Re: Flushing all Buffers Before Exiting
deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> writes:
> I just wonder why one would do that, but it is again your business.
In all but a very small handful of countries around the
world, the hobby of amateur radio exists and it's justification
for existence is to allow people to self-train as to how
electronic communication, especially radio, works. The vast
majority of radio amateurs do not do destructive things with the
knowledge they gain but listening to non-amateur communications
systems and understanding how they work is part of the hobby.
So, we do things that may seem really strange to those who don't
look at technology that way.
Computers fit right in to this hobby also as they are
part of modern life.
> Nowdays
> all of this communication is encrypted and you have virtually no chance
> listening to this.
When the day comes in which all radio communications are
encrypted except for amateur radio where encryption is illegal,
we will probably stop listening to signals other than amateur
radio and broadcasting.
Right now, much is still in the clear. It may be
digitally encoded but the coding standards are either to
improve reception, compress bandwidth or both. If they are to
obscure the conversation from eaves-droppers, then the landscape
gets more complicated regarding the law.
> In most of the countries it is even illegal, but ok,
> one
> can do things for fun anyway - braking the encryption though is close to
> impossible.
That is quite true. some of the encoding schemes involve
more than one layer of encryption and use 1024-bit keys or
something similar so a person who doesn't know the key or keys
involved probably doesn't have enough seconds in his or her
natural life to break even 1 set of keys much less deal with the
key-holders changing the keys every hour or so. There are far
better ways to spend one's life.
> The communication follows well defined protocol, so knowing it, you might
> be
> able to read the frames, but the content will remain hidden.
Quite true.
In the case of what I am doing, a web site for scanner
radio enthusiasts published the frequencies and the logical order in
which they should be entered in to a receiver but the index
numbers turned out to be wrong due to changes made to the site
after the information was published. The control data includes
the index number for the channel to which a conversation or part
of one is assigned so one can learn the list by reading the index
numbers and observing which channels come to life. This allows
one to fix the list correctly. It's like solving a partly
assembled puzzle.
Sorry for getting far afield of the original topic.
Martin WB5AGZ
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