Fluorescent lamps (don't) have ears | Hacker News Reader

Fluorescent lamps (don't) have ears

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51 pointszdw10 comments

Everybody is focused on the tubes... What about the diffuser with pyramid shaped lenses? the highly directional light projects a beam (flourescent lights are known for awfully harsh shadows) through the thin, lightweight 24x24" or 24x48" lens(diffuser). as the light is projected down a minimum of 8 feet the tiny deflection from sound hitting the diffuser is amplified. Then, at an interface of light and shadow on the floor, the moving projection becomes a brightness signal that has audio encoded in it. they could use a lens and a photodiode. Didn't exactly have 5000fps cameras falling off trees 40 years ago.

If you get a high frame rate video of a space, there's plenty of other objects that can act as visual transducers: https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/.

I as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to the claim that ambient audio modulates the fluorescent light. But I could sure use more details on what analysis was done to the photos. Sounds like there were several photos taken, say 100ms(?) apart. Then the photos were subtracted pixel-by-pixel to look at the variations in time (between photos) or spatially (neighboring pixels)? I still think a photo-diode AC-coupled to a high gain amplifier fed into an oscilloscope would be the more conclusive test. Do a audio frequency sweep from 100-10kHz. Both with the fluorescent light on, and then again with the light off (as a control, in case something else in the setup is sensitive to the audio).

He has the integration time set to 1/8000 s.

I assume the idea is that you're effectively randomly sampling (with each shutter press) that amount of time of the sine wave. You should see a distribution of brightness if there's a signal present, unless you get unlucky and sample at the same brightness (many would be required). Capture many with and without audio signal present, compare std deviation. If they're the same, no signal.

But yes, truly terrible lab report. ;) Who knows if this data is meaningful.

I wonder if the original rumor came from a bulb with a failing ballast, with a "less stable" arc, or maybe with a mic/diaphragm integrated into it, that modulated the light by sinking some current? I always assume these more wizardly things are based in truth.

There is also the problem that that impedance mismatch between the gas in the tube and the glass surrounding it is huge so very little power is coupled. Interesting things would be for the tube length/resonance to be closer to the sound frequency of interest (eg 200-2000Hz) and close to critically damped. I have no idea if that's the case.

The second question is whether one can simply modify the tube/ballast in a visually imperceptible way. For example, one could insert an IC in the ballast that modulates the power draw of the lamp dependent on the ambient coupled acoustic/vibration power (eg possibly using the lamp as a vibrational microphone). Then pulse modulating the power draw of the lamp at a relatively low noise part of the power spectrum and within the band of the main power transformer filters. The lamps easily draw 40-80W so there's lots of room to work, and there are already Power Factor Correction implementations that use this simple technique to make lamp's inductive loads "look resistive".

So what's notable is that either the ballast of the lamp could be tampered with or one of the bulbs. Either one could allow transmission out along power lines, if standard transformers and capacitors are used for power delivery. This is how home powerline ethernet works and it transmits Gb/s rather than the few kb/s needed to get voice out over the power lines.

Case in point. I saw a single Korean Samjung lamp interfere with AM radio stations (<1MHz) from 100 meters, by just clipping the power draw of a small fluorescent with a thyristor and oscillator at the ballast of a desk lamp to provide PFC so that thousands of lamps could be placed in huge open plan offices.

Fluorescent lamps are already RF noise sources. Modifying a tube to modulate the noise would be a useful eavesdropping device. If you used a digital modulation mode with a scrambler (the pseudorandom device that makes the number of 1 and 0 bits roughly equal) the emissions would look just like standard white noise to receivers that didn't know the decode pattern.

Now all you have to do is to get your modified lamps into the supply chain for lamp replacement in the secure area.

If someone has physical access enough to install a modified tube, there are far simpler and less detectable means of recording audio.

You modify tens of thousands of tubes and they are installed as they are replaced in the target facility.

One way I could see this working is with old bulbs - when you’re near the threshold for it flickering, perhaps sound can modulate the light.

Or perhaps the contacts need to be realistically cruddy and intermittent, and the long glass tube acts as a sounding body to trigger an intermittent contact, encoding sound into light.

Would be interesting to do a FFT of pixels in the sequence of images and see if anything is in there.

Just because the brightness fluctuations aren’t noticeable doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

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