RichPowers

Ive compiled a condensed version of the New York Times Article (JAN. 14, 2014), highlighting some key points to ponder. A link to read the full article is below..

The N.S.A.’s efforts to reach computers unconnected to a network have relied on a century-old technology updated for modern times: radio transmissions. 

The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that are not connected to any kind of network.

“What’s new here is the scale and the sophistication of the intelligence agency’s ability to get into computers and networks to which no one has ever had access before,”

There is no evidence that the N.S.A. has implanted its software or used its radio frequency technology inside the United States.

German newsmagazine, published the N.S.A.’s catalog of hardware products that can secretly transmit and receive digital signals from computers, a program called ANT. The New York Times withheld some of those details, at the request of American intelligence officials,

The N.S.A. refused to talk about the documents that contained these descriptions, even after they were published in Europe.

President Obama is scheduled to announce on Friday what recommendations he is accepting from an advisory panel on changing N.S.A. practices. The panel agreed with Silicon Valley executives that some of the techniques undermine global confidence in a range of American-made information products like laptop computers and cloud services.

indicates that the United States had already conducted “more than 50,000 worldwide implants,” .. A senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the actual figure was most likely closer to 100,000.

Mr. Obama tried to differentiate between conducting surveillance for national security — which the United States argues is legitimate — and conducting it to steal intellectual property.
“The argument is not working,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution,..

This isn’t part 15 related, so I made it so!.. Another something I came across while looking for something else.. You just click on one of their templates then upload pictures and enter the text and it does the rest. They offer a download, but I didn’t try it, just did this with their online app http://www.photofunia.com/ I just thought it was cute

The following quote is from section 15.211 of the FCC OET63 bulletin ~Understanding The FCC Part 15 Regulations for Low Power, Non-Licensed Transmitters – http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet63/oet63rev.pdf

Tunnel radio systems

Many tunnels have naturally surrounding earth and/or water that attenuates radio waves. Transmitters that are operated inside these tunnels are not subject to any radiation limits inside the tunnel. Instead, the signals they produce must meet the Part 15 general radiated emmission limits on the outside of the tunnel, including it’s openings. They also must comply with the conducted emission limits on the electric power lines outside of the tunnel.

Ok, I get it.. no I don’t.

Now, let’s just stop here for a minute… and just in case your thinking that I’m quoting this portion of the FCC bulletin as a means of leading up to some kind of wonderful loophole we could utilize somehow or something… I’m not. Nor is this an attempt at pointing out some important or usefull information.

No, It just struck me odd, and I’m curious why the FCC made it a point to specify such permision to lift the radiated limits for Part 15 in a tunnel to begin with?
 For what reason did they feel a need to bring this subject at all? Why??
 To me, it just seems weird.

But even weirder, and kind of funny to me, is what they say in the next paragraph..

Buildings and other structures that are not surrounded by earth or water (e.g oil storage tanks) are not tunnels. Transmitters that are operated inside such structures are subject to the same standards as transmitters operated in a open area.

Well thank you very much for letting me know, becuase I thought they were tunnels, and was just getting ready to start broadcasting inside of an empty oil storage tank till you told me that.

Is it just me??.. Why would they ever even say such a thing!
There has got to be some kind of story behind it all.

And I really wanted to transmit in that oil tank too.

This has got to be the coolest Part 15 related thing I’ve stumbled across since discovering Carls Low Power Hour!..

This guy has a Part 15 station: “The Ocho! operates on the north end of town and can be heard along parts of Old 37 and Walnut Street.”  .. I didn’t see any mention of what city or state ‘Old 37 and Walnut street’ might be in, nor if the station is currently is still in operation or not. But it apparently was from 2006 to 20011.

I just ran a search on Part15.us a few moments ago and see that he is a member and has posted here a few times, but it doesn’t look as though anyone ever gave a response.. I think it might be because no one understood what the hell he was talking about.

Anyway, I fell across his website and discovered a really brilliant thing he created to use with ZaraRadio (at least I think it’s brilliant, it’s new to me). He came up with a way of using Zara Radio to control 3rd party scripts for additional automation.
 He has Zara running on his windows pc and.. well, here it is in his own words..

“..We’ve been able to run a 100% automated radio station using a second linux box to generate text-to-speech updates for weather, news, and the hourly gas price report for our town. So far we’ve been using a “pull” methodoligy were the Zara playout host downloads updated dynamic content (text-to-speech) from the linux box using batch files and wget for Windows. This works very well for content that only needs to be updated hourly like the gas and weather. The linux box updates the text-to-speech report a few minutes ahead of the playout time, then the Zara host downloads it just before the scheduled playout beings..”

He has some example mp3s there of the text to speech outputs, like: ap news, current events, gas reports, slashdot_headlines, and weather.

The computer voice sounds like a NOAA report, which would be fine (to me) for the weather and gas reports, but not the news and events. But there are better virtual voices availble I know. I can see something like this being very useful.

He goes on to say:

“..I’ve wanted to have the system annunciate the names of the songs played for a while but only recently figured out a way to do this. ZaraRadio needs a method to call scripts or otherwise initiate the regeneration of a text-to-speech reports except it does not directly support this. However there’s no reason the playout log can’t also be used to trigger events, if a script can watch the log it can pick up commands from it too. How do you inject commands though? Simple: add fake song names to your playlist. The song names contain metadata which your script knows how to read…”

He go on describing detailed but simple scripts, and also provides a download of the “Automated DJ” program he wrote. And he tried to tell us about it here, but no one seemed to listen!

I think this is so cool! Doesn’t anybody else?

Check it out: http://ibmgeek.shacknet.nu/ocho/index.shtml

 

A pleasant one page read..

http://electronicdesign.com/blog/amazing-adaptable-am-radio

“There have been rumors about phasing out AM and eventually FM radio in the U.S.  I don’t see any immediate action on this but keep it in mind.  There is still time to enjoy the benefits of AM radio.”

This is pretty neat, and it’s compleatly free. No software download or install, it’s all done on the web. I didn’t actually try it out (yet anyway), but did check out several of their examples and was rather impressesed.

https://auphonic.com/

“We develop new algorithms in the area of music information retrieval and audio signal processing to create an automatic audio post production web service for broadcasters, podcasts, radio shows, audio books, lecture recordings, screencasts and more. Users just upload their recorded audio and Auphonic will do the rest: neither complicated parameter settings nor audio expert knowledge is necessary.”

 

And this proccessing method below I think has been mentioned before:

How to Streaming Zararadio to MBL4 

http://rbsfm.org/am/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=426&Itemid=28