[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)