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Phased array beamforming workshop
by coderman 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

https://github.com/jonkraft/PhasedArray PhasedArray (GNU Radio 2020 Workshop presentation can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/0hnWfTvETcU) Phased array beamformers are very powerful! And they find applications in 5G MIMO, FMCW radar, and satellite communications. But their underlying principles and issues can be hard to intuitively grasp. But with the instructions and explanations here, you can build an easy to use system that allows you to experience the underlying math and principles of beamformers. With this setup, you'll track an RF source, plot its beam characteristics and learn of the features integrated into modern beamformer ICs. It is a hands-on way to learn about steering angle, beam width, null locations, beam tapering, grating lobes, and beam squint. To get started, first read the "Phased Array Lab Build Your Own" document. Then peruse the "Phased Array Lab" document to see what we'll be learning. After that, please try it out and build your own. Seeing and manipulating the beam first hand is much more informative and educational then just seeing the equations or the slides I provide of what the beam should look like. Build it, play with it, and you'll learn a ton about this very powerful concept.

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[ot] Re: Anarchists murder the political right
by professor rat 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

I have a label on your e-mails reminding me that you > requested I reply with rational responses only. Which you keep ignoring. > > What you're saying here, I want to let you know that I don't > understand it. It doesn't look clear what you are talking about. It > sounds like you are worried that a political value is under specific > attack by anarchism, and I don't see why this would be. You need professional psychological help - or maybe remedial English reading help - possibly both. > > I'm curious whether posting new threads as your only way of > communicating is something that you desire to do or not. I have other places - JoinDiaspora & Insane Journal - I commend ' Insane Journal ' to you since you clearly don't have the first thing about anarchism and think that known living Nazi's provide value. Only dead Nazi's ( The Zenaan Harkness / Batshit Crazy, Julian Assange type ) provide any value. Get help.

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[spam] monologue on going crazy while remembering being brainwashed to think of yourself as a hippy turd
by Karl 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

i think of myself as an anarchoprimitivist. I haven't really read anything about anarchoprimitivism, but I'm pretty sure I could defeat anybody in a forthright argument about whether or not agriculture is the reason for suffering. I don't expect to meet many other people who share this opinion. I got a new vivid experience of being harassed around a term, recently. "social anarchy". I don't really know what social anarchy is. But around social _welfare_ I do have an opinion: everybody is wasting time working jobs when you could be stealing money from the government and using it to buy bombs to blow up their buildings, and then forcing them to read peace treatices, like they imagine you imagine doing. Meanwhile, we have bitcoin, that gives free money to people who figure out how to access it and don't read the fake news claiming it is going down every week. Then we have those free gifts from the natural edens in our backyards called "exported geographically-tied goods" such as oil, spouses, and nicotine, which you can just keep on making more and more and more of, raking the money in as fast as you want. If you want a lot of money later, you can invest in capital, marketing, and supply chains, or if you want a steady supply that starts early, you can give yourself a big salary, hire your friends to do nothing, and be reasonably popular and powerful. What happens when those hardworking bitcoins engage those lazy plastic toothbrushes and oil barrels, begging for money like the lazy good-for-nothing slobs they are, from their poor shareholders and ceos all day? Basically they kick around insulting each other, expecting them to eventually go away. And everybody knows that nobody is going away. Like most people associated with mutual aid, I miss being able to give things freely to people in need without being called a terrorist for doing it without a degree or a religion telling me to. I'm excited to help out with cryptography.

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Lost narratives lock OG cypherpunks out of reputation capital
by professor rat 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

As the world tips over into runaway crypto-anarchist greenhouse it becomes more interested in its cypherpunk antecedents where it quickly learns that - thanks to a stupid conservative called ' Mongo ' this small pioneering group mistook anarchism for techno-fascism ( Austro-libertarianism, Agorism, Voluntaryism, etc ) These technology savants were mostly political morons! How else to explain why a left-wing utilitarian social-revolutionary movement could ever became mistaken for an elitists crypto-fascist reactionary movement! Only in the Moronic Inferno - Only in Amerikkka. Thankfully the error was fully corrected by 2001 when Tim " Mongo " May was openly denounced as an anarcho-phoney to his face. The problem was the few the proud the insane that stuck to the original carpetbagging con-artist story became tarred with the same brush. And their reputations are enduring a similar ' crypto winter ' as Mongo first declared back then. Going by the trajectory of Julian Rand Paul Assange it won't be long before he's even sharing the same grave. Fools and their reputation capital are soon parted. Cheats never prosper. Such is anarchist life.

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python-gnupg community fragmentation
by Karl 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

`pip3 install python-gnupg` this installs a fork on github with a high version number that hasn't been updated for 3 years. the fork reference a missing todo file and some of the funcitonality has been removed. it is full of unaddressed issues and pull requests meanwhile the original project on bitbucket has recent updates. not sure if it's on pip or not.

