The problem is, with what media would you replace them with if you had to replace them somewhere between then and now? iomega zip drives? Jaz drives? CF cards? sony memory sticks? rewritable cds/dvds? Imation superdisks?
They could've replaced floppies multiple times, with all the certifications and hardware replacements and new procedures and regulations, and we'd still be using (a different, but still) "obsolete" medium for this now.
Agree. For a purpose-built system that is only used by trained professionals, being "up to date" really means nothing. There's only fitness for purpose.
But the cost of switching -- mainly thoroughly certifying the replacement system, retraining, and the risks of an error happening during one of those processes causing a catastrophe -- that's real.
There's no point in upgrading the storage mechanisms of arbitrary systems, or completely redoing the whole system from scratch on new hardware which would be the case here, unless it yields measurable improvements in fitness for purpose to balance against the switching costs.
Those things actually work great, not everything has to be modernized for modernization sake... that's how we get cars with touchscreens instead of buttons and knobs.
Get an rtl-sdr dongle that covers way more frequencies, install urh ( https://github.com/jopohl/urh ), and you get the full signal on RF, demodulated and you can do full analysis on it + you can do a lot of other stuff with RF with the dongle and other software (eg. track planes in the air with dump1090, listen to walkie talkies and ham radio operators, etc.)
If you buy a tx-capable sdr, ignoring the legallity issues, you can also replay that signal or modify it before replaying.
i initially disagreed, assuming they went with the cc1101 to transmit custom stuff. also ti launchpads for their entire cc series are more affordable and easier to use than any tx sdr.
it is not hard to program RF ism band stuff, even with custom protocols there is reams of examples.
but ya after reading a bit more its the blind leading the blind
Look at all the anti CSAM laws... "hey, we'll scan all the mail you get and send, and well check all your photo frames in your houses, just in case you have pedo stuff there".
Or the different chat control laws... "well put a mic on you and listen to every conversation, just in case you talk about something illegal".
Then you have the people defending this with "ok, that might be bad, but metadata is just metadata"... sure, every time you go to a bar, we'll record when you came inside, who you sat with, and record how much you talked with each person there.
But that's mostly true because those countries are rich and fly half the world away to attack poorer countries and usually by bombing them from far away. Eg syrians can't realistically gather enough money and weapons and planes and bombs to bomb paris. Or iraqis london. Etc. On the other hand, they can gather a few fanatics, give them guns and have them shoot a bunch of people, or bomb something, or worse. But then we get the "why did those people get radicalized? was it GTA?" articles.
TBH, considering the number of dead in palestine and the number of people in europe/us who literally lost everyone who ever mattered to them, the number of "terrorist" attacks seems relatively low.
Why is that relavent? The point is that some countries have more immediate security fears then others. It doesn't matter what structural factors lead to that. Countries with realistic security fears are going to invest differently than those that don't. Countries like people do whatever they think is in their best interest.
If your point is the world is unfair, then yes obviously that is true, nobody disputes that.
If france decided they needed to exert their "political pressure" over eg. germany, they'd have the same problem and all the realistic security fears, because germany is a rich country and they share a border. Same for the opposite direction with a few more historic events related to that. Same with france vs uk wars, and many many other wars in europe.
But hey, having your capital cities bombed is expensive, transport is cheap, and so it's easier to bully countries in a different continent, eventually bomb and invade them, becuase you're pretty sure they won't be able reach you back home with conventional war means (planes, rockets, tanks,...).
And yes, it's relevant, some politicians in one of those "safe" countries decided to bomb some country in a different continent, and you, a normal football fan or a party goer get killed when those people come and fight back in "unconventional means" (eg 2015 in paris). Somehow no one treats those as "we're at war with them, we bombed them first, they're just fighting back".
What are good, cheap, SDRs these days? Back when the first RTL-SDRs came out, I had an overview, but now there seems to be a gazillion variants, and every time I start researching I end up awfully close to buying a full HackRF that I'm drooling over but realistically don't have time to play with and which will just sit there gathering dust. Help! :P
Pick an RTL that does the ranges you are interested in and I doubt you can go wrong. The rtlblog v4 is recommended but hard to get ahold of now. They receive only but actually work quite well when paired with correct antenna.
HackRF is not as good at listening -- a bit deaf -- but does provide much larger bandwidth and obviously the low powered half duplex tx ability.
If you just want to grab random signals around and explore, get a cheap RTL.
If you really want to go back and fourth with a device, to modify data packets etc get a hackRF.
If you want to push beyond those limitations, you'll probably already know what you're shopping for next at that point.
Beware, you'll end up acquiring many different radio devices and then likely start building antennas out of scrap, buying a nanovna, and falling deeper and deeper into the magical rabbit hole!
> Pick an RTL that does the ranges you are interested in and I doubt you can go wrong.
Last time I was down this rabbit hole (when cheap RTL-SDRs were completely new), my favorite fun test was ADS-B, so let's say I wanna play around 1-1.1 GHz at first.
One day I also wanna sit down and do GPS from scratch, "by hand", so let's say I also wanna do 1.57 GHz (which I understand is becoming borderline difficult for the cheapest devices?).
Even though these devices are cheap, I'd rather avoid needlessly extra-shitty devices or my money going to copycat leeches.
Any recommendations in light of these requirements? Thanks a lot!
> HackRF is not as good at listening -- a bit deaf -- but does provide much larger bandwidth and obviously the low powered half duplex tx ability.
Yeah I know it's in a completely separate category, I just derail and start daydreaming ;-)
> Beware, you'll end up acquiring many different radio devices and then likely start building antennas out of scrap, buying a nanovna, and falling deeper and deeper into the magical rabbit hole!
RTL-SDR can do GPS L1CA signal processing easily, but you need to use the RTL-SDR Blog dongles not the blue no-name DVB-T dongles as:
- You need stable clock for the processing algorithms to be happy, RTL-SDR blog dongle have 0.5ppm TCXO while who knows what crystal they use on the no-name ones
- RTL-SDR blog dongles have bias-T, and a lot of GPS patch antennas are active antenna that need power from the coax to power the LNA
You are of course absolutely correct! Let me rephrase: "from scratch" once the signal has been captured and I've avoided all the ways that hardware will fuck me over due to my lack of skills :-)
Good and cheap is probably still RTL-SDR and HackRF. Both solid at what they do. If you want a similar thing from a different maker you can check out the sbitx-v3 [1] (official platform of HERMES[2]). For more money there are a bunch of options and I don't have any personal experiece with the platforms, but I see people recommend bladerf or kracken. Reddit's /r/sdr is a great place for info.
HackRF is the gold standard, but definitely not cheap. I have an SDR-Play duo that I'm pretty happy with, writing software for it is doable (even though the manufacturer is really coy about what's in there you can dig into the driver easily enough). It remains to be seen how long those will be for sale though, I'm not sure if they're still making the chips (long story short: the SDR-Play seller once upon a time made a chip for another market and they seem to have realized they could make more money selling those same chips packaged to the SDR market).
On the other hand, browsers don't need to share all this data at all. Sure, IP address can't be hidden, but from your example, installed fonts and volume settings? Why should that be shared at all? Sure, for example for a teams meeting, but you'd have to allow the use of microphones or that, youtube for example doesn't need to know how loud you're listening to a video.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average
Joe Average would be charged by Flock per search, and could only afford to stalk his ex wife a couple of times via Flock, because it would get expensive soon.
They could've replaced floppies multiple times, with all the certifications and hardware replacements and new procedures and regulations, and we'd still be using (a different, but still) "obsolete" medium for this now.
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