Comments
nil • May 29, 2026 5:43 PM
I can’t find “Zero Emission Pad” on the web anymore. They’ve totally scrubbed it! I’ll check my backups, I hope I still have it. If so, I’ll distribute it everywhere and anywhere I can.
@nil,
remember that compilers aren’t nearly as prolific as browsers.
back up javascript examples and implementations of curious or useful things too.
Clive Robinson • May 30, 2026 4:32 AM
@ Hendrik, ALL,
With regards CIFswitch and your,
“Will this be the season of the kernel devs becoming more security conscious in their coding?”
CIFswitch is not really about “coding”
It’s actually about an architectural failing that goes back to the early days of not just *nix but other OS’s, that was basically caused by “resource issues”.
I explained this back on last weeks Squid Page,
In essence we have a “legacy issue”… In that OS’s that originated from before the 1990’s had limited security capabilities due to “lack of resources”.
Thus as the OS’s were brought forward into this century and resources became available a problem arose…
Due to various issues in the base OS extra security was needed.
There were two basic choices available,
1, Completely rework the base OS design.
2, Add extra security as a layer over the base OS.
The first option would create no end of “legacy code” issues, so the “safe path” was seen as being the “add the extra security layer” and “encourage replacement” of legacy code.
The problem was that “adding the extra security layer” would still create “legacy code” issues, unless the layer could be bypassed by legacy code.
The not unexpected result of this is that the “extra security layer” suffered two failings,
1, It was too complex to use.
2, The default “use” for everything was “bypass”.
Thus SElinux and similar became rarely used, or too permissively configured.
This has “enabled holes in security” for “legacy code” to not just exist, but be exploitable by “ease of use” behaviours of system operators.
This “Support legacy code security model” is going to cause lots more problems and not just in *nix OSs.
nil • May 30, 2026 5:51 PM
@r
remember that compilers aren’t nearly as prolific as browsers.
It’s not a compiler. Zero Emission Pad is a simple text editor with anti-Tempest features. It was on several freeware sites but has since been scrubbed from the web. It’s not difficult to reason why. 🙂
hooved butler • May 30, 2026 8:31 PM
@Bosna,
Speak English. No one gives a shit about your cockroach language.
Clive Robinson • May 30, 2026 9:24 PM
@ nil, r,
With regards,
“Zero Emission Pad is a simple text editor with anti-Tempest features.”
I don’t remember the name, but an editor using the UK Cambridge Computer Labs “soft TEMPEST fonts” was around back late last century.
That over the next decade things got pulled as technology improved. One such improvement was “Software Defined Radio”(SDR) that are not just very wide in frequency coverage 0.1Mhz-6GHz, but also wideband width on the I&Q outputs upwards of 1MHz became commonly available and made Van Eck “freeking” possible beyond what could previously have been possible.
But another issue was the “display technology” put simply “soft fonts” nolonger worked due to changes in graphics display systems, where “chips replaced software” and random bit dithering etc were nolonger accessable.
You can read more at,
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest-faq.html
The last time I looked –which was a while ago– there was still links based on this work up on the Internet, but they suffered from the issues identified in the FAQ.
Hum Vee • May 30, 2026 9:53 PM
@ Clive,
One can test Zero Emission Pad (if they can find it) with the proper SDR antenna/software combo, which I’m sure you know about. 🙂
Thanks for the post.
beam me up • May 30, 2026 10:17 PM
I use the free program:
Tempest for Eliza
on my modern monitor and I can broadcast with my monitor, no other hardware needed, music for my TEMPEST spies in the neighborhood.
They spy on my monitor and I laugh at them by playing Star Wars MIDI like sounds through my monitor which I can pick up on AM/FM radio.
I hope they enjoy the music!
Glowies gonna Glow!
Anonymous • May 30, 2026 11:38 PM
I just tried to masturbate to ascii characters and it worked! I’m hooked!
I tried the free game nethack and I jacked off to the first monster on the screen. I hope my dog doesn’t hate me.
Hi • May 31, 2026 1:07 AM
I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong in this he-said-she-said situation. But my past experiences with Microsoft lead me to favor the security researcher. Some years back I found a problem with Windows. The ethernet port would work fine under Linux (dual-booted) but not Windows. And I found a workaround fix to the Windows bug. Microsoft wanted me to pay $300 before they would accept my bug report. Not to fix it. Just to hear what I had to say. Un-freaking-believable.
