My Secure Dream laptop

Not quite that, but the Amiga desktop computer could run its OS - called Workbench - with full GUI from a single 880KB floppy disk. The 0.5MB ROM (called 'Kickstart') was an integral part of the OS. The last major release of Workbench, before the company went belly up, was v3.0 and took up all of 4MB HDD space fully installed, but could still run from a single 880KB diskette with

24-bit graphics and 4-channel sound. It was fully plug-and-play 10 years before the plug-and-pray of Windoze 95.

Green Xenon wibbled on Tuesday 02 March 2010 17:07

Why not just get a normal laptop and pack it with thermite? If "they" come, light the magnesium fuse and run - won't be much left that's readable.

--
Tim Watts

Managers, politicians and environmentalists: Nature's carbon buffer.

IDs

come,

Too expensive. I can't afford to keep destroying and buying new laptops.

... but it won't achieve the degree of anonymity that you seem to want.

You haven't dealt at all with the issue of radio direction finding. A wireless card that's as powerful as you say, will be quite easy to detect at a distance whenever it's associated with a WiFi access point. A little bit of RDF triangulation, and your position will be spotted to within a couple of feet. The people searching for you (if they do) simply won't *care* that your laptop no longer has evidence that you were the guy they're looking for... they'll know it was you via radiolocation before they even confront you and you have a chance to kill the power.

Rather than dream about a super-anonymous laptop, to use to vent your anger at all of society's quirks, you really ought to work at finding a healthier way to deal with your anger, and a more constructive way to deal with the underlying social issues. Simply dumping your anger onto other people, by provoking them into outrage, is unlikely to bring you the long-term peace and serenity that you seem to desire. What you're planning to do is the emotional equivalent of toxic-waste dumping, crossed with a tantrum suitable for a five-year-old.

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
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I think that there are meds that can help with paranoia.

John

Is there a way around the RDF triangulation?

Is there a way for me to figure if I'm being triangulated before it's too late?

1. Stop doing anything requiring security.
2. Turn the laptop off.
3. Wrap the laptop with aluminum foil, two layers will be fine.
4. If you need more security, wrap some foil around yourself, or on the walls of your room, or both.
5. Above all, keep away from usenet groups, "they" are watching you.

Wow what's up with the paranoia? What are you planning to do?

No RF triangulation is passive so you wouldn't know until they kicked your door in.

No, not at all reliably. Anything you do to obscure the RF position of your laptop, will inevitably decrease its transmission and reception range... and thus eliminate the whole advantage of having a strong transmitter.

The triangulation process can be (and usually is) an entirely passive process... the people who are hunting for a transmitterdon't need to transmit any signals at all. Their RDF'ing won't interfere in any way with what you, or other people are doing via wireless. So, no, you can't depend on being able to detect that you're being hunted.

Of course, if you see silent-bladed black helicoptors drifting by overhead, it might be something to worry about.

I've even seen some high-end WiFi access point / router devices on the market which have multiple transmit/receive antennas, and can do RF beam-shaping under software control. In effect, the access point figures out the direction to each client system it's talking to, and "points" the antenna system electronically in order to give the best range and sensitivity. In effect, these access points are "triangulation ready".

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
     boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

too

If I use this laptop in public place, will it be more difficult to figure me out? There are a lot of open wireless access points available to the public and can be found in many coffee shops. If I use those, will it be easier for me to elude those who are after me? After there are so many people using wireless access points these days.

That sounds a lot like the access router has phased-array antennas.

Why not build a similar array into the laptop lid? Once it finds the router and locks its main lobe onto it, stray signal available for triangulation would drop drastically. Seekers would have to get lucky enough to stumble into more than one of the sidelobes to triangulate.

The array would have to be rather larger then the typical couple of stubs in the laptop lid; it'd probably take up the whole lid, and make it a bit thicker, but so what; laptops are extremely thin these days.

This would also make signal dropouts less likely due to moving- object-induced multipath distortion even for isotropic-antenna access points. The laptop's array would be able to actively track the signal as it shifted around from the laptop's POV; you know, that alone makes the idea commercially viable. That would also make the sidelobes shift around, making triangulation that much more difficult.

I really ought to patent this stuff.

Yeah, if the Black Hats have access to that, you're cooked. But, can the antenna-aiming information for each client be accessed from the router? I doubt that, since it has to be able to change on the fly.

Mark L. Fergerson

How would having a phased-array on the laptop make it more difficult make it more difficult to triangulate me? I'm interested. This phased-array devices is another essential for my secure dream laptop because it will make it harder to link my profile with my identity.

The original IBM PC XT had BASIC in ROM and was useable with no floppies ("cassette BASIC" is what they called it); it was designed that way so that a potential buyer could start "cheap".

You do not understand; buy them in 100 lot quantities and get (1) a big discount,and (2) the maker will find ways to make them at lower cost to support the higher volume).

Nice. I had a limited experience with the early IBM PCs as I started out with Amigas. My 1992 Amiga A1200, still in fully functional condition with a 14 MHz CPU and 2MB onboard RAM, can still run rings around a modern Windows box at multitasking. Heck, even my 1985 A500 can do that. Different screen resolutions for each task, no shutdown process, no virtual memory needed - ever.

Once, back in the late 90s when it looked as if the Amiga was going to be seriously revived, a national computer magazine asked me to write an article about Amigas. To back up my claims about multitasking, I ran _ten_ different tasks simultaneously on my A1200 enhanced with a 25MHz processor and 8MB EDO RAM. The tasks were creating a new partition on the HDD, printing a long document on a DMP, copying several large files, playing music, rendering a satellite DEM, some math process, running an animation, autorouting a PCB, etc. It did all that smoooothly, albeit slowly. Peak memory usage (no virtual memory) was 5.5MB. Imagine what it could do with a modern CPU and say, 128MB RAM.

Tin foil hat?

Nial.

Did you read what I wrote? Do you know how phased arrays work? Do you know what main and side-lobes are in this context?

also see

Building such an antenna array is the easy part; the signal-steering circuitry and software will be the fun parts.

Mark L. Fergerson

IP Information - 98.154.37.244 IP address: 98.154.37.244 Reverse DNS: cpe-98-154-37-244.socal.res.rr.com. Reverse DNS authenticity: [Verified] ASN: 20001 ASN Name: ROADRUNNER-WEST IP range connectivity: 1 Registrar (per ASN): ARIN Country (per IP registrar): US [United States] Country Currency: USD [United States Dollars] Country IP Range: 98.152.0.0 to 98.155.255.255 Country fraud profile: Normal City (per outside source): Diamond Bar, California Country (per outside source): US [United States] Private (internal) IP? No IP address registrar: whois.arin.net Known Proxy? No Link for WHOIS: 98.154.37.244

--
Greed is the root of all eBay.

What makes you think that if "they" come after you, you'll have the opportunity to buy a new laptop, or much else either?

;-)

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)