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Fwd: USSS Electronic Countermeasures Suburban
by Karl 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

coderman forwarded the other 2 that didn't get on-list ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Karl <gmkarl(a)gmail.com> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2021 18:51:17 -0500 Subject: Re: USSS Electronic Countermeasures Suburban To: coderman <coderman(a)protonmail.com> partial reply, whole email not addressed, resources strongly appreciated: On 1/12/21, coderman <coderman(a)protonmail.com> wrote: > this is where something smaller and lighter (RTL-SDR + rpi) would be > preferable to larger and heavier :P this can be done very simplistically in an almost grab-and-go way, even including i/q logs because an rtlsdr uses only 8bit samples and has a smaller sample rate. software already exists. [uhhh i patched rtlsdr some time ago to store i/q logs with timing information, which can be run with an existing wideband scanner like rtl_power or the alternative cli one that uses soapy-sdr.] [for bigger equipment, the first solution to the bandwidth-to-storage-media issue should simply be downsampling, lossy compression, and/or intermittent recording. this moves priority towards getting things running and working, rather than obsessing over perfection.]

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[not][a][joke]How To Kill the Right Wing
by Karl 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

Given the political left, notably social justice, is stuffed full of people who honestly care about the political right, it is very revealing to see us targeted with so much overt messaging claiming we are trying to harm the political right. It is obvious that the political right would be stuffed full of people who honestly care about the political left, too. Can you spread this message, please?

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Fw: Re: USSS Electronic Countermeasures Suburban
by coderman 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 10:11 PM, coderman <coderman(a)protonmail.com> wrote: > > > ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ > On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 9:30 PM, Karl gmkarl(a)gmail.com wrote: > > > i am interested in actually doing this but i'd need somebody to help > > with the a couple of the parts i'm struggling with. any interest? > > parts: > > > > - software that performs a wideband sweep (there are existing tools > > that do this, one would be selected) > > > > lots of options, both closed and open source. > > on the open source side, i've successfully used gnuradio in python and gnu radio companion GUI to implement selected modulation, processing, and output. > > for example, using the QT GUI Eye Sink https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/QT_GUI_Eye_Sink > > > [i would like to record raw i/q > > logs. > > here's your problem with that: bandwidth to storage media! :) > > depending on the hardware, you could be receiving signals at giga-samples per second. > > i've found the sweet spot is to do some signal processing to band filter, clean up, demodulate, and then persist that much reduced sample. > > note that this still consumes significant CPU, unless you're able to offload some signal processing on your receiver via FPGA (or something). > > > - hardware to do the wideband sweep > > on the cheap end, an RTL-SDR would work fine! > https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/Hardware#rtl-sdr_TV_tuners > > on the expensive end, you've got the latest ettus and pervices hardware: > https://pervices.com/documentation-cyan/ > https://www.ettus.com/all-products/usrp-n321/ > > > - access to the event with the setup > > this is where something smaller and lighter (RTL-SDR + rpi) would be preferable to larger and heavier :P > > best regards,

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Re: USSS Electronic Countermeasures Suburban
by coderman 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

nope; forwarded :) ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 11:59 PM, Karl <gmkarl(a)gmail.com> wrote: > i just noticed you just e-mailed me, and didn't cc the list! was this > intentional? > > On 1/12/21, coderman coderman(a)protonmail.com wrote: > > > ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ > > On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 9:30 PM, Karl gmkarl(a)gmail.com wrote: > > > > > i am interested in actually doing this but i'd need somebody to help > > > with the a couple of the parts i'm struggling with. any interest? > > > parts: > > > > > > - software that performs a wideband sweep (there are existing tools > > > that do this, one would be selected) > > > > > > > lots of options, both closed and open source. > > on the open source side, i've successfully used gnuradio in python and gnu > > radio companion GUI to implement selected modulation, processing, and > > output. > > i tried very hard to help gnuradio get live controls and streaming > information to make it useful as a research platform involving > wideband scanning. these features were eventually implemented by > others, after i burned out on my personal attempts to contribute. > it's hard for me now to re-engage gnuradio creatively around wideband > recording, but i understand there are 3rd party apps that do this, and > maybe existing setups .... > > what do you think about gnuradio and wideband channel hopping? is it > the tool, if the time scale's just a week?

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Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes
by coderman 12 Jan '21