In contrast, another time I found a bug in the FSF’s gcc compiler. They accepted my bug report, verified it, and had it fixed in the latest developmental branch in 40 minutes.
Night. Day.
Clive Robinson • May 31, 2026 6:25 AM
@ Bruce, ALL,
People are starting to understand
We here a lot of nonsense about how vibe coding will empower people.
It mostly won’t because those people are neither “domain experts” or “trained engineers”. Nor for that matter are they “code cutters” they are not even the equivalent of “Victorian Artisans”.
In short they come from that not much talked about “bolt bits on till it stops breaking” attitude that is more dangerous than “run fast and break things” mentality.
Any way I’ve been through explaining this in the past and got vilified by certain people who really had no clue as to what a “trained engineer” is or more importantly how they go about it.
Well somebody else is saying similar due to LLM use forcing the issue,
https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2026/05/domain-expertise-has-always-been-the-real-moat/
Like many others though, their use of “engineer” tends to the old and very much wrong “software engineer” definition.
Clive Robinson • May 31, 2026 4:06 PM
@ ALL,
“Something for the boss’s weekend…”
You might have heard there is a nasty succession of malware that gets on your system by “code reuse” and the supply chain it requires behind it failing due to the fact it can not be made secure…
The most recent was named after the “Shai-Hulud” sand worm on Arrakis in the Dune series of books, that chews up everything on the surface.
This is amusing to some as the attack if you try to remove it has a “Dead-man’s Switch” that issues an “rm -rf ~/” or equivalent[1],
That swallows all the files in the directory.
But annoying as that is, the “Shai-Hulud” infestation is down to the stupidity of badly managed supply chains for code reuse.
And the reason this happens and will happen again is something I pointed out to @Nick P and others on this blog years ago[2].
“Code Signing attests to little to nothing. All it does is a checksum on one or more files and uses a crypto signature to say it’s unchanged from when it was signed. All that really says is someone/thing had access to the private key, nothing more.”
So you can “code sign any old garbage” (and people have done). Which due to the “stupidity of trust” that people put in such things has ment that malware writers can get bad code into the “code reuse” supply chain and they have done.
Well a young lady Addie Lamarr who is getting a bit of a name for herself as a security explainer / guru has just dropped a YouTube video about Shai-Hulud and the background to it,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CM8sjQcQsPs
Which should be sufficient for the “non technical boss types” in your life.
Interestingly though whilst she does mention people getting called “paranoid” for foreseeing the parts of this attack. She does not take it back to the real issue that is the fact of “trusting code signing” is a waste of time that will cause you to get bitten.
The simple fact is nobody has so far come up with a solution to the obvious “code signing” problem and ultimately it means that by far the greatest part of the “software supply chain” that of “code reuse” is a complete and utter fail as far as security is concerned…
Which has all sorts of implications that turns nearly all the ICTsoftware Industry into a bunch of “heads in the sand” types…
Yup I can already here the sound of people sharpening their pitchforks and that “flint on steel” sound of setting sparks to kindling so the “torches can be lit” and the vengeful vigilante march begin in my direction 😉
[1] The existence of “rm” CLI command on *nix systems predates just about every “file delete” CLI command on current commercial and consumer OSs. The “force -f” switch to “rm” is one of the best reasons to run backups on a very very regular basis. As the old saying has it “Crap happens” and mostly nothing you can do after the event can make up for a lack of forward planning hence “The ship was lost for the want of a hapenth of tar”… Backups are the equivalent of a bucket of tar. The “recursive -r” flag tells rm to descend into all subdirectories and the “shell ~/” is a short cut for your “home directory” as the place to start the file munching from. You can read more at,
‘https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linux-unix/rm-command-linux-examples/
[2] With the predictable result I was called “paranoid” or was “attacked” for pointing it out, as well as not having a “drop in solution” (for which there is none, nor can there be under current assumptions).
Oh and please don’t say in the future “nobody told me”…
sammy lightfoot • May 31, 2026 6:50 PM
@Dancing On Thin Ice,
Tattle tale. No one likes a hall monitor.
lick it • May 31, 2026 6:53 PM
Did you know in prison licking someone’s anus is actually considered currency?
lurker • May 31, 2026 7:42 PM
Always on internet is an essential now, can’t live without it.
It used to be that you couldn’t get onto a train without a ticket that would be valid when you arrived at your destination, Now it seems you can buy your tickets on the train, if the wifi is working …
Weather • June 1, 2026 2:27 AM
Clive you have been out of the green, ha not me, but different times.
