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henfredemars@lemmy.world

Personal website:

https://henfred.me/

  • 2 Posts
  • 559 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Those random numbers have a random distribution. Random uniform or random normal, I can average out those values to zero to remove the noise. This is indeed what GPS does for example. This wouldn’t be effective for blocking those types of radio signals.

    If you want to be effective, you need to know the symbol rate and cater your jamming to the application. There’s also other parameters of a radio signal besides amplitudes like polarity and your signal also has to propagate through free space and make it through the front end of my receiver which could be selective in other ways. You don’t typically have the privilege of transmitting directly into the receiving antenna.

    There’s an interesting related area called channel coding that you might be interested in that models noise and interference and figures out how to encode radio signals in ways where they are not easily disturbed.

    For your specific example, if you’re talking about changing the value randomly on every nanosecond, I would expect to see a one gigahertz main frequency with lower harmonics, which would likely look like pretty much nothing to most GPS devices.


  • Wi-Fi is interesting. It’s designed for maximum bandwidth at low power levels. It also has a carrier sense system to prevent interference with other unknown devices on the unlicensed spectrum. Most things are sacrificed for that bandwidth, such as exploiting multipath and spatial propagation differences to squeeze out every last drop of data. Orthogonal carriers are spaced very close together maximize the available spectrum.

    Still in this case, Wi-Fi operates at other frequencies that do not get microwave interference, and wireless network might explicitly be trying not to interfere with the microwave because it could be a device trying to share the unlicensed spectrum. The other Wi-Fi frequencies don’t go very far and aren’t good at penetrating walls, so the amount of power that an alien spaceship would have to use to block these signals categorically is crazy high. at some point you don’t have a jammer but a giant space death ray.

    I’m not saying they couldn’t degrade it, but jamming them all? That sounds like a very challenging ask. Your microwave shares your living space. Meanwhile your wireless router politely avoids speaking when the microwave appears to be talking.



  • Jamming isn’t so trivial because it’s not really the volume but the signal to noise ratio that really matters no matter how much energy the aliens use. Therefore, I propose that this question doesn’t make technical sense.

    Take for example GPS. The signal strength is way below the noise and you can’t really hear it at all because it’s so weak. The background noise is overwhelmingly loud already. You have to process the signal out of the noise using special techniques to collect the energy you care about using statistical correlation. While can still jam the signal in general, jamming requires that you understand how the signal is being used to impact that signal to noise ratio and stop the information flow. Simply screaming into all frequencies might not have all that much impact unless you understand what a signal means for each use case. Many wireless applications are even point to point links that are great at rejecting inputs outside of the intended direction and even the wrong polarization. There are physical limitations that preclude a general all signal jammer.

    That said, let’s say the aliens understand all of our wireless communication protocols. I think people would adapt after a short period of disruption because it wasn’t all that long ago that we were using wires for business and critical functions. Heck, some industry still use fax machines and famously a lot of old government tech still has software stored on floppy disc. I think we’ll be OK. Might even be better for our mental health once the phones stop working.













  • In principle, yes, and I believe a few small hobby projects have attempted to do this and support specific TVs. However, interest in developing a custom Smart TV platform tends to get siphoned away into a project where the output from your actual platform is displayed on the TV rather than running directly on it. Simply, it’s easier to develop and maintain support across different models.

    Why would you develop a custom TV OS that runs on one TV when you could develop it for any mini PC and immediately support all TVs? You’d have to develop your OS to run on each specific TV model which will make it quite hard to reach a critical mass sufficient to attract attention from developers and users alike.

    The juice isn’t really worth the squeeze. It’s not like TV vendors are publishing detailed hardware specs and drivers. Writing or even porting an OS is hard. Look at the state of the Android ROM scene, and that’s about as good as it gets when some vendors are actually attempting to open source their drivers. The difficulty is much higher and the interest lower due to the existence of a viable alternative.

    With that said, motivated minds have done it anyway. You just need to have the right TV for it.