The exploit involved the very powerful (500KW) Aspidistra transmitter, coupled to a directional antenna farm. With that power, they could make it sound like a local station in the target area.

With a staff of fake announcers, a fake German band, and recordings of recent speeches from high-ranking Nazis, they would smoothly switch from merely relaying the German network to emulating it with their own staff. They could then make modifications to news broadcasts, occasionally creating panic and confusion.

German transmitters were switched off during air raids, to prevent them from being used as navigational aids for bombers. But many were connected into a network and broadcast the same content. When a targeted transmitter switched off, Aspidistra began transmitting on their original frequency, initially retransmitting the German network broadcast as received from a still-active station. As a deception, false content and pro-Allied propaganda would be inserted into the broadcast. The first such "intrusion" was carried out on March 25, 1945, as shown in the operations order at the right.

On March 30, 1945, "Aspidistra" intruded into the Berlin and Hamburg frequencies warning that the Allies were trying to spread confusion by sending false telephone messages from occupied towns to unoccupied towns. On April 8, 1945, "Aspidistra" intruded into the Hamburg and Leipzig channels to warn of forged banknotes in circulation. On April 9, 1945, there were announcements encouraging people to evacuate to seven bomb-free zones in central and southern Germany. All these announcements were false.

The German radio network tried announcing "The enemy is broadcasting counterfeit instructions on our frequencies. Do not be misled by them. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority." The Aspidistra station made similar announcements, to cause confusion and make the official messages ineffective.

The New York Times rounds up using cell phones as hotspots: Though the reporter, Bob Tedeschi, mentions the issue of having to have an unlimited data plan to avoid unpleasant charges, and worries about bad drains and malicious users, he doesn't note that many carriers don't allow this kind of sharing or routing without a separate "tethering" plan, that can run $20 or more per month. Also, U.S. carriers have now all imposed a 5 GB per month reasonable use cap; some will cut you off, some charge you more, some cancel your service based on exceeding this use.

Gigabit Wi-Fi? Someday: TechWorld considers the IEEE's Very High Throughput (VHT) study group, which wants to start work on 1 Gbps or faster Wi-Fi standard for completion in 2012. With 802.11n offering raw symbol rates up to 600 Mbps--even though no devices have shipped with the radios and antennas to offer that optional high speed yet--there's interest in other frequencies that would allow faster encodings, as well as aggregating multiple links to achieve high speed rates. My experience in testing and using 2.4 GHz with Draft N would show that wide or aggregated channels doesn't work very well. The article's writer, Peter Judge, notes that ultrawideband had potential (over short distances) to approach the gigabit mark, but that UWB hasn't really reached the market in any substantive way years after it was promised to be a big technology.

Flight attendants express concerns about in-flight broadband porn: When I've spoken to airlines, industry experts, and service providers, I find that they all have stories about how porn is viewed on computers, through DVD players, and in convenient magazine form on planes today. Adding the Internet may provide new salacious imagery, but the problem predates Internet access, and filtering Internet service is never as good a solution as a social one. Someone idiotic enough to view porn on a plane over the Internet is also stupid enough to bring along inappropriate DVDs they watch while seated next to children. Flight attendants already have the power vested in them to take care of this. The flight attendants for American might be expressing this concern as part of a bargaining issue, where their responsibilities but not commensurate pay have increased.

Spokane ends free Wi-Fi: Remember Vivato? Boy, I sure do. A company with a reach far exceeding its grasp, Vivato initially powered Spokane's downtown network. The network has continued to run on some basis--I'm not sure using what equipment--and now will move from free to fee. OneEighty Networks will charge about $10 per month to cover the costs of the network, for which local businesses at one point chipped in.

Brazilian TAM airline signs up for in-flight calling, messaging: OnAir has signed up the Brazilian carrier TAM, which will deploy the service on its Airbus A320 craft. Brazil hasn't yet provided regulatory approval, so no launch date is noted. TAM is the largest domestic and international carrier for Brazil.

The HANG UP Act (Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace, cute) will make the regulatory actions statutory. Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio has been pushing such a move to prevent airlines from moving forward on such services despite the overwhelming distaste by American travelers. In Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, there appears to be less concern, and we'll see how it works out when calling starts to become widely available on RyanAir and other airlines by year's end.

