Why Does This Top Secret Government Numbers Station Use Windows XP!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 พ.ย. 2022
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There is a TON of legacy equipment out there that uses Win XP (usually the embedded version but not always) - Lab stuff, ATMs, all sorts of radio and scientific gear. It's a pain because they're so vulnerable to malware they need to be air-gapped from most other devices on the network just in case the firewall rules engine were to ever fail open or an admin makes a mistake.
Yer right I’ve seen ATM’s that’s application has closed and ye’ can see the XP desktop
A *lot* of industrial and manufacturing stuff runs XP as well, we have 3 CNC machines at work from 3 different brands, all 3 use XP - one was brand new in 2015 manufactured to order, so not new old stock either.
The self checkouts in my local Morrisons store run XP.
@@HogwartsBasement Yep, I've seen this recently
@@_Kirby207 It makes sense, stable as a rock and not loaded with call home spyware.
i am 99% sure that the Windows XP shut down sound was just intended to make a fun ending for number station
I think they used Windows XP
@@kreuner11 I use XP right now!
@@VicGreenBitcoin evil, you can get like 0 software for it except really old ones
@@kreuner11 true, true this unit runs olders software but is 64 bit :-) To be honest it runs fine, feels really fast to
Why do you show pictures of satellite dishes ?
To have a string of text (GOODNIGHT) show up in the clear in a message and to actually have it on recording is pretty impressive!
You have to ask yourself what good night could've mean .. need to check the date it was recorded and then see if you can link it to some secret israeli operation lol.
Indeed.....what are the odds ? Unless they were recording 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 365 days/year. That would fill quite a few terabyte drives.
Romanian here. “Terminat” means “ended/finished” and most likely refers to message end.
Reminds me of an fm radio station I was listening to which suddenly went silent followed by the windows xp startup sound. It's funny that the engineers never turned off system sounds lol
In the 80s I used to be involved in running a numbers station. 5 figure groups sent in morse initially by an operator and then we upgraded to a BBC model A computer
Go on Steve...
Its nearly 4 decades ago, height of the Cold war with hoardes of red forces ready to breach their western border and head eastwards. In that event there were all sorts of stay behind and partisan groups who needed to communicate.
The number groups, always encrypted, were used in different ways. They could be used to send instructions to individuals or to multiple groups or they might contain the frequencies available for the partisans to communicate back to base or contain information on the following day's frequencies.
By the late 70s automatic direction finding was starting to put such operators in a perilous position and we saw the introduction of burst data. Products like Tithe and Merod (Racal) plus a number of others.
You should get in touch with the ENIGMA group and share your experiences, they surely would publish what you have to say on their newsletter
@@edoardodalpra4742 He's got one more decade to wait
This is such an addictive subject I wonder if any Government will ever declassify what these MSG's were all about
Thanks again Lewis for more fascinating content 10/10👍
I don't want to know what secrets the governments hold. I know that I would only be angry, sad, and disgusted.
Completely agree with everything said, senrab. Honestly cannot get enough of this stuff.
There are many devices, old software is only compatible with Windows XP. Those devices and software are very important, not simply upgrading Windows like normal users. Upgrading a version of Windows will be a big deal for places that need high stability like the government. And Windows XP is really stable and useful. My dad is still using an old Core 2 Duo computer running Windows XP, he still does some office work and surfs the web normally. He reads newspapers, watches youtube, watches movies, uses Twitter, Reddit, ... normally. Edit text in Word 2003 and edit photos with Photoshop CS3. In addition, he also played some old games like half-life 2, cs 1.6, ... My father always said that the old computer was enough for his needs and he even refused to upgrade to Windows 7.
November 16, 2022 7:15PM
Wow
Office 2k and Office 2k3 where awesome to use! Your dad is a smart man for not upgrading 😉
bro, he should not be on the internet with XP. lol
last thing i expected to see on a video like this would be someone with a lilmonix monika profile lol
Monika
I love the chaos of things going wrong in radio ....and particularly number stations...I can imagine someone at a mixing desk frantically trying to pull the broadcast or get someone on the phone to make a decision lol
Great history as always Lewis
Well done
On the ham bands you hear PC sounds all the time in the digital sections, because a lot of hams forget to turn off system sounds.