Clive Robinson • June 1, 2026 2:36 AM
@ Hi, ALL,
With regards your reticence about Microsoft statements and behaviour…
I don’t know if you remember but just under 2 years ago Microsoft announced with great fanfare that it had solved the “LLM Hallucinations” problem with a tool it called “Correction”.
Well here we are nearly 2 years later and a quick search for the tool by name shows nothing news wise…
But we know the hallucinations still go on, as they are the result of the use of randomness within a statistical process and as one researcher once noted,
“Trying to eliminate hallucinations from generative AI is like trying to eliminate hydrogen from water,”
Os Keyes, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington who studies the ethical impact of emerging tech, went on to further note about the AI Hallucination process that,
“It’s an essential component of how the technology works.”
Whilst I’m not sure the word “hallucination” is correct for LLM based AI[1],
“I am certain “Hallucinations” is the correct word for most Microsoft Management etc proclamations.”
[1] As I’ve said before the correct “term of art” is actually “Soft Bullshit”,
‘https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology
Clive Robinson • June 1, 2026 11:32 AM
@ Weather,
With regads,
“… you have been out of the green…”
I stopped getting paid to wear it quite a few years ago…
Now they would not take me back, even if I paid them… as my beard whilst not as Snowy as our hosts, is however getting towards looking like “swarf on a lathe bed”…
Clive Robinson • June 1, 2026 6:44 PM
@ Bruce, ALL,
US Election on line shenanigans
Yes as it gets towards that time again it appears that specific cyber-crime might well be “on the cards”,
Election interlopers register 5K+ domains, hope to catch some voting phish
Hacking voting machines is so 2017. Phishing, impersonation pose the real election risks
“The biggest threat to America’s midterm elections in November likely isn’t foreign attackers hacking US voting machines. Phishing and election-official impersonation are the bigger risks, according to Check Point, which documented more than 5,000 election-themed domains registered between April and May.
These domains can be used by attackers for phishing, impersonation, fraud, misinformation, or influence activity, especially when coupled with about 17,000 exposed credentials associated with fundraising orgs, political parties, and government-related services also spotted by the security shop’s intelligence arm in May.“
Make of it what you will but it looks like the pot is coming to the boil one way or another.
lurker • June 2, 2026 3:22 PM
Daft Error Message of the Day:
Oops! Something went wrong
We apologize for the inconvenience.Please try again later or contact support if the problem persists.
Back to home page
This seems to be becoming popular amongst cdns instead of the informative (but still oppressive)
You need Javascript and Cookies enabled
to access this site.
Clive Robinson • June 3, 2026 5:41 AM
@ baby bumblebee, ALL,
With regards,
“Russian spy agency says foreign spies turned officials’ smartphones into surveillance devices”
I am reminded of the old saying,
“Tis the pot calling the kettle black!”
The only problem I see is working out historically which is the Kettle and which is the Pot (or is smoking it to blow up someone else’s posterior 😉
They are as bad as each other, we have known for years the NSA has spies on everyone they could for as long as the technology has allowed them to. What we know of earlier Russian behaviours they likewise have been at it back well into the old Tzarist Empire and the KGB etc just took on the mantel often employing the same people.
There is that resigned mentality of,
“It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it…”
Given as an excuse.
But as I’ve noted before the US well and truly lies about attribution. It is a “political dog whistle”. There are or were a list of four,
China, Iran, North Korea, Russia
Who would be blamed by some “unattributed government source” almost in turn. Even though any reasonably educated and sane person could easily work out that every nation that can spies on it’s own, friends, allies, and enemies alike without exception.
Including China on Russia, after all China, Iran and North Korea were “Putin’s only friends” untill Trump was so bl@@dy daft as to follow the Israeli “Prop political pariah and criminal Netanyahu up” campaign…
If you were China having “invested” in Russia you too would want to keep your eye very firmly on the investment.
Any way does it matter,
“Who is to blame?”
Just regard this Russian latest outburst as an admission of guilt or impotence or both, smile and get on with your day, after all your country is watching you…
Clive Robinson • June 3, 2026 8:58 AM
@ ResearcherZero, ALL,
With regards,
“The malware spread via the mini Shai-Hulud does not activate on Russian-language systems.”
This is one of those issues of where attribution becomes a guessing game…
Back in the early cyber-crime days Putin “supposedly” gave cybercriminals immunity and protection if they did not touch Russia.
