Van Eck Phreaking | Hacker News Reader

Van Eck Phreaking

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39 pointslakeeffect16 comments

...and the entertaining tangent story involving Van Eck Phreaking and vintage furniture.

"Entertaining" isn't a word I'd use to describe that overlong digression in an otherwise entertaining novel. I love Stephenson, but he sure could use a stern editor at times.

Hopefully not to stern to leave out Capt'n Crunch and frozen milk.

How much of this just comes down to taste? I enjoyed that whole book, including the digression.

I enjoyed it at the time, but whenever I re-read it, I typically skip over that section.

For what it's worth, there's a huge audience for Stephenson's work, so I'm perfectly fine with him digressing in his books - I always enjoy it on a first read-through, and most of them are enjoyable during a re-read, too. No need to try to take those away to satisfy a slightly larger audience.

Fair point. I didn't consider re-reads. Although, as you say, it's easy for the bored re-reader to just skip it.

I certainly would. Some of my favorite passages ever, fascinating stuff.

You found page after page of awkwardly written furniture fetish fascinating? Whatever blows your hair back, I guess.

It certainly wasn't the only digression either. I think you sign up for this when you pick up a Stephenson book. It's part of his intellectual style.

The Diamond Age is like 75% digression.

Markus Kuhn’s work on “optical eavesdropping” — reconstructing a CRT image from reflected visible light — is really interesting: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf

(with video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5_tpq5ejFQ )

This SDR implementation looked really interesting for sniffing monitor output - https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR

Alas I don't have a suitable SDR to try it with.

Holy crap, it works for distances up to 120m using a custom built antenna. https://youtu.be/8HV70b-DpE0?t=23m46s

Though $50 will get you enough of an antenna, amp and SDR to get started...

If you want to play around with Van Eck Phreaking, try https://packages.debian.org/sid/tempest-for-eliza , which lets you listen to MIDI-like music via AM radio from your computer monitor.

Unrelated, but at the bottom of http://celeriac.net/sx/public/ is a sonification of Van Eck's sequence

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