I wonder if the WinXP shut down noise counts as "music?" Amateur radio operators are prohibited from transmitting music.
why would a ham radio play windows xp sounds?
XP gets used in all kinds of infrastructure. It's extremely stable when left alone for long periods, is already developed (so you don't have to pay for that bit), it's a known programming environment, and it'll run on just about the cheapest stuff you can find just fine. Sadly, the set it and forget it benefits are also why they're often hooked up to networks with password like "admin1" as they're so prevalent that standardized passwords were easier to manage than a separate one for a device that only gets serviced every 3 years, and is in almost every building in some device or another made in the last 20 years. Elevator control systems are a good example.
You really can't have a secure elevator though, safety regulations and all that.
But that also requires them to drive the elevator full force downwards as fast as it will go every few years to be sure the mechanical safeties are still working, so theres not a lot of trouble people can make with the bad security.
Its also incredibly optimized after all these years, and a lot of the industrial control software that runs on them isn't really resource-intensive. The embedded system I've worked on only had downtime because of a power failure in the shop, otherwise it would have years of uptime. The last time I checked I think it was at 600 days of uptime.
I saw a cash machine stuck on a boot loop the other day. scary to see it is XP.
I’ve seen XP running an entire water treatment plant and had been running for 20 years. Only issues had were either instrumentation or outside components breaking.
I ran a very large building automation system based on 5 (dedicated) networked PCs running XP. It monitored and controlled 20,000+ hardware points spread amongst 100 buildings. I accumulated 2 hours of total downtime in over 20 years, and in every instance, it was a hardware failure. (One of those times was when a security guard plugged his electric heater into my refrigerator sized UPS to keep his feet warm 🙄). As "Not Telling" said, it is a well understood and rock solid OS that runs on dirt cheap hardware.
Being more of a cybersec guy myself, this channel is right up my alley
Some countries still have numbers stations which are active today.
Russia:
E06 - The English Man “00000”
E07 - The English Man “000 000” and A07a
Ukraine :
E17z - The English Lady “674”
Poland :
E11 - Oblique
E11a - Oblique Message
and Egypt has:
E25 - Rebeat
Whats frequency's can these be found on
@@minibikemadman check priyom
This series is fantastic. I love that 'goodnight' message.
I worked in Data Hall security, and the reason that you use old software is because most critical issues have been fixed over the years, and new software has trouble working with old software so its another level of security keeping people who want to use Google Chrome or their iPad away from the network. Everyone talks about how all these new programs have these security features that make windows xp outdated, but the fact is that it takes time to find and fix problems. We also used a lot of custom software that was implemented by former US Navy security people who always said flashy features are vulnerabilities pushed by people to create security jobs. When he was keeping the nuclear reactor software safe on a sub, they kept it simple.
Yeah, if you have something that works, and you don't have to have it on the internet, there is no need to upgrade.
@@volvo09 so long as you can rebuild it when the hardware fails.
If your critical systems are airgapped, then you won't have problems...unless a spy uploaded Stuxnet with a thumb drive.
all things which work for ages are very simple, for example my chair my mom bought 30 years ago and other things
@@LeePorte There will be internal information available, most likely paper only or some other secure means of information transfer.
As windows XP was extremely stable. Rock solid worked and worked.
If perfectly configured. Unfortunately it was a crapshoot to get it configured perfectly, so for a great many people it was a nightmare.
Also Windows 2000 was stable too
@@RaysGamingChannel2003 still use Win 2k on my old laptop I use to control my home network.
I had an XP box running a demo on the showroom floor for several years. It would crash about every 45 days. I think people wax poetic about XP because the versions before it crashed constantly.
This fascinated me as a young boy in the late 70s and early 80s. I'll go so far as to say that it was a major factor in getting me into radio in the first place, dispite me blaming my early radio interest on CB! At the age of 10 in 1978, I'd spend hours in the evening tuning around the bands on my Trio 9r59de. ... not even knowing what "tuning around the bands" actually was at that time!!
Me too. Especially as some of those stations used AM and I was able to hear them on my shortwave radios before I knew what SSB modulation is.
