Skip to main content

The NSA Theme Song


This famous song by The Police really says it all:

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you

Every single day

Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you

"I woke up in the middle of the night with that line in my head, sat down at the piano and had written it in half an hour. The tune itself is generic, an aggregate of hundreds of others, but the words are interesting. It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn't realize at the time how sinister it is. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control."

—Sting
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Breath_You_Take]

The main problem that I have with tapping the undersea cables, is that it is done with no judicial oversight whatsoever.  Of course, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo were stupid to use plain text communications over their trunks, so they are not blameless either.

There will be a huge furor if the government insists that each time you make a phone call, a policeman has to sit in your living room and look over your shoulder - but that is precisely what the American and UK governments are doing! 

Fascist Perverts doesn't even begin to describe it.

Nuf sed!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Unlock CRA PDF Forms

Unlock Canada Revenue Agency PDF Forms It appears that there is a relatively new PDF feature to prevent casual copying and saving of a file and that some programs save PDF files with these foolish features active by default.  Many forms from the Canada Revenue Agency are locked in this way, which makes it difficult to do one's taxes, since one can fill the form, but cannot save it.  One can only print the form.  It should be possible to print to a file or export it to a new PDF file, but it is far better to reset the annoying anti-taxpayer flags, since the 'printed' form cannot be edited easily any more and I always manage to make a mistake or three that need to be corrected after review. If there is a Linux (virtual) machine handy, install qpdf and use it to reset the silly flags: $ su - password # dnf update # dnf install qpdf # exit $ qpdf --decrypt lockedfile.pdf unlockedfile.pdf One doesn't need a password to unlock these flags, so the fix is instant. La voila! He...

Parasitic Quadrifilar Helical Antenna

This article was reprinted in OSCAR News, March 2018:  http://www.amsat-uk.org If you want to receive Satellite Weather Pictures , then you need a decent antenna, otherwise you will receive more noise than picture. For polar orbit satellites, one needs an antenna with a mushroom shaped radiation pattern .  It needs to have strong gain towards the horizon where the satellites are distant, less gain upwards where they are close and as little as possible downwards, which would be wasted and a source of noise.  Most satellites are spin stabilized and therefore the antenna also needs circular polarization, otherwise the received signal will flutter as the antennas rotate through nulls. The helical antenna, first proposed by Kraus in 1948, is the natural solution to circular polarized satellite communications.  It is a simple twisted wire - there seems to be nothing to it.  Various papers have been published on helix antennas, so the operation is pretty well ...

OpenEMS with Octave and SciLAB

I wanted to do some advanced RF antenna development work and needed an electromagnetic field solver that is a bit more up to date than NEC2 .  Commercial solvers from Matlab , Ansys and others are hideously expensive (in the order of $20,000 to $50,000) and do not fit in the wallet of a hobbyist or a small consulting company.  Recently, openEMS became available and it fills the niche with a capable free tool.  In general, openEMS is a solver - a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) numerical engine.  You interact with it through Octave , which is almost identical to Matlab .  You can watch a good video by Thorsten Liebig here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ThMLf0d5gaE   Getting it to work is a little painful, but it is free, so bear with it - then save a backup clone, or a zipped copy of the whole virtual machine directory and NEVER update it, to ensure that it keeps going and doesn't get broken by future updates, right when you are ...