12 Jan '21

note from the editor: yup! this is the year it's finally maybe worth my time to code custom permutations in hashcat to cracks luks headers on old drives, and code a brute forcing bot complete with sms challenge response to iterate over online account passwords... add a few hundred dollars to run the brute on cloud GPU clusters, and, maybe lucky? we'll find out :/ --- https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-… Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes Bitcoin owners are getting rich because the cryptocurrency has soared. But what happens when you can’t tap that wealth because you forgot the password to your digital wallet? By [Nathaniel Popper](https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/by/nathaniel-popper) - Jan. 12, 2021Updated 2:14 p.m. ET Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million. The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just [a month ago](https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2020/11/30/technology/bitcoin-record-price.html), when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000. The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail. “I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.” Bitcoin, which has been on an extraordinary and volatile eight-month run, has made a lot of its holders very rich in [a short time](https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2020/12/16/style/bitcoin.html), even as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the world economy. But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth. Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had gotten 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago. Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to get access to their fortunes. Many have owned the coins since Bitcoin’s early days a decade ago, when no one had confidence that the tokens would be worth anything. “Through the years I would say I have spent hundreds of hours trying to get back into these wallets,” said Brad Yasar, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who has a few desktop computers that contain thousands of Bitcoin he created, or mined, during the early days of the technology. While those Bitcoin are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he lost his passwords many years ago and has put the hard drives containing them in vacuum-sealed bags, out of sight. “I don’t want to be reminded every day that what I have now is a fraction of what I could have that I lost,” he said. The dilemma is a stark reminder of Bitcoin’s unusual technological underpinnings, which set it apart from normal money and give it some of its most vaunted — and riskiest — qualities. With traditional bank accounts and online wallets, banks like Wells Fargo and other financial companies like PayPal can provide people the passwords to their accounts or reset lost passwords. Image[“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said.]“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said.Credit...Nicholas Albrecht for The New York Times But Bitcoin has no company to provide or store passwords. The virtual currency’s creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said Bitcoin’s central idea was to allow anyone in the world to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate. This is made possible by the structure of Bitcoin, which is governed by a network of computers that agreed to follow software containing all the rules for the cryptocurrency. The software includes a complex algorithm that makes it possible to create an address, and associated private key, which is known only by the person who created the wallet. The software also allows the Bitcoin network to confirm the accuracy of the password to allow transactions, without seeing or knowing the password itself. In short, the system makes it possible for anyone to create a Bitcoin wallet without having to register with a financial institution or go through any sort of identity check. That has made Bitcoin [popular with criminals](https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2020/01/28/technology/bitcoin-black-market.html), who can use the money without revealing their identity. It has also attracted people in countries like China and Venezuela, where authoritarian governments are known for raiding or shutting down traditional bank accounts. But the structure of this system did not account for just how bad people can be at remembering and securing their passwords. “Even sophisticated investors have been completely incapable of doing any kind of management of private keys,” saidDiogo Monica, a co-founder of a start-up called Anchorage, which helps companies handle cryptocurrency security. Mr. Monica started the company in 2017 after helping a hedge fund regain access to one of its Bitcoin wallets. Mr. Thomas, the programmer, said he was drawn to Bitcoin partly because it was [outside the control of a country](https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2019/02/23/opinion/sunday/venezuela-bitcoin-inflation-cryptocurrencies.html) or company. In 2011, when he was living in Switzerland, he was given the 7,002 Bitcoin by an early Bitcoin fanatic as a reward for making an animated video, “[What is Bitcoin?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo),” which introduced many people to the technology. That year, he lost the digital keys to the wallet holding the Bitcoin. Since then, as Bitcoin’s value has soared and fallen and he could not get his hands on the money, Mr. Thomas has soured on the idea that people should be their own bank and hold their own money. “This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes?” he said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.” Other Bitcoin believers have also realized the difficulties of being their own bank. Some have outsourced the work of holding Bitcoin to start-ups and exchanges that secure the private keys to people’s stashes of the virtual currency. Yet some of these services have had just as much trouble securing their keys. Many of the largest Bitcoin exchanges over the years — including the onetime well-known exchange [Mt. Gox](https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/mt-gox-creditors-seek-trillions-where-there-are-only-millions.html) — have lost private keys or had them stolen. Gabriel Abed, 34, an entrepreneur from Barbados, lost around 800 Bitcoin — now worth around $25 million — when a colleague reformatted a laptop that contained the private keys to a Bitcoin wallet in 2011. Mr. Abed said this did not dim his enthusiasm. Before Bitcoin, he said, he and his fellow islanders had not had access to affordable digital financial products like the credit cards and bank accounts that are easily available to Americans. In Barbados, even getting a PayPal account was almost impossible, he said. The open nature of Bitcoin, he said, gave him full access to the digital financial world for the first time. “The risk of being my own bank comes with the reward of being able to freely access my money and be a citizen of the world — that is worth it,” Mr. Abed said. For Mr. Abed and Mr. Thomas, any losses from mishandling the private keys have partly been assuaged by the enormous gains they have made on the Bitcoin they managed to hold on to. The 800 Bitcoin Mr. Abed lost in 2011 were a small fraction of the tokens he has since bought and sold, allowing him to recently buy a 100-acre plot of oceanfront land in Barbados for over $25 million. Mr. Thomas said he also managed to hold on to enough Bitcoin — and remember the passwords — to give him more riches than he knows what to do with. In 2012, he joined a cryptocurrency start-up, Ripple, that aimed to improve on Bitcoin. He was rewarded with Ripple’s own native currency, known as XRP, which rose in value. (Ripple has recently [run into legal troubles](https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2020/12/21/technology/ripple-cryptocurrency-sec-lawsuit.html), in part because the founders had too much control over the creation and distribution of the XRP coins.) As for his lost password and inaccessible Bitcoin, Mr. Thomas has put the IronKey in a secure facility — he won’t say where — in case cryptographers come up with new ways of cracking complex passwords. Keeping it far away helps him try not to think about it, he said. “I got to a point where I said to myself, ‘Let it be in the past, just for your own mental health,’” he said.

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