? Because from
| what I gather that thing was massive. Future big balloons also
| will not necessicarily be used for espionage - worse case
| scenarios involve dropping harmful payloads.
| robotnikman wrote:
| That was actually a tactic deployed by the Japanese during
| WWII to attack the US mainland. They carried and incendiary
| payload in hoped of starting forest fires and other damage
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb
|
| edit:
|
| Actually, there is a whole history of weaponized balloons,
| it's pretty interesting
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_balloon
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Those balloon bombs caused the only US civilian casualties
| due to enemy action in the mainland US; one of them killed
| a few kids who found it in a forest. Strangely, their
| father later became a presumed civilian casualty in the
| Vietnam War, where he went missing. Tragic distinctions for
| that family.
| ghaff wrote:
| I learned about it a few years back from, I think, a 99
| Percent Invisible episode. I find almost as bizarre as
| the story itself is that it's practically unknown.
| godelski wrote:
| In addition to this, HAM radio rules require that radio signals
| are not encrypted (rules specify that they must not be
| obscured). While this wouldn't prevent you from having a spy
| balloon and sending all images back in clear, it would make it
| obvious what you are transmitting or obvious that you're a spy
| if it is encrypted.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Could you hide an encrypted signal in what appears to be a
| normal HAM radio signal? I know it would be illegal, but is
| it possible?
| refuse wrote:
| Steganography? Sure, but you might be better off using a
| code that sounds like normal speech.
| godelski wrote:
| There's a lot of weird stuff on radio. You don't need
| encryption to have codes. But this probably wouldn't be
| useful for sending surveillance information from a
| balloon. It would also draw a lot of attention.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
|
| (Buzzer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_broadcast
| maxbond wrote:
| This regulation is often misunderstood. The requirement is
| that it must be possible to decode the signal; the signal
| cannot be scrambled. It is totally legal to, for instance,
| have an HTTPS connection tunneled over an internet radio
| link, as long you could decode the radio message - it's not
| illegal for a message to carry an encrypted payload.
|
| By the same token, steganography wouldn't be illegal
| either. This regulation isn't trying to stop you from
| sending secret messages, it's making it possible to
| introspect the messages to determine what protocol and call
| signs are involved. It's about managing the spectrum and
| figuring out who to complain to if there's interference,
| not about controlling cryptography.
| detaro wrote:
| That's wrong. The prohibition is exactly on non-
| understandable meaning of messages, recognizable protocol
| and call signs is not enough.
| MandieD wrote:
| It's also part of why a lot of amateur radio-related
| sites still serve unencrypted HTTP, either optionally or
| exclusively.
|
| (The other part of why is that there are an awful lot of
| valuable amateur radio sites that haven't been updated in
| 15-20 years)
| detaro wrote:
| or are ran by people who can't be bothered to figure this
| new-fangled HTTPS stuff out
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Or people who buy into the "nothing to hide" nonsense,
| influenced by a HAM culture of not encrypting things that
| emerged from the rule against it.
| progman32 wrote:
| Can you post a citation for that? Everything I've heard
| indeed claims that any encryption is no go except for a
| narrow band of critical applications.
| teraflop wrote:
| FCC regulations say: "No amateur station shall transmit:
| [...] messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their
| meaning".
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/97.113
|
| This isn't entirely unambiguous, and people can and do
| argue about how it applies to things like proprietary
| data protocols that aren't publicly documented. But I
| think it's clear that encryption, such as that used by
| HTTPS, is intended to be banned by this clause.
| klyrs wrote:
| With steganography[1], it's certainly possible. For
| instance, if your balloon is only broadcasting its
| location, you can fuzz the highest precision bits of the
| longitude and latitude to emit a few bits of signal at a
| time. Or, for example, you can oversample from a GPS
| satellite, and only broadcast the locations whose high-
| precision bits match the signal you want to broadcast.
|
| I do think this would be illegal, but detecting it could be
| quite difficult.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
| flavius29663 wrote:
| I still remember the project in college where I embedded
| quite a lot of information in images. While detecting
| would be difficult, if NSA puts its mind to it and
| figured it out, then it would be very clear what you were
| doing, you can't claim randomness in your defense
| klyrs wrote:
| Yep, the detectability of steganography tends to increase
| with information density, of course. If somebody is
| watching GPS traffic they could discover my (hastily
| conceived) location-beacon scheme, for instance.
| Likewise, a metadata scheme (varying time between
| broadcasts) could be discovered through close enough
| examination. But, that at least has some plausible
| deniability baked in, random delays are better than fixed
| delays in terms of network congestion.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| That was my point, there is no plausible deniability.
| Your cleaned-up data just happens to be the png image of
| some secret US bases? Good luck convincing a judge it's
| not intentional. If you encrypt it well enough, it might
| be that NSA never discover the underlying data, but that
| hinges on protecting the emitting source. If they get
| their hands on it, they can recover the keys.
| ilyt wrote:
| How would you detect it then? Assuming your encryption
| looks like random noise and you could shape it so it
| looks say like sensor noise ?
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > your encryption looks like random noise
|
| well, for one, you're emitting from a balloon, so you
| WILL get the attention of NSA at least. Second, it's
| pretty trivial to find patterns in otherwise noisy
| signal, and NSA is expert at that and you're probably a
| novice. The only thing that can protect you is if you
| have a good enough encryption, which is hard to keep once
| they get their hands on the physical balloon. But even if
| they don't break the encryption, they can hold you in
| dark cells with no access to a lawyer, if they have the
| slightest suspicion it was indeed a spy balloon.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| The NSA might figure it out, but I doubt they'd tell the
| FCC about it.
| muunbo wrote:
| I really love all the random hobbies that people have
| [deleted]
| myself248 wrote:
| I used to be, let's not say heavily involved, but eagerly
| observing, this community. I was lurking in #highaltitude when
| M0XER's B-64 crossed its launch longitude, marking a
| circumnavigation, and the place went _nuts_.
|
| Then B-63, launched a few days earlier, did the same. But B-63
| popped shortly thereafter, while B-64 just kept going, eventually
| circling 8 times over the coming 4 months. It's one thing to set
| a record, it's another thing to smash it so thoroughly
| immediately after setting it.
|
| I want to say he was using dry-cleaning bags as envelopes early-
| on, but I think he switched materials to achieve that kind of
| durability.
| avz wrote:
| Technical detail: Having crossed all meridians is generally not
| considered the proper criterion for circumnavigation since this
| is trivially done near the poles. The definition I have come
| across include a loop that partitions Earth's surface into two
| parts of comparable area.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Any two non-zero areas are comparable, but I don't think
| 1:10000000 will satisfy the definition. It is necessary to
| establish an acceptable ratio. 1:6 or something like that?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-05 23:00 UTC)