Research Experiments and tools that make you want to knit tinfoil into your hat
Some of these stories sound completely ridiculous.
The unfortunate part is that they’re usually backed by a research paper, a vulnerability disclosure, a radio receiver, a satellite, a badly configured system, or someone discovering that a piece of technology was never designed with today’s threat model in mind.
Tinfoil Files is where I collect them.
The rules
Every file tries to answer three questions:
- Can it actually work?
- How difficult is it in practice?
- Should anyone outside a lab actually care?
Files
#001 — Tracked by Thunder
Your microphone may be recording more than speech.
Lightning creates acoustic and electromagnetic signals that can be detected and located. Someone has demonstrated that thunder itself can be acoustically localized, while global lightning networks can provide independently located lightning events. Put the two together and the humble thunderclap starts looking a lot more like a geolocation signal.
Status: Scary but pretty hard
More files pending investigation.