I can never share the gospel of Attack of the Show with anyone besides Charles because a) Comcast doesn't carry G4 and b) there aren't enough colossal dorks around here. But if you've got DirecTV and a computer, you really ought to watch. Parts may be completely incomprehensible to those not yet beyond redemption, but the cast has enough charm and wit to keep everything moving. Right now I'm watching their year-end Best Of The Cons show, and it's pretty entertaining. But then, I'm the kind of guy who geeks out when he sees Scott Moschella or Phillip Torrone on camera.

Speaking of cons, here's something Defcon-y: TEMPEST phreaking. Remote viewing of television screens by detection of the radio frequency noise they emit was just a rumor back in the bad old BBS days, when I and scores of other antisocial geeks spent their evenings debating whether ymodem or zmodem was the superior protocol for transferring copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook amongst ourselves. Later on I heard mutterings about the government's standards for RF shielding in secret facilities; and it was hard to miss those signs in various defense contractor conference rooms explaining which TVs could be used to display secret material and which could not. Now, a real-world example: download this program, stick a radio in front of your monitor, and point the app at an mp3. It'll display patterns on the screen that are designed to produce waste noise that'll be picked up by the radio. You're playing an mp3 out of your monitor! If you can do this with the junk you've got hanging around your house, it seems like a safe bet that dedicated hackers can see what's on your television from behind a wall or across a street.

Unfortunately I haven't got any computer CRTs hanging around — and although televisions have the same vulnerability, the odds of this working with a laptop-to-TV setup seems unlikely anough that I'm not prepared to expend the effort hooking everything up (North American (NTSC) TVs are interlaced and have different refresh rates than monitors — the noise they produce would be very different). So I haven't given it a shot myself. Still, it looks pretty cool.