I re-read the Wikipedia article on
modems to find the brand-name behind the CAT acoustically-coupled modem. All-in-all, it was a rather enlightening read. Here is my response to the replies thus far.
Aloone:
Isn't TexMex actually right on track by implying that the magnetron would sooner degauss your PC's data drives than compromise electronic security measures?
Refalm:
Although it's possible to send and receive files thru radio (actually done that), you'd need special hardware and software.
Yes, it's somewhere along the same line of thought as acoustic modulation.
This guy is simply nuts. He thinks DirectX graphics aren't from Microsoft, and hackers put effort in placing a few pictures on his computer, that Debian is spying on us, that a NX connection wizard is meant to hack other computers, etc.
I think that this guy
[sic] just basically misunderstands the concepts involved in operating a system, let alone compromising one. As for her possible neuroses, I dare not delve into those without a personal encounter.
It's the kind of person that doesn't receive sun light on a daily basis, lives in some shitty apartment in a major city, and in general doesn't have anything other to do than cooking up conspiracy theories.
...or the kind of person that saw
The Net,
Sneakers,
Hackers,
The Matrix (and so on) a few too many times and found her sense of reason compromised by a terror stirred by a profound misunderstanding of technologies as they exist today.
Vanessa:
I would take what the author says with about a truckload of salt. For the most part, Dark_Me has addressed the various flaws with her rationale. However...
Dark_Me:
Unless someone had prior access to her computer and knew she was going to buy it it's not.
A number of unpatched systems leave worldwide retailers everyday. It's not wholly improbable that she hit a bad sequence of events, culminating in her system being one of the many unpatched Windows systems compromised mere seconds from being connected to a public network. Other than that, though, I can't help but feel that she has direly misunderstood the purpose of half the software out there.
