audial TEMPEST

sit down at any lab PC or perhaps at your home machine, jack in your headphones and reboot. during the boot sequence, and under various OS, during periods of high system activity, you'll hear strange low-volume audial chatter - i'm pretty sure it's been abused by woos to make "electronic voice phenomena", in fact.

i got a different hypothesis about this chatter. i think it's a form of data leakage; like a Category III-risk optical TEMPEST indicator - a HDD status LED or the indicator LED on some routers and broadband modems - it seems to correspond to the data passing through the device. on a PC, you hear what seem to be unique patterns of chatter during application startups, writes to and reads from the HDD, and when joining or acceding from a network.

this is to my curiosity what liquid oxygen is to a barbecue. i have got to find out whether data from my networks is leaking out the sound card as well as out the emissions of the components, the old-school cathode-ray monitors and half the LEDs on everything.

therefore, i have a new research project. i'll be back with all the existing research i can find on the subject ASAP. you guys are in for an ethically awesome, fact-finding, data-jacking, network-sniffing, audially-challenging goddamn adventure!

my Zero Cool-emulating childhood self would be really impressed with this.


Lepht