It just feels like I'm listening to something I shouldn't
At a time before cheap and fast-enough Arm boards a good ol PC was a popular choice for embedded applications and still is for anything requiring high power. The hardware is cheap and programming Windows applications is pretty easy. Of course in 2010 when that clip was recorded, WXP was still current.
at 12 YO in the 80's I was fascinated by these number stations writing down notes and trying to understand ,,,,,2022 and still listning ...great film to watch is The Number Station with John Cusak
Thanks, going to watch that film tonight - noticed its on Amazon Prime. 👍👍
I did watch that last week (because of a recommendation here). I must say it’s a bit of a rubbish film.
@@PibrochPonder Of course... just like the many "the real story of.." "the truth about...." kind of movies
Quite eerie to hear that final Romanian broadcast. You can hear the sirens in the background, city under full shutdown
Thanks Lewis yours is on of my favourite channels keep up the good work mate
The last skylark transmission sounded like someone was hitting the Tokay wine hard
I had a wonderful image pop into my mind whilst listening to this of sweating and highly stressed sleeper agents in cupboards around the world with bingo cards and pencils getting a little light relief! One does wonder if they were just playing psychological games with each other. 😂
Plot twist: They just select a random string from pi.
I heard a broadcast about numbers stations which included a station from Asia (Taiwan?) in which they literally taunted the counter-intelligence forces monitoring the broadcast to find the secret agents who might have been listening. Subtle psychological warfare! Come to think of it, some editorial propaganda could be injected right into the counter-intelligence agents who had to pay close attention to the coded broadcast! ;-)
I want to set up a pirate numbers station😂
Do it!!!
well you could. make it interesting however, like 6930khz lsb and use a russian text to speech just spitting out random numbers. and do it every day at the same time for a few months. and you will have someone that will find it and go wtf?
Guarantee you'll attract attention !! The kind of attention you don't ever want!!!!!
I like your stories and love reading the posts. You hit a nerve with what sounds like older radio operators and SWL folks. Keep up the good stories. 73 Leo. K1zek
Another interesting video on a subject that interested me when I was younger.
Also - some great footage from Jodrell - I was there last week!
Love hearing number stations go wrong. Such as the Windows XP shutdown sound.
That was not something going wrong.
Windows XP is a workhorse I'm not surprised they still use it
When I was over in Germany in the mid 1970s I heard a lot of number stations but most of the ones I copied were Russian or other European communist countries.
Thank you Louis another great video
Having worked for multiple different UK governmental bodies and used some of the ridiculously ancient software still entirely critical to their operations, this does not surprise me in the least 😂
As did the US gov and mil back in the day, mostly Windows NT. The Kernel and default settings in modern windows still haven't changed much in terms of security.
I worked for a large investment bank and very old mainframe software was still in use.
The company laid off the people who new how to support it and had to hire most of them back when the "new kids" had no idea how it worked when large issued occured.
@@volvo09 Yep, I've a friend who got a very well paid contract doing something for a bank because she just happened to have experience with Fortran from something esoteric at university. COBOL probably another one worth learning!
@@jhonbus yep, I believe at least a few of the guys were COBOL programmers. I talked to him when he came back (I thought he was coming back out of desperation) and he said the company has been BEGGING him for months to come back and he finally threw out a stupid number and they took it, 😂🤣. I congratulated him on sticking it to them!
1:45 confirms it for me its gotta still be used, its leaning in that photo.. that big dish is wonderful oh man what i wouldn't give to live by that sight.
Very interesting! I work at a Global Financial institution in London. There are still WinXP applications in use in some teams.
found your channel a week ago, and since then, the videos are bringing back things I'd forgotten about..
really interesting to learn what the cause of the "woodpecker" sound was, that noise that just completely wiped out your radio and TV in the 80's 📺😤😀😄
and we thought it was just a dodgy connection/ wire in the TV🎬🎥/ radio🎧🎙 stations studio somewhere🤭🤣 ..
but when I saw your video /film😳 showing the actual gigantic transmitter structure🏯🏯
it was most macabre to see it !
to think it was so powerful to transmit/ block around the world..
the cold War, dark dark times..
back in the 80's I was in my teens, I shared a bedroom with my older brother .
all I think I can remember is.. he had CB's called a President and a Cobra International .. a huge "power booster" thing..
and in the back garden on a 40ft scaffold pole. a PDL2 radio ( I could be getting the name wrong) it looked like the deathstar and It could be rotated from a wire linked control box in the bedroom
when he keyd his "desk" mic, he'd block the area for miles..
and he'd get these postcards, ( I think they were called CQ cards !?), from country's around the world ..
apparently.. his "rig" was supposed to be one of the most powerful in the surrounding Nottingham/ Lincolnshire district...
