Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/05/hey-remember-number-stations.html
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The cold war ended? Or there became more effective ways of sharing coded info? Both?
[ETA] and if I had read past the headline, I would have seen they are still around! TIL!
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Are they really, though? They are simple, low tech, and very effective.
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Not even the cleverest hacker can work out who the sender and receiver are. At most, the sender’s location can be determined by triangulation.
A receiver in a third-world country doesn’t need any suspiciously expensive or sophisticated hardware/software, or even an internet connection.
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And yet they are still a thing according to the body of the post.
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Yes, go look at my ETA!
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I could be very wrong, but you can’t really track who is listening to a station. I also can’t think of a safer one-way mode of communication for someone in the field.
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“Obsolete” is what saved Battlestar Galactica.
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Maybe the Iowa Democratic Party should have used numbers stations to communicate caucus results.
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Happens to the best of us, right? 
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What I think is great about the fact that these are still a thing is the number of sci-fi universes which also have some variant of “numbers stations” as a thing - many instances of “We’re picking up an encrypted transmission but can’t determine the recipient unless they reply!” sort of thing.
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I like to think someone out there has a ham radio and a burning desire to share every digit of pi with the world.
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It’s like talk radio - but for arithmeticians.
Or…it’s a radio version of Numberwang!
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If you are talking about the space travel type of SF, radio is the only type of communication available, barring some yet-to-be-invented form of FTL sub-etha comms.
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I suspect that the endurance of the numbers stations is due to the fact that the one-time pad method of encryption is absolutely secure, as outlined in the video. Digital encryption is easier and more convenient, but is always ultimately breakable, and electronic devices are vulnerable to a number of hacks that don’t even need to defeat the cipher. If you have the resources to distribute the keys, OTP encryption is simply more effective than anything electronic.
Also, methods other than radio can be disrupted, as these folks found out in 2013:
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As a kid, these number stations used to freak me right out. Some time in the '80s, some band I was into used a sampling of a numbers station in the background, leading me eventually to The Conet Project(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project)]. Still good for a creepy vibe.
(edit: must’ve been the '90s, because it was Boards of Canada’s In A Beautiful Place in the Country)
(Second edit, upon return from a very pleasant musical odyssey: It’s BoC, but the track is Aquarius, from Music Has the Right to Children, which was '98,)
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I’m saying numbers aloud right now
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What happened to them? Wilco happened to them.
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