Hacks

Cellphone spectrum analyzer

Cellphone spectrum analyzer

With some careful planning and PCB trimming, Miguel managed to fit all the components needed for a 2.4 GHz ISM band spectrum analyzer into an old cellphone enclosure – resulting in an awesomely stealthy spy-worthy device. The project uses a Nokia LCD (natch), an ATMega8 microcontroller, and a CYWM6935 wireless USB radio module – build […]

Maker Birthdays:  Charles Darwin

Maker Birthdays: Charles Darwin

You may have heard of this guy. Born on this date in 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Charles Robert Darwin would go on, in 1859, to publish On The Origin of Species, a book which is surely among the most influential ever written. In it, Darwin first proposes the idea that all of life descends from common ancestors, and that its diversity can be explained by a process of evolution driven by natural selection. He died in 1882, aged 73, and was afforded the exceedingly rare honor, especially for a scientist, of internment in Westminster Abbey.

VOIP ideal for hiding secret messages?

VOIP ideal for hiding secret messages?

The 50-cent word here is “steganography,” which per Wikipedia is “the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message.” You may have heard, for instance, that you can encode a hidden message in, say, an image file, in such a way that no one who wasn’t looking for it would know that it’s there.

Well, this morning Danger Room linked to a post at IEEE Spectrum to the effect that Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) is particularly susceptible to steganographic hijinks. Wired’s David Pierce put it this way: