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Anonymous' New Walkie Talkies Use Radio Waves to Access the Internet
- lutusp 13y ago> The hacktivist group Anonymous is working on a new communication tool to circumvent censorship and set information free, and it’s going low-tech this time. The project is called Airchat, and it will use radio waves instead of wifi, broadband, or phone lines to communicate data and messages between computers. It’s basically pirate radio for ones and zeros. I wish people who write these things would reveal the history behind the methods. This technology was pioneered by ham radio operators decades ago, pre-Internet, using what's now called "packet radio". In fact, I used my own prototype packet scheme to stay in touch with home while sailing around the world -- two ham radio transceivers, separated by as much as 10,000 miles of empty water, exchanging packets. More here: http://arachnoid.com/sailbook http://arachnoid.com/sailbook > In its current incarnation, the project uses Fldigi software to communicate data—it’s the software commonly used to broadcast amateur radio stations from a computer. Okay, one oblique mention of ham radio.
- jlgaddis 13y agoIndeed. Before I clicked over to the article, I had a gut feeling... The first time I ever connected to "the Internet" was over a packet radio link from my home, in a very rural area, through a digipeater at a (relatively) nearby ham radio club and then to the nearest university. I had "borrowed" a login and was able to telnet into one of their UNIX servers and send/receive mail, use archie, gopher, etc. Of course, I don't really miss that 1200 baud extremely high latency connection but the convers servers were really cool.