Say, some alien just wanted to mess with us, but doesn’t invade, or even care enough to want to kill us, but seeing how everyone is on their phone all the time, they decided to just jam all our radios to watch us suffer. Their transmitting power they use is so powerful, its jamming signals are 1000 times stronger than the strongest radios we have, so there’s no way we can overpower the jamming.

What does the immediate aftermath look like?

What does it look like in the long term?

(Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it)

  • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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    20 hours ago

    Why can’t the aliens just use a quantum RNG to set the nanosecond to nanosecond amplitude change on each individual frequency?

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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      13 hours ago

      Those random numbers have a random distribution. Random uniform or random normal, I can average out those values to zero to remove the noise. This is indeed what GPS does for example. This wouldn’t be effective for blocking those types of radio signals.

      If you want to be effective, you need to know the symbol rate and cater your jamming to the application. There’s also other parameters of a radio signal besides amplitudes like polarity and your signal also has to propagate through free space and make it through the front end of my receiver which could be selective in other ways. You don’t typically have the privilege of transmitting directly into the receiving antenna.

      There’s an interesting related area called channel coding that you might be interested in that models noise and interference and figures out how to encode radio signals in ways where they are not easily disturbed.

      For your specific example, if you’re talking about changing the value randomly on every nanosecond, I would expect to see a one gigahertz main frequency with lower harmonics, which would likely look like pretty much nothing to most GPS devices.