I can definitely remember hearing/ listening some of the numbers stations your videos cover!?.
one thing I do remember about CB RIGS ?!!...
A quiz question??....
why is a PIN 📌 ??
a nightmare to a CB Radio and aerial rig owner ?
Great channel
Thanks mate! A pin in the old coax! ☠️
The "woodpecker" was Russian Over The Horizon Radar.
I never knew there were number stations in România... fascinating!
i mean how else are you going to coordinate the nazis embedded in the ukrainian army and spy on your european allies
Excellent video, cheers!
I feel this is what inspired the whole plot line of CoD Black Ops
When I saw the title, I thought you were referring to Cuba's HM01. Good to know the DGI isn't the only sloppy SIGINT agency.
Another excellent video. I don't know how you find the time to do so many in such detail.
Because xp was and still is the best operating system ever made.
you will find that places like banks and uni's are often behind in windows systems as they leave it for a few years to make sure its fully secure or rather meets their security levels , i spoke to someone in a bank and they asked me about online banking and i said its not secure enough esp as they have just brought out windows 11 as 10 is that full of holes they have given up on trying to patch it as every patch breaks something else.
she looked a bit upset and worried and said they had only just moved onto windows 10 in the past 6 months lol and a friend works in a uni and its only in the last 5 years that they have moved away from xp and upgraded all there systems to windows 10.
Embedded WinXP is still out there on a LOT of devices. Scary
You'd be surprised just how many governments still use 95' or 98'
The "Papa, Lima" station at 7:37 has a charming little musical interlude. "Let's meet in the colours next season..."
I burst out laughing when I heard the windows xp shutdown sound
Just before windows closedown sound, there was a lightning strike static sound - maybe that crashed the '286' PC...
Nothing wrong with a 286! I started my career on a state of the art 286 with twin ejectable datapac brick sized drives of a whopping 1.2meg each. One was just a backup copy but 2.4meg! Imagine!😂. And a 5 1/4 “ floppy to boot! Well not to boot but you get the picture.....
Nice info Lewis !
utterly fascinating - really enjoying these so well researched and put together videos!
If I may dig into the two signals thing, it's more complicated to Crack the code if it's written like musical tablature.
I'm curious if any of these number stations are using winamp to play back the recordings. Like set it to load up the correct recordings and start playing if it has to either restart due to a crash or a power outage unless it has a UPS device to keep it powered up. Or a backup generator.
Would be weird if one of these started playing music because someone thought they would plug in their MP3 player and it starts playing the music.
When number stations go wild
The PL PL signal sounds like a netting call for manually tuned sets.
Numbers stations are always so interesting!
0:47, had to do a double take; Modcom (a pet project of VNV Nations Ronan Harris) ended up sampling CynthIA for their track "One Zero" back in the day
Thanks for sharing, shared.
It's crazy to think this kind of stuff exists , I can only wonder at what other covert stuff is going on around us everyday and who these people are who do these jobs, it's mind blowing
2:54 hmmm... i recorded a flutey sound similar to this here, off the AM radio back in the 80's. It tended to fade in and out. Is it an interference of two carriers or would it be something else?
Another interesting video. Thanks.
Yes. Just have a frequency and time and you are on! :)
What what even the purpose for the broadcast. And how do you tune into them. They sound very interesting
"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0"
sounds like the person at the keyboard just got bored
Always interesting, particularly Number Stations/Cold War.
And I learn a lot from the obviously well informed comments!
Ian
I should probably stop watching videos about number stations while trying to fall asleep lol! The voices DO NOT help!
Aside from that this is some fascinating stuff and is very well presented.
Thanks Lewis
Hearing those broadcasts feels illegal and creepy
I could imagine transmitting on the same frequency serves to automatically identify listeners with smarthones and other listening devices in their location.
