Tempest for Eliza

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the quality of the music is not exactly what you are used to :-) but at least it works!

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Tempest For Eliza (c) 2001 by Erik Thiele This program uses the GPL license. see the file COPYING for details. a very important passage will be pasted here, too.: NO WARRANTY 11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. 12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. this means if you get an electric shock from an old radio or crash your aircraft because of radio signals, it is YOUR problem! ok. now to the more interesting but less important topics: What is it ? ------------ Tempest for Eliza is a Program that uses your computer monitor to send out AM radio signals. You can then hear computer generated music in your radio. this document first describes tempest for eliza, the old program that plays music like your cellphone does when you get a phonecall. then it describes tempest for mp3 which you can use to play mp3 files :-) How does this work ? -------------------- All electronic devices send out eletromagnetic waves. so does your monitor. and your monitor does it all the time. and at very high frequencies. high enough for your short wave AM radio. all you have to do is display the "correct" image on your screen and your monitor will emit the "right" signals. Tempest for Eliza displays pictures on your screen. one for each note in the song. [Note: Markus G. Kuhn's and Ross J. Anderson's paper; "Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission Using Electromagnetic Emanations" was used as a reference when programming Tempest-AM. This paper is a must read before going further testing Tempest-AM. The paper is availabe from http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih98-tempest.pdf I strongly recommend to read the paper thoroughly.] Why this program ? ------------------ You need no additional hardware to understand that it is really possible to observe your computer without physically touching it. (tempest). I wrote this program because it was fun and because it teaches in an amusing way that tempest really exists. i want people to understand that their computers can be observed. And last but not least you can listen to music without a soundcard! More information on Tempest --------------------------- Tempest and electromagnetic radiation is an interesting topic. There aren't very much public literature on this topic. Luckily, there are a few technical papers and web sites on the net that are a must read. Papers to read: o Markus G. Kuhn's and Ross J. Anderson's, "Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission Using Electromagnetic Emanations" http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih98-tempest.pdf o Wim van Eck, "Electromagnetic Radiation from Video Display Units: An Eavesdropping Risk?" http://jya.com/emr.pdf o Christopher Seline, "Eavesdropping On the Electromagnetic Emanations of Digital Equipment: The Laws of Canada, England and the United States" http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/Security/tempest_legal.draft Here's a few links to start from: o Ros Anderson's website, is a good starting point and has links to go further. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/#Tempest o The Complete, Unofficial TEMPEST Information Page, a great site. A lot of links to other websites and papers. http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/tempest.html Compiling and runnning ---------------------- you must have libSDL installed. see http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/ type ./configure make now start X11. make sure that you choose low colordepth this gives much higher speed !!! 8 bpp is optimal. if the cpu runs at 100% the music will slow down, i.e. short tunes will get longer than they usually are. the song will sound bad :) start xvidtune. write down the values of HDisplay VDisplay HTotal Pixel Clock now go and get a short wave AM receiver. (pocket radio, put switch into SW position (if it is named this way;)) dial close to 10 Megahertz now start ./tempest_for_eliza 105000000 1024 768 1400 10000000 songs/forelise pixelclock Hdisplay VDisplay HTotal radio music *1000000 frequency file the program runs in fullscreen. now SLOWLY move a little left and right on your radio to find the 10 Megahertz. You will hear a Song for Eliza from Ludwig van Beethoven the song will be on the radio at multiple frequencies. but the best transmission is at the frequency you gave on the commandline. if your computer makes too much noise on that frequency you could also try some other radio frequencies. it is up to you. now go and try other songs included in the songs/ subdir !! Let's be a spy -------------- Observe your computer from within another room ! take the radio into another room. play with the antenna touch earth connections or other things. just play around. depending on the distance and the quality of your monitor you will hear good voice. i have a TCO'99 monitor and i can still hear GOOD music ! Tempest for MP3 --------------- get your favourite mp3 file to the current directory. let's call it 'foobar.mp3'. make sure you have "amp" and "sox" installed. you must use X11 with 8 bits colordepth. use the old -bpp 8 option to your xserver or the new -fbbpp 8 option if you have a newer Xserver. first we need to find out what the correct sampling rate will be. therefore start: ./tempest_for_mp3 115500000 1024 768 1350 810 1500000 0 20 notexist.raw pixel-clock resy vtotal playmode resx htotal radio-frequency amplification filename note that the vtotal parameter is a new one and must be read from the xvidtune screen! also note that the notexist.raw file does not exist. we just want to see the output of the program, play no music yet. it will display: "audio file frequency should be 13519.890261 Hz" now take this value and convert your mp3 like this: ./mksong.sh 13519 foobar.mp3 cool.raw you can now listen to it with this command: ./tempest_for_mp3 115500000 1024 768 1350 810 1500000 0 20 cool.raw notice the low radio frequency of only 1500 KHz. well... i found out that you actually don't need a short wave radio if you put your antenna close enough to your computer screen. lower frequencies also work. and even nowadays most radios can receive AM waves :) so finally you can send to any radio you have. (but no FM, sorry...) the playmode and amplification parameters control the algorithm for playback. you can choose between playmode 0 and playmode 1. playmode 1 produces a correct AM signal. amplification 1 is correct. if you increase amplification the audio signal will be clipped. but since there is so much disturbing noise anyway, this doesn't matter. you can use playmode 0 to further increase output energy. the signal is not very good anymore then :) but it is louder. the problem is i cannot use the time when the electron beam does the blanking and retrace phase. unfortunately there's no way around this, folks. if your song has heavy basses, you shouldn't over-amplify, because you won't hear the melody while the bass is drumming then... Credits ------- The original idea is from Pekka Riikonen. (see file AUTHORS) he wrote the program tempest-AM-0.9. i used a simplification of his routines to create the signal.

(erikyyy at erikyyy dot de, Erik Thiele)



