8 ms·
Ethernet over barbed wire
- j_s 9y agosource: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15909261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15909261 on (somewhat?) related front page discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107 (ADSL over wet string) also linked there: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...
- sonium 9y agoPeople might find it intersting to know that in the car industry Gigabit Ethernet over unshielded twisted pair is common [1] since it allows to shave off some cents on extra copper. [1] http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID=7256 http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID...
- wereHamster 9y agoWhy would not having shielding save copper? Shielding is usually made out of a metal foil or mesh, often aluminium. I've never seen shielding out of copper.
- fisherjeff 9y agoI think the copper savings in 1000BASE-T1 come from running GigE over a single pair versus the more-typical 4.
- daniel-cussen 9y agoThe NSA (read money is no object) has copper in the windows of its main building to shield them from TEMPEST style hacking.
- marzell 9y agoThese are 2 fundamentally different things. In twisted pairs, shielding is there to prevent interference from changing a signal. In TEMPEST protection systems, shielding is used to prevent radiance of transmissions that could be intercepted. While there is some overlap in conductive materials that could do both (prevent interference AND radiance), the methods employed and benchmarks used to measure performance differ significantly.
- azinman2 9y agoSounds like money well spent
- SCHiM 9y agoIt is actually. I've seen hazy images recovered from your monitor by collecting the radio emissions of the cable. The signal traveled through windows, walls and an airgap of about 15 meters. The antenna used in that attack was only about half a meter long I think. I imagine you could put a much bigger antenna (or a dish) inside a van in the parking lot and spy on some analysts or something...
- consp 9y agoIt's possible to collect it from status leds for instance: http://www.applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf http://www.applied-math.org/optical_tempest.pdf
- StavrosK 9y agoJeez, at this point we might as well assume you can collect information from anything. I bet someone has made something that can restore the image on your screen by the vibrations on the windows that the sound of the power supply makes as the data flows in.
- Bartweiss 9y agoA good-sized antenna at range works, and so does a tiny device at close range! There are Van Eck listeners small enough to conceal completely that can still eavesdrop table-to-table at a cafe. The conference debut involved hiding one in a piece of pita bread, where it could sit right out in the open. https://t2.fi/tag/van-eck-phreaking/ https://t2.fi/tag/van-eck-phreaking/
- bsder 9y agoHas this become standardized yet? I've got a bunch of multi-drop CAN stuff that I would LOVE to move over to single pair ethernet with multi-drop a la 10BASE2. Unfortunately I haven't see a 10BASE2 compatible PHY in 20+ years. IEEE had a working group on this but I hadn't seen any actually shipping chips that mortals could get their hands on. (Edit: Apparently still vapor. Still can't find a source for the Marvell 88Q1010 & 88Q2112.) (Edit: Only thing available seems to be this which is almost certainly some gigantic FPGA solution ... https://beyondstandards.ieee.org/connected-vehicles/intrepid-rad-supermoon-first-1000base-t1-media-converter-avbtsn-support/ https://beyondstandards.ieee.org/connected-vehicles/intrepid...)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- voxadam 9y agoWhat are your bandwidth and latency requirement? More than once I've pondered 6LoWPAN over RS485 using token passing.
- bsder 9y agoMy biggest problem is software stack performance--not physical layer performance. Most protocol stacks in the embedded space other than TCP/IP are mind-blowingly bad. Being able to obliterate USB, CAN, and RS-232 (to a lesser degree--RS-232 is really reliable but the problem is generally in frequency drift if you don't have a crystal anywhere) in all of my designs and replacing it with ethernet will dramatically improve the reliability of my hardware. The only places I don't currently have ethernet in my designs are where I'm limited to a single pair of wires. As for RS485, it doesn't really offer me anything that I don't already get with CAN.
- IgorPartola 9y agoWhat do you work on?
- 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- matthberg 9y agoNeeds a (2001) tag, but fascinating demonstration with get marketing.
- slinkyavenger 9y agoIt's a nice callback to early phone infrastructure, which leveraged barbed-wire fences to bring service to those who lived in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire_telephone_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire_telephone_lines
- mschuster91 9y agoHmm. For whatever reason this did not show up when I posted my own comment... I'm impressed one can run Ethernet over barbed wire.
- digi_owl 9y agoWell ethernet didn't start over twisted pair. It started over thick coax. Something that is not that far from setting up a couple of radios. Now you are more likely to get the minimum speed this way (1MB?) than the GB stuff some of us have come accustomed too.
