• Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      Apparently Flock frequently illegally installs them on city property without asking and they usually just don’t get removed.

      I hate how new business ideas are all ‘break the law and make enough money fast enough so that they can’t stop us.’

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
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    3 days ago

    If it’s inside BMS, it’s probably just Lora style transmitters giving off data so that you can read if the batteries are low.

    It’s not exactly brain surgery to hunt down the microcontroller and dump it if there is something crazy going on.

    We’re becoming so inept it might even just be a fucking bluetooth radio which would be a pretty common thing to see on a BMS.

    • JustAnotherPodunk@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      We have officially hit the point where radio waves are the devil. As a lora nerd and a ham operator, it’s funny that the public is starting to catch on to all this.

      It’s like the microchips in the COVID vaccine thing. Why would bill gates and the ghost of Steve jobs try to sneak all this into your life when they already got paid 800 bucks for you to own a smartphone?!? You already did it!

      This is just a part of normal infrastructure now and your Amazon echo is way more useful to them than whatever conspiracy theory is getting cooked up about this shit.

      Hell most of it is horribly implemented and borderline useless even if you had the explicit intent to be evil with it. Ffs

      • rumba@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        Hello fellow Ham.

        Yeah, it’s a radio in a battery management circuit. On the signpost, on the side of the road. What exactly is it spying on? Are they concerned that the signpost on the side of the road has too much knowledge?

        Do they now know how much sunlight Central philly gets? Or how long before the battery in their crosswalk indicator, doesn’t work anymore.

        Back when the transceivers on Super Microboards were sending actual data home over the internet, that was relatively interesting news.

        Come to think of it, I do kind of wish they were running meastastic for meshcore. That would be a great way to extend the networks. Transit-Authority providing off-grid comms for 20 bucks a node…

        • turmacar@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          They keep refering to them as “undocumented cellular radios”, which either means they have no idea what they’re talking about (very probable) or that they’re concerned it’s getting on the Internet. In theory, decades from now they could maybe all turn off simultaneously and cause a noticeable lack of power. I guess.

          Mostly, it’s very frustrating that the articles are all about what inverters and batteries are and that the US doesn’t trust China, instead of what the things they say they found actually fucking are.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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            3 days ago

            “undocumented cellular radios”

            Oh, now you’ve done it. Now ICE goons are smashing highway infrastructure and throwing it into vans.

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Hidden radios aren’t even hidden anymore, they’re most likely in your hand right now…

    • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Why bother hiding them when they can just convince everyone to carry them around. Social engineering has always been so much easier than nefarious hacking. We humans are incredible simple and predictable creatures.

    • devdoggy@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      So, I’m assuming you’re referring to our cell phones? Because they have hidden FM radios in them. Most of them.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago
        • FM is radio, yes.
        • Cellular is radio, yes.
        • WiFi is radio, yes.
        • Bluetooth is radio, yes.
        • NFC is radio, yes.
        • RFID is radio, yes.
        • GPS is radio, yes.

        Did I miss anything?

        • devdoggy@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I was referring to FM radios being hidden in our cell phones. I didn’t know the rest were radio!

          • over_clox@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            Yes indeed, they all work in different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, AKA radio frequencies.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    Hey uh, asking for a friend, does anyone know how illegal it is to just walk around with an active, broad spectrum EM jammer on your person?

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        Hahaha holy shit that is incredible!

        That actually does pretty directly show how illegal it is.

        For anyone else reading this thread… I am doing a bit, I do not seriously think it would be any kind of a good idea at all to do something like this, I literally just did not know how illegal it is.

        It is obviously rather easy to detect a broad spectrum active jammer, it is obviously quite likely you would be caught, lol.

    • despoticruin@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Incredibly, and not at all subtle. It’s also of fairly limited effectiveness in most scenarios, wireless signals are generally a lot more complex than what a simple jammer will cover. On top of the difficulty in transmitting a reasonably large amount of radio power in any useful frequency, you have to also jam side frequencies to avoid fail over and certain noise mitigation techniques.

      Honestly it’s not even just that it’s massively illegal, it’s just so wildly impractical. Like, what would you accomplish? Radio waves fall off pretty quickly in strength, so your jammer is going to have a limited range, and if it doesn’t you just knock out flight communications and emergency response while cellular hops to one of the other hundreds of frequencies and like 10 modulation protocols until something works, and it’s going to be insanely difficult to jam all of those at once.

      Just jamming 700mhz would involve an antenna array that would be bigger than a person and using the old “moar power” approach sees wattage requirements shoot into megawatt ranges pretty quick.

      • redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        I’m imagining the logistics of setting up a giant wave bubble to envelope a property. I wish had the money for such mad scientists shit

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    The four-page security note, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said that undocumented cellular radios had been discovered “in certain foreign-manufactured power inverters and BMS,” referring to battery management systems.

    The note, which has not previously been reported, did not specify where the products containing undocumented equipment had been imported from, but many inverters are made in China.

    It’s got to be easier to pick up on them at the cell network level, if they’re connecting to the cell network. You’re not going to inspect every power-connected device for a cell radio.

    It’d be harder to deal with non-cell radios, like shortwave receivers or something.

    • Archer@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      If they were smart about it at all then they’ll wait for an activation signal before connecting. That’s what I’d do

  • dhork@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    The US is just mad that we’re not the ones bugging all the other countries, but to do that we would actually have to make shit here