A mobber once said they could “always get in.” But—signal be damned—some conditions may be more challenging than others.
One such condition was the recent replacement of the gas water heater with an electric heater at the Albany house, accompanied by the shutoff of the natural gas line. Along with the fuel and tank change, my plumbers asked what they should do with what looked like a “telephone wire” that was affixed to the gas line of the old water heater. We did not restore it to the new tank. All told, the change significantly interfered with the mobbers’ ability to divert sound onto the Roku video stream for at least a few hours, the mobbing signal cutting into the sound stream again and again.
These days in Albany, when I plug in and start up the Roku there seems to be increased contention over the playback stream. I am forced to try to shield the Roku and find an angle for the television that minimizes exposure to rogue signal. While vying over access to programming, I get a succession of HDCP errors like this one.
Lately I’ve also seen a few errors indicating that I am trying to connect to a media server that is not supported.
The effect of mobbing failure is easier to record and hear than the successful injection of the harassing stream. The following recording is from last night.
The volume increases twice during the recording. The first increase is my manual adjustment to heighten the sound of the cutting in and out. The second increase probably occurred when the mobber’s connection or acquisition issue was resolved.
Keep in mind that this kind of man-in-the-middle attack is what I live with on a constant basis. This is true to the extent that, given the fact they are still free to operate, I sometimes find myself wondering if they’ve set up their own WordPress server to host this blog. But I do seem to have a presence on Google search and hope that my Cloudflare subscription makes that sort of exploit too dangerous. Besides, most of those who call themselves mobbers probably don’t have the technical chops.
Roku is a streaming device that includes WiFi capabilities. I use Roku on Ethernet and do my best to ensure it is off any wireless network. The TV includes a tuner that would probably allow for over-the-air reception of a rogue stream. Based on the fact that the effect of mobbing television is usually the overlaying of what I used to call a “harassment track” onto the sound stream, during aggressive harassment or perhaps as the result of jamming, the Roku stream loses sync and I have to re-sync by changing the Roku channel and then changing it back again.
Loss of synchronization means that sound and picture are not synchronized. This is usually discernible in speech or “voice over” when the uttered words don’t match the movements of the mouth. You might see this effect in films that are dubbed. Loss of synchronization is an effect I associate more with the Seattle mobbing implementation.
For more information on video diversion and a link to a YouTube demonstration by security researchers Craig Young (@craigtweets) and Ken Westin (@kwestin), see Radiohead: Cell phones are radios (part 3).
One response to “Mobbing noise: Signal diversion and the failure to sound”
[…] replacement of the hot water heater, described in, was eventful (Mobbing noise: Signal diversion and the failure to sound). Among other things, the plumber found that what he described as a “telephone wire” […]