AirCell's near-term launch with American Airlines of its GoGo Internet service will use various measures, including crew involvement, to prevent in-flight VoIP.

To enable in-flight calling, OnAir and others place a low-power picocell in an aircraft which handles all the frequencies that could be used by mobile phones. The phones associate with the picocell, keeping their power output low. The picocell could be used to prevent calls entirely, too.

Ostensibly this purchase allows JetBlue a faster and simpler path into operations. Whether it's worth it to JetBlue is hard to tell, except that they will likely be marketing this service to other airlines as a differentiator. It will be lower bandwidth than AirCell, but could be likewise cheaper and used for shorter-haul flights.

Verizon notes some of the technical details of their service's business status on a FAQ for their corporate customers, which has an oddly large amount of business detail. Verizon was obligated within two years of the end of the auction for the spectrum they occupied with their very inefficient narrowband analog service to cease operations on those frequencies. That date is about now (the certification of the auction results was close to two years ago), and Verizon clearly worked out the details to allow current customers to maintain continuity through the spectrum vacation and into JetBlue's hands on January 1.

As I noted a few days ago, a few sources had already tipped me that JetBlue's test aircraft with Wi-Fi onboard and email was using the ancient Airfone network, which is capable of slow dial-up modem speeds, rather than using the 1 MHz which could conceivably carry over 500 Kbps of data in each direction per plane.

Creative drops Wi-Fi music player: The formerly leading portable music player firm, before Apple and Microsoft entered the biz, confirmed a report that the Zen Share existed, but that the company chose to drop that Wi-Fi-enabled player. An under-wraps player may appear in about two months that could include Wi-Fi--the name Zen X-Fi could be revealing or not, as X-Fi is an audio-processing technology.

Inspiair's physics-defying technology sold, relabeled Max-Fi: I express my doubts about the combination of marketing promises, including area covered, low latency, and speed, and the collision of those promises with the laws of physics as well as regulatory issues. The lack of sales, noted in the article, tends to confirm my opinion, which is precisely what happened with Vivato after early positive response led to devices being built that couldn't meet the mark. Current claims are 30 sq km with 14 access points for outdoor coverage at the port of Antwerp, a network that's in a test. I wrote about Inspiair back in 2006.

Foster City, Calif., turns down MetroFi equipment offer: The city decided against paying $200,000 for MetroFi's gear, which serves about 1,500 people a month, partly because yearly operations would top $125,000.

Airworthiness is a separate measure that's been addressed by the European Aviation Safety Agency across the EU. The EC took this as an opportunity for push for pan-European telecom rules to avoid having to keep defining rules that have to be adopted across all member nations for pan-European services, like this and mobile satellite operation.

The very pro-consumer Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding, who already through force of will backed down European carriers to drop their cross-border roaming rates--later backed up by regulation--suggests that carriers think long and hard about the rates they charge for in-flight service. "However, if consumers receive shock phone bills, the service will not take-off," she said in an EC press release.

The social factors concerns are left to the airlines, with an implicit threat by the EC to keep on top of it. Reding said, "I also call on airlines and operators to create the right conditions on board aircraft to ensure that those who want to use in-flight communication services do not disturb other passengers."

The rules today affects phones that can use the 1800 MHz band (GSM 1800), which is estimated to cover phones used by 90 percent of European passengers--or is that 90 percent of travelers on European flights? Hard to know.

The picocells must not simply accept connections for 1800 MHz bands, but also prevent phones using 460 MHz, 900 MHz, and 2100 MHz from communicating with ground stations, which is a simple matter of providing a null carrier that associates with the phone yet provides it no path. No mentioned here is the 1700 MHz and 850 MHz frequencies used by GSM in the U.S., which one would expect would alos need to be blocked, even though quad-band GSM phones include the 1800 MHz band for use. Perhaps through automated selection that's not an issue.

Here's how it works: Inferno uses four frequencies spread out over 2 to 5 kHz. The idea behind it is that unlike a regular siren, these particular frequencies have a uniquely disturbing effect on people (and presumably cats, dogs and any other living thing). At 123 dB, it's loud, but not significantly louder than any other alarm system. The advantage, according to Dr. Goldman, is the combination of frequencies. The human ear just doesn't like it. I agree, I really didn't like it.

Note to the TSA: Dr. Goldman has had no problems bringing this thing onto airplanes.