With the change of seasons from summer to fall, the Albany mobbers segued from inflatable goblins, to Veterans Day flag waving, and then to air-bloated fowl, soon to be followed by inflatable Santa. Given the circumstances, finishing off the long-promised piece on how mobbers abuse inflatable Santa would be timely (Coming soon: Why for mobbers, inflatable Santa is the next-best thing to an inflatable doll or, why cities like Albany, California should update municipal codes to protect residents from predatory crime), but for now I’ll let mention of the topic stand as a heads-up to investigators and a caution on making inflatable toys available to criminals, not to mention a note on the malicious use of air compressors “in plain sight.” (Ever see someone pass out when nitrous oxide displaces oxygen?) Instead of talking about the mobbers’ fetish for blowup Santa, I’m going to share a bit of information about something I found in the basement of the Albany house.
After I stripped away the coaxial cable from the north side of the Albany house a few years back, it was clear that much of the higher-range mobbing abuse originated from the AT&T network interface device (NID). I wrote about the process of removing the NID in Mobbing, infrasound and leaky feeders (part 2), and how its removal significantly diminished the clatter. The NID was located toward the back of the house, on the infrastructure side bordered by a property line shared with the lowlife house. A fence is also shared with that house, a segment of which had gone missing when my mother still inhabited this house. The lowlife have been working to break other parts of the fence since; when I was out of town earlier this year, for example, I came back to find they had dug under a fence post and rendered our front gate unusable.
When I began spending more time at the Albany house the first year of the pandemic, my mother told me how the lowlife (my nickname for them, not hers) removed the planks of the leaning segment and stacked them on his side. This enabled line-of-sight access on the ground level from the walkway that runs the length of the lowlife property through a window to the gas furnace and gas hot water heater in our basement. Having learned how foundational these appliances have been to the mobbing at the Albany house, this year I shut down the natural gas service at the house, discontinued use of the gas furnace, and replaced the gas hot water heater with a (ventless) electric hot water heater.
The replacement of the hot water heater was eventful (Mobbing noise: Signal diversion and the failure to sound). Among other things, what the plumber described as a “telephone wire” was affixed to the gas line on the hot water heater. But it wasn’t until I decided to isolate the out-of-service furnace from the complex of heating vents that I got a good look at the ceramic plate shown in the following image.
When I began stripping the house of unnecessary communications devices and wires years back, I severed some obvious twisted pair wiring a few feet from the ceramic plate, but I did not suspect the significance of knob-and-tube wiring and the possibility of carrier current transmission in being mobbed. After the plumber held up the wire he’d found on the gas line, however, a ceramic plate that secured both knob-and-tube and communications wires in proximity to the furnace became all the more interesting ( Mobbing HVAC: Sources of RFI in furnaces and air conditioning).
IMPORTANT: Though suspicious of a connection, I did not tamper with the wires affixed to the plate once I saw the knob-and-tube wiring. I value my life and the home I’m trying to preserve too much to risk destabilizing an old electrical system and causing a fire. The ceramic plate and its wires remain.
Unfortunately, despite having licensed electricians working in the house a couple of times now, I’ve no idea of the purpose or function of the ceramic plate and whether it might have been used at one time to bring low-voltage communications wiring in over knob-and-tube, in other words, for carrier current transmission. I did do a bit of research, hoping to find some explanation online, but nothing has turned up yet. Would such a plate connect a knob-and-tube antenna to communications wiring (a landline)? Should having one of these in a house where some knob-and-tube remains in use be considered a vulnerability to network exploits that leverage powerline technology.
These issues don’t fall squarely into the realm of the licensed electrician or the network security expert. But with aging infrastructure and the rapid strides of digitization, these are things we should know.
