3 ms·

Generally speaking, any kind of radio transmission is detectable. It's why radio silence is a thing when stealth is important.

lazide 4y ago
The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable - and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393]
- mlyle 4y ago
  > The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic. > and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).
  - lazide 4y ago
    Well, that is also fundamentally not an internet.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Well, I thought I made that pretty clear in what I posted. "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
      - lazide 4y ago
        Since the whole point of the internet is, you know, people can request what they want and communicate with others, and they already HAVE people shoving ‘important stuff’ their way, what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
        mlyle 4y ago
        > what exactly do you think that adds to the picture? - Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment. - 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see. - An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable). That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        > That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor? This already exists, it's called ham radio. There are even large communities of folks sending 'postcards' to each other on a regular basis.
        mlyle 4y ago
        I'm probably failing to articulate what I'm describing. Not really. I've been part of the SSTV scene. I know about packet and things like PACTOR etc too. I remember operating a UUCP site, and I remember how well network news gracefully dealt with quite a wide variety of sites with different ad-hoc setups. I miss that. I wish more of today's internet was a bit more like that: all the interactivity in the world when the network is good, but gracefully degrading to offline copies, snapshots, etc as the network is intermittently disconnected or one-way or whatever. Secure ScuttleButt ("SSB") does a lot of this, but there's no real one-way provision and it's a bit wack to use and discover your way through.
7373737373 4y ago
Spread spectrum, and especially pseudo-random noise codes are pretty hard to detect i think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectru...
- lazide 4y ago
  The more random it is, the harder it is to have certainty, but at high enough transmission rates and powers the raised noise floor is impossible to miss and is definitely something that can be triangulated. If a normal radio transmission is a point light of a specific color, truly random spread spectrum is a grey glow. Direct sequence spread spectrum being many different color flashing lights here, I guess.

lazide 4y ago

The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable - and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393]

mlyle 4y ago
> The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic. > and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).
- lazide 4y ago
  Well, that is also fundamentally not an internet.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Well, I thought I made that pretty clear in what I posted. "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
    - lazide 4y ago
      Since the whole point of the internet is, you know, people can request what they want and communicate with others, and they already HAVE people shoving ‘important stuff’ their way, what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
      - mlyle 4y ago
        > what exactly do you think that adds to the picture? - Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment. - 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see. - An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable). That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        > That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor? This already exists, it's called ham radio. There are even large communities of folks sending 'postcards' to each other on a regular basis.
        mlyle 4y ago
        I'm probably failing to articulate what I'm describing. Not really. I've been part of the SSTV scene. I know about packet and things like PACTOR etc too. I remember operating a UUCP site, and I remember how well network news gracefully dealt with quite a wide variety of sites with different ad-hoc setups. I miss that. I wish more of today's internet was a bit more like that: all the interactivity in the world when the network is good, but gracefully degrading to offline copies, snapshots, etc as the network is intermittently disconnected or one-way or whatever. Secure ScuttleButt ("SSB") does a lot of this, but there's no real one-way provision and it's a bit wack to use and discover your way through.

7373737373 4y ago

Spread spectrum, and especially pseudo-random noise codes are pretty hard to detect i think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectru...

lazide 4y ago
The more random it is, the harder it is to have certainty, but at high enough transmission rates and powers the raised noise floor is impossible to miss and is definitely something that can be triangulated. If a normal radio transmission is a point light of a specific color, truly random spread spectrum is a grey glow. Direct sequence spread spectrum being many different color flashing lights here, I guess.