This sadly became one way to say of malware that it’s developers had Kremlin associated alignment…
Thus this became a way to run a “False Flag Operation” for other people including the CIA…
So it’s now a useless attribution indicator.
But also consider, is it actually worth trying to do standard cyber-criminal activities against Russian organisations?
The answer is,
“As the Russians are short on real money but long on real vengeance… Probably not.”
Anonymous • June 3, 2026 9:32 PM
Fedora Linux 43 Exposes 20-Year-Old Microsoft Outlook Security Failure
Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade.
The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook itself. Still, the discovery has sparked discussion among Linux admins and security folks because many users likely assumed their email traffic was encrypted simply because Outlook claimed SSL/TLS was enabled. The incident also highlights how stricter defaults in modern open source infrastructure can expose ancient assumptions and questionable behaviors that quietly survived for decades.
welcome to mindhead • June 4, 2026 7:33 AM
Five Eyes Warns Chinese Spies Are Using Fake Job Ads to Target Military Staff
https://hackread.com/five-eyes-chinese-spies-fake-job-ads-military-staff/
Five Eyes warns that Chinese spies are using fake job ads on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Upwork to target military staff and steal sensitive data.
Western intelligence agencies are warning about the growing preference of China-linked state actors regarding the use of job websites to trick government workers and military staff into sharing sensitive information.
This warning comes from the Five Eyes (FVEY), an international intelligence partnership comprising agencies from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Five agencies, including the UK’s MI5 and the US FBI, shared a joint report about how these spying operations work.
Clive Robinson • June 4, 2026 8:47 AM
@ ResearcherZero, ALL,
Pulling buttheads out of their own holes.
You note,
“Pentagon finally grasps that their own troops are being targeted using location data.”
Have they actually grasped it or are just pushing paper across their desk top battlefield?
This issue has been suspected for a decade and a half if not longer, and public proof was shown over a decade ago.
The problem with some of the more “self centered” soldiers is they have a need to show they are “elite”…
So they use devices to record their physical performance then post it for all to see on Web sites. These often include not just a personal ID but high accuracy GPNS coordinates.
These details reveal which ID’s appear within the coordinate geofence of supposedly secret bases.
A few laps around the perimeter or similar has them nailed. The same with those that ride bikes to and from their home and work place.
Also “who they shop with” when and how much they have spent on plastic.
At one point the UK armed forces tried banning “fitness trackers” and similar. But it was as pointless as trying to ban mobile phones. Especially when other trackers recorded all sorts of medical/health related information.
Do you remember back to the early “naughties” whilst the US President was doing his Cowboy Walk? The Vice President had a heart condition that was steadily getting worse as such things tend to do. Eventually he had to have a Medtronics box fitted in his chest and he had some reservations.
The press reported it as he had a fear a hacker could assassinate him, so he had the “radio” part disabled.
He was not the only one with concerns but their interests were “tracking” and “evesdropping” rather than assassination.
And their fears were justified. You might remember a court case for murder where the heart trace from a monitor was used to show that the suspect was doing very significant physical work thus had very elevated heart rate etc.
Apparently it’s been argued that as these signals can be read in public places, they don’t get various legal protections like other medical information does.
I’ve been mentioning the issues of security and various devices for as long on this blog and other places… But apparantly people do not think my cautions are valid untill it’s too late…
In effect they think me “paranoid” or a “conspiracy nut” or some such.
But the old saying of,
“You know you are not paranoid when you know they are out to get you”
Or other variation of Joseph Heller’s line from his Catch 22 book,
“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”
But it does not have to specifically be “get you”, it could as well be “get them”, or “get us” etc.
As I note from time to time I tend to come up with interesting flaws in all sorts of systems, not just security. When I see a potential flaw almost the first thing I ask is,
“Within the laws of nature can this flaw be turned into a vulnerability and exploited?”
Even some things that appear against the laws of nature are not. As far as I’m aware I was the first person to publicly state that with “collect it all and Blufdale the NSA were building a virtual time machine” to track peoples past movements and behaviours to build connection diagrams and the like. Thus track them through decades of virtual reality…
It took a while for other people to realise that this was the intent, but some are still in denial about it for various reasons.
Thus the old phrase,
“You can not go back in time.”
Is not as true as it once was. Even now people are still in denial about this possibility…
JG5 • June 4, 2026 12:32 PM
Hadn’t thought about #StarFish Prime for quite a while. I saw this pop up a few days ago and it touches a couple of topics in this thread.