- cellularmitosis 9y agoI wonder if this is one of the reasons why the phone system standardized on 48 volts. With DC, you need to get above about 60 volts to have any chance of lethality. If someone were to grab the barbed wire, they'd get a jolt, but it wouldn't kill them.
- amigoingtodie 9y agoI believe current is a more prevelant factor in electrocution. [edit] Found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_and_ring#Line_voltage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_and_ring#Line_voltage
- moron4hire 9y agoYes, it is technically true that it is the current that disrupts the heart rhythm. Theoretically, a 9v battery can supply enough current to cause a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia, if it's shorted through a person's blood. But it's also being pedantic. Consider Ohm's Law: `I = V/R`. Why is it so frequently printed in this way, rather than the simpler `IR = V`? If we don't care about simplicity, why not `V = I/R`? What is special about `I = V/R`? Resistance--be it your work load or your human fleshy bits--is usually roughly considered a constant--or at least a known--for a given application. And most power sources that you'll encounter in the wild are voltage-controlled and able to supply practically as much current as you want (aka "more than enough to kill you"). So Voltage is the independent variable, leaving Current to be the dependent variable. While it is true that "it's the current that gets ya", it's the voltage over which we have control, so we tend to focus on that instead.
- omg_ketchup 9y agoWho needs https when you have barbed wire?
- StavrosK 9y agoEveryone? It's trivial to tap barbed wire.
- mschuster91 9y agoCan I run this on a farm? Seriously, this reminds me about the stories I read on HN about how early telephone networks were established by farmers (ab)using their electric fencing for communication.
- digi_owl 9y agoNo surprise there, as analog phones are basically two lines of telegraph wire.
- himom 9y agoIt would be neat to have a mesh topology that uses the bandwidth and redundancy of multiple fence paths in order to prevent an outage from damage to any one particular fence. Solar-powered routers anyone? Otherwise: Dabnabbit Maude, the cows gone loose again because we lost the interwebs. (I’m half-Texan so it’s not -ist.)
- Bartweiss 9y agoBizarrely, that's close to a real problem! Ethernet over barbed wire may have been just for show, but phone service over it was a very real approach. Perhaps not "the internet released the cows", but at least "the stampede cut the phone lines". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire_telephone_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire_telephone_lines
- dogma1138 9y agoToo bad there are sanctions against North Korea, it seems like this would be a perfect fit for Kwangmyong[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)
- ringaroundthetx 9y agosanctions have no power here Blockchain networks have no capability of this concept
- ryacko 9y agoPatent law doesn't work against a sovereign state. So yes, they probably violate the GPL.
- frik 9y ago> In 1998, Wide-Band Systems demonstrates Gigabit Ethernet running on four pairs of old, rusty barbed wire. Yet in 2017 we still have only 1Gbit Ethernet in LANs :( 1Gbps = 125 MB/s !! I am running 1Gbit since 2003 at home. And all f..king home network devices still support only 1Gbit Ethernet. It's not fast enough. When can some network company finally release 10Gbit or 100Gbit Ethernet (copper or fiber) for cheap home usage.
- krylon 9y agoI feel for you, but I think if you need a 10GBit or 100GBit network at home, your needs are a little extreme. My home network still runs on 100MBit, because of a stubborn old switch that refuses to die. By now, my curiosity to see how long this thing will last (it is about 13.5 years old) outweighs my impatience when pushing large files around. ;-)
- stordoff 9y agoDefinitely on the high end, but having centralised most of my storage (backups, media etc.) to a NAS, 10Gbps would definitely be welcome. Pushing large backups to my NAS is time-consuming, and e.g. video editing basically requires pulling it down to a local drive first (not to say it'd be ideal to use a network store for that at all, but it'd be more viable).
- lucaspiller 9y agoUsed enterprise hardware that supports 10Gbit isn’t that expensive. For the average home user even gigabit is overkill, which is why 90%+ of people just use whatever WiFi router their ISP provides.
- randomerr 9y agoAre there modules I can experiment with? Related link: https://books.google.com/books?id=mMJxcWqm_1oC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=Broadcom%27s+T4&source=bl&ots=73okOWEqdp&sig=1iIW9NPoRbzneLPEiq8X0NyVk44&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwig1qmA9YbYAhXH1CYKHZB7C1YQ6AEIMDAB#v=onepage&q=Broadcom's%20T4&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=mMJxcWqm_1oC&pg=PA34&lpg=P...
- pjc50 9y agoI'm not sure what you mean, you can just splice your barbed wire into Ethernet cable and plug it into regular transcievers that you already have.
- throwaway413 9y agoTalk about a secure connection.