StoneyBBS

Look, you and I both totally agree with respect to the 4th Amendment and our expectation of privacy. I'm also fully on board with all the great quotes from our founders, especially the ones with regard to freedoms by Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc. But the ONLY thing that has changed is the ability for people to get the information more easily through the Internet. Your personal information (home address, phone number, etc.) has ALWAYS been available... the phone book was basically the same think as Spokeo and those other data mining sites. We still get solicitation calls over the phone, but it used to be MUCH worse back in the 80s when the internet wasn't really used by the public. The first loss of privacy, really, was the introduction of the social security number... quite honestly. Back then, companies STILL sold your information. When you would donate to a charity, that charity would sell your information to other charities who would then send you out mailers. I know this because I accidentally spelled my name with an extra D way back when (in the 90s) when I was sending a check for donation. A month later, I had three new charities soliciting me with the exact same misspelled name. As far as credit cards and things like that go... if you're concerned about the products you purchase being tracked, you can always pay for these items with anonymity through place like Bill Pay or Western Union. You can still pretty much buy whatever you want locally from brick and mortar stores. Children today will have a much more difficult time (or maybe an easier time?) adjusting to a society where everything from birth to death is recorded online. Everything we type.. like me typing this in, is queryable. For what it's worth, I don't have a Facebook account, just not interested in it... but there are things you can do to realistically detach yourself without being anti-social or considered a weirdo. I personally have no need for Ethernet connected appliances... that may not be a choice in the future... but we as consumers should demand products that don't NEED Ethernet connectivity. I'm not suggesting we all go back to carburetors. I love fuel injection, but does my car need to have WiFi in it (TPMS, Bluetooth, or what have you)? Probably not... especially if cities will likely all eventually get WiMax, or our phones can be used as hot-spots.

Oh dude.. BBS Documentary? Hah... I have that on DVD (purchased it). I'm just as much a geek as the rest of those guys... but the video was basically hours and hours of filming old people from their parents basement. I honestly can't get through the first DVD... I usually end up falling asleep. BUT, as a documentary, it's pretty awesome... I just can't get through it.

Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I'll post in this thread if I find anything new out...

Hey guys, I was waiting for my order at a restaurant the other day, and was given a transponder to let me know when the food was ready to be picked up. I noticed on the bottom that there was a frequency listed there... 457Mhz with some decimals which I have forgotten. Now, I'm not a fan of doing stuff that's illegal, but I thought it was kind of interesting and wondered if there was a way to screw around with that system. Not that I'm upset with the restaurant by any means... but curious if it was possible for us to transmit at the same frequency as those pagers function on. Anyone know what gets transmitted, or if it's just "noise" that gets transmitted at that frequency that the device is expecting to pick up?

Hairbag and Cooper! Thanks guys, I really appreciate it! I always feel like such a dumbass when I have to post a question that I KNOW I'm sure has already been answered. I really appreciate the responses. I'll go through that list... now realizing that I didn't run the install command in the home directory, hah... By the way, love Holland. Been there a few times. Nothing like being drunk and walking around Madurodam pretending like you're King Kong while eating a stroopwafel.

I agree with you (on the corporate part), but nothing has really changed. 50 years ago, the local barber shop kept track of his customers, just as the local doctor kept track of your patient records in folders behind the front counter. The only difference now, is that the internet allows this personal data to transfer over a medium that can no longer rely solely on physical security. So what's changed from then, to today? "Corporations" as you say, track your information... 50 years ago, most people paid for things with cash? What's changed...? Credit cards aren't required... we just choose to use them because they are more convenient and we get "points." Although I agree with your frustration, are you basically asking the same government you just criticized, to now pass regulation on your behalf? I agree with Cooper.

I've been SUPER pleased with my Lenovo X131e. I bought this thing when it showed up one day on Woot for $219 (normally still selling for $500+). It's a netbook, primarily meant for Education (to be given to teenagers). For a netbook, it's heavy-duty. There is a rubber bumper all along the edge, and it's very sleek. There isn't any nonsense crap / buttons all over it for garbage I don't want. I've been VERY impressed with it. It came with a fairly unimpressive 1.5Ghz Celeron something or other, but with 8 gigs of 1600+ Mhz ram, and a SATA3 SSD drive, it's been extremely fast. For this kind of stuff, you don't really need heavy processing power. The X131e is an older model, but if you want to stick with Lenovo, there are a few others in that price range.

Hahah... still doesn't explain why he didn't just take the WWAN PCIe card out of his laptop rather than spend $100 bucks in aluminum foil to wrap a room in a stranger's basement! hahah. Still, I actually really liked the movie. The one thing I didn't quite understand though, is the acting at the very beginning was HORRENDOUS... as in, before the title screen. But then after the title screen... it got increasingly better. It would almost have been better if they just started the movie after the title screen.

DirecTV and ATT Uverse both have new remote controls that provide voice activated control... this is in case you are SUPER fat and lazy and don't even want to lift your arm to pick up the remote from the arm of the chair... you can just demand through voice that the channel change! hah. Anyway, yeah... I'd guess you could see the UDP traffic going across, like the XBOX Kinect. But, it's no different than having a digital cellular phone in your house.

He could have saved a ton of time looking for the hard coded IP by just grabbing the executable and running STRINGS.exe from Sys Internals on it.

Watching the movie now... it's actually pretty awesome, but I'm 30 minutes in and see a couple of nit-picky things. 1, the USB drive in the phone company's server, all machines that have been patched since 2009 will have the autorun key disabled by default as per a Microsoft patch. Unless it was keystroke injection, but then still not sure how he managed to re-compile the code unless it was an interpreted environment like Mumps or something. Then with the aluminum foil, I thought copper blocked signals. And if he's that concerned about using his laptop with WiFi, then why doesn't he just remove the WWAN PCIe card and the Bluetooth adaptor. But, still super-cool... the intro was a little cheesy, but so far the movie has been pretty awesome.

I super-apologize in advance for posting something that's probably already been posted before a million times. I went a little "ape" one the Hak5 store, and bought a bunch of stuff (this stuff is awesome). One of the items was the SDR $20 USB dongle with antenna. I've hooked it up to my laptop and realized it doesn't just "work." ...that I need to install software to make use of it. I installed a dual boot on my laptop with Ubuntu and Windows 7 64. I can't seem to get the device to do anything in either Windows 7 or in Ubuntu. So here's where my interest is. I'd like to be able to use this to manually sweep through signals. I have some experience with the Oscor Green from REI, and I'd kind of like to be able to use it in a similar fashion (IE: tuning through frequencies and seeing the "waterfall"). What is the best OS that I should be using? Linux, or Windows? For what it's worth, I "installed" GNU Radio on my Linux, but beyond that, nothing happened that I could see... hahah. I did the usual SUDO SU, and then ran the install command that it mentioned. All I see however are C files that are uncompiled. What am I missing? Do I have to compile all of those individual applications? Why wouldn't they have pre-compiled them? I guess I just don't understand what the heck I'm supposed to do to get to the point where I can actually use it. I also tried booting with the Ubuntu ISO that has all the stuff installed, and I still didn't see anywhere that I could actually USE the radio device. Again, super-noob here, totally cool with that, but it seems unreasonably complicated to make work. What am I doing wrong? I've written pathology medical applications for 2/3rds of the pathology labs in the US, and wrote all the scouting applications for an entire NFL team, and none of that seems as complicated as getting this SDR TL;DR to do something, hahah. Appreciate any help! Thanks!