Meshtastic 101
#chrisboden #comedy #engineering #diy #educational #science #radio #tech #gear #edc
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oUkBUACALFY
I got a kick out of “My house is a backup generator to the backup generator.” I also believe that US infrastructure is a shitshow of bubble gum, band-aids, and baling wire. Maybe that is why we need another 4th Turning. You can set you watch by it. 1780, 1860, 1940, and 2020
You’d have a reasonable chance of establishing endpoint security with small microprocessors and the aforementioned “garden path.”
I am enthusiastic about propane as a generator fuel. The biggest problem is that you can’t get a small one off the shelf, so far as I can tell. There are lots of them from maybe 8000 to 15000 watts, and up. My definition of small is 1000 to 3000 watts.
lurker • June 4, 2026 2:40 PM
@JG5
1000 to 3000 watts is about the power the sun supplies to the average house roof. The major supplier for equipment to trap and convert this is currently in the western Pacific. What’s the greater risk, suspended particles disrupting sunlight, or Chinese spies in the solar panels?
Clive Robinson • June 4, 2026 6:06 PM
@ JG5,
Sorry I tried to reply but got auto-modded, then auto-modded again after editing and re-submit…
I’ve kept a copy so I can try later “in parts” if it does not appear.
@clive,
those “fill in the blank” time machine data points are being used in drone warfare for target selection. stale information, ai hallucinations and blam!
they’re criminalizing knowledge possession and association to rationalize reclassifying civilians as aiding and abetting or acceptable losses…
we are all living on borrowed npu-time.
oh i forgot, selectors cross entities: include persecution for ‘sins of the father’ also.
Clive Robinson • June 5, 2026 5:50 AM
@ Bruce, ALL,
We know from your various postings you fly a lot.
From this we can figure out you probably glow slightly more than most others 😉
But have you considered the other risks of being on aircraft that nobody on board knows or can navigate themselves?
Aircraft especially need radio navigation systems some only work within a few miles of their transmitter location and need the aircraft to approach from a given direction. Others are more omnidirectional and work out to maybe a hundred miles or so due to “horizon issues”.
Which means once out over the oceans and similar independent navigation has to come from Space primarily from pulsars down through various mathematical processes to become the ubiquitous “Global Navigation Satellite Systems”(GNSS).
And for various reasons all four current GNSS are “vulnerable”[1] to either jamming or spoofing[2]. Due to the use of low power TX and sharing the same frequency spectrum in L-Band.
Well this video has just dropped[3] to tell you that things are worse than most mistakenly think,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
Let me ask you a question after you’ve watched it and bearing in mind that many are starting to think we are going to enter more global aerial conflict with hypersonic missiles, UAVs and similar in the next couple of years,
“Do you really want to be in an aircraft when somebody jams or worse spoofs the navigation system that most commercial aircraft are reliant upon?”
A similar question obviously for those that use GPS for driving or drones.
[1] It’s why we know the Russian systems actually have “tricorner reflectors” on them so lasers and telescopes along with “tables” in computers can be used… Think “celestial navigation” but with man made objects. China likewise has as part of it’s “Cryptography ‘Quantum Key Delivery” from Space” been investigating similar celestial navigation. In the UK laser gyros and SQUID used for magnetic based systems have been researched going well back into the last century. We can assume the military research institutions in most of the top first world nations –ie G20 etc– have been doing the same.
[2] Any radio system can be jammed it is just a question of getting a sufficiently strong signal at your adversaries receive antenna such that it’s 6 to 12db above the wanted signal. Spoofing on the otherhand is like a “replay attack” that is you fake the adversaries modulation such that you take over much further down the receive chain often further than just into baseband.
[3] Those “in the industry” have known about this for a little while and are not really surprised about it. After all both Russia and North Korea are known to have both jammed and spoofed Sat-Nav for some years now with maritime reports of ships seeing their GPS position jump by twenty nautical miles (think just under 50kM).
@Clive Robinson,
@ Bruce, ALL,
We know from your various postings you fly a lot.
From this we can figure out you probably glow slightly more than most others
Is that a Terry A. Davis reference? 😀
Clive Robinson • June 5, 2026 8:18 AM
@ o,
With regards,
“Is that a Terry A. Davis reference?”
Err no Terry is unfortunately dead, and his work has not been further worked on.
What I was getting at is that a “transatlantic flight” can give you the same dose of interesting radiation as a medical X-Ray.
In the UK many many years ago there was a company that made a sort of Oat based Breakfast for children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Brek
They had a TV advert that had children in it (on their way to school on a winter’s morning). It had an orange glow drawn in around them, like that you would expect from one of those ancient 1KW electric bar heaters.
They used the advert for many years untill a BBC 2 dark humour show –Not the Nine O’Clock News Show” took the micky out of it.
Redy Brek used the tag line of “give your children that inner glow” and the satire show changed it to “do you want your children to glow in the dark” and then added “move to Windscale”,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt1Jd4stPFQ
The dark side of this can be seen in Kyle Hill’s video on what was –at the time it happened back in 1957– the worst nuclear accident in Europe if not the world,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EGas-5BUbnk
The only reason the accident was not a lot lot worse was one man physicist Terence Price who had realised the potential danger of the pile design and who pushed against just about everyone to have filter traps added to the Windscale Reactor chimneys. Luckily the man leading the project thus design team Sir John Cockcroft took the warnings seriously. The traps became known as “Cockcroft’s Folly” but soon it was realised they were anything but. A whole series of “minor events” were kept quiet by the UK Government, that even tried to “hush up” the 57 fire. It was years before the full extent of the issues became known. And even today, the site is heavily contaminated with broken fuel cartridges that won’t be cleaned up untill 2040 at the earliest.
faceless agony run run! • June 5, 2026 10:46 AM
@ Clive Robinson,
Err no Terry is unfortunately dead, and his work has not been further worked on.
Yes, people have conntinued to work on/fork TempleOS. If you keep up with the chatter here or ask about development someone should help.
What I was getting at is that a “transatlantic flight” can give you the same dose of interesting radiation as a medical X-Ray.
Thanks. Yes, I know, but thanks for going into detail about it, I always learn something from you. ^_^
I was referring to the, “Glow in the Dark” MEME from Terry about CIA. 🙂
Clive Robinson • June 5, 2026 3:05 PM
@ Bruce,
Is US GNSS a Numbers Station?
Is a question asked and researched by some one you know,
The Empty Field That Wasn’t
GPS, OTAD and Two Decades of Encrypted Broadcasts
“Cold War shortwave numbers stations broadcast strings of digits to anonymous listeners, content that’s meaningless to anyone without a matching one-time pad.
They still operate today. As it turns out, GPS broadcasts in much the same way. Buried in every L1 C/A navigation message is Subframe 4, Page 17—a 176-bit field that IS-GPS-200 reserves for “special messages with the specific contents at the discretion of the Operating Command.”
Every satellite broadcasts it. Every receiver decodes the subframe that contains it. And for nearly two decades, no one has publicly explained what it contains.
We analyzed 12.16 million observations in this field from 2007 through early 2026. The content is not text. It is encrypted material consistent with the military’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) global rekeying network. For 19 years, every operational GPS satellite has been a numbers station—broadcasting ciphertext on a public channel, to billions of receivers, in plain sight.“
https://lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=865273&p=62&view=issueViewer
JG5 • June 5, 2026 5:23 PM
Reporting a couple of coincidences. Another pleasant day in the Pacific NorthBest. Within a couple of hours of mentioning #Starfish Prime, I see the headline that there is a geomagnetic alert. YMMV I looked out the window at 10:30 PM and the only glow on the horizon was the last twilight. We are pretty close to 49 degrees north here.
Solar Storm Coming Tonight, Quakes, Storms, Magnetic Wind | S0 News June.4.2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VbqxVj63J4
Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2026/06/04/upgraded-severe-northern-lights-alert-for-23-states-thursday/
Upgraded ‘Severe’ Northern Lights Alert For 25 States Thursday
NOAA has upgraded its aurora forecast, with strong to severe geomagnetic storms possible Thursday and Friday, raising Northern Lights chances across 25 U.S. states.
The day before, I was sitting out on the street in another beautiful day when I realized that I had sat just across the street 34 years previously, to the week, probably to the day. And it was equally pleasant then. The group next to me said something about “freedom” just before I stood up to get a refill. I put up my hands as if surrendering and said, “We may never be free.” Got a laugh out of the crowd. When I returned, this was playing
Fleetwood Mac – The Chain (Official Music Video) [HD]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBYHwH1Vb-c
Subscribe to comments on this entry
Leave a comment
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.