If they identify a known signal, they could send a small and unsuspicious respone over the internet, opposed to having to encode all data that it listens to.
My brother in christ, have you had a stroke?
@@brokenpda I'm still alive. And I don't do organised religion or cult activities. Are you a medical doctor?
The US Air force used 1500 playstation 3s linked together for a computer system that was never on line or connected to the net i guess it was for a internal use ,maybe even for SAC
Is the German voice at the end pronouning "9" as "neu-en" to prevent mishearing "nein?" Similar to how English speakers use "niner?"
I suspect its an air-gapped Windows XP system which works perfectly, no point in changing it if it works!
I wonder if they didn't just use a recording of the tone to signify "end of transmission", while not actually using an XP machine.
I miss XP
Funny how I hated it when it came out, then I loved it.
@@CraftAero The tone isn't a signal. It was accidental - That's why. The computer has some other functionality associated with the operation - Probably software is what creates the text-to-speech voice. Someone was in a hurry to leave the shed that night and shutdown as soon as the message had ended without keying down first is my suspicion.
You've never waited with the start menu open, hovering over the shutdown button waiting for some process to finish coz you're in a real hurry to get outta there? You've clearly never had the right job.
@@UnitSe7en My comment began with "I wonder if..."
Yours' seems to be factually based. Thanks for sharing your intimate knowledge of these procedures.
@@CraftAero It did. That's dyslexia for you. The point is still valid though, mainly being that the tone is not intentional. It's not my "intimate knowledge" that tells me this - it's because everyone knows it was an accident, because it happened only one time. Your question is moot.
I have three computers that run XP and have no issues. On the other hand, every time they update Windows 10 it screws up the wireless card drivers on my Dell and Toshiba laptops.
I spent a lot of time in Europe and the Middle East hunting these signals. Very interesting times in the late '70s
I once haired the Windows XP shutdown sound live in shortwave band
Don't know about tension, he sounds sloshed to me.
Almost everyone uses Windows, often when it's use is totaly inapropriate Then they wonder why they keep getting hacked or constantly have to reboot.
I can tell you endless stories of windows related disasters.
It's a brave IT director who insists on anything but Windows.
How did you understand Terminate from that? I heard "Tell me Not"
How can someone reproduce this glitchy sound distortion of the 2 broadcast collapsing together ??? Or maybe more acutely I am talking about this sound 4:50 or 7:32… can we reproduce the same sounds
G16 must've caught the millennium bug.
Love it Lewis.
Don’t tell ‘em Pike ! Interesting video. I’ve been listening to some satellite comms recently. Interesting stuff!
M1DDD
The fact you can faintly hear a cis on the back ground at the start
It’s sad we are losing these number stations. Setting aside the dangers associated with espionage, the stations have that cloak and dagger charm. How can they not fascinate you.
I was thinking the legend record producer Joe Meek would have loved these sounds or Delia Derbyshire from the Radiophonic workshop.
Marc In Bletchley G6XEG
What are the antenna at 7:22 is for?
Can you pick number stations on a normal shortwave radio?
Yes
There was some observatory telescope still operating on BBC master 512kb up until the early 2000's. I can't remember where off the top of my head but remember reading about a few years ago.
The first time I discovered "Numbers Stations", (Mid 1970s) My first thought was: "Was John Lennon inspired by these for "Revolution #9"? Or was it the other way around?!?"🤔
Nice pic of Jodrell Bank
Fascinating stuff this 👍
Thanks Bishop
From what I can tell, some of your recordings are not from Conet Project. Can you tell us where you got these recordings?
None of them are from the conet project
@@RingwayManchester Where did you get these recordings and can anyone download it?
Always run your numbers station on Linux. Preferably fedora Linux if not redhat. Not only is is more robust and easier to have uptime measured in years but you can audit the code to ensure security.
Will keep in mind if my country's secret service ask me to work for them.
Another quality video Lewis,now things my heat up after today's actions with Russia and Nato.
Great video, as always.
This is unrelated, but one of your previous videos got me thinking the other day - what have avid numbers station listeners noticed about the state of shortwave since the start of the Russian war with Ukraine?
There's a live stream dedicated to a Russian station known as The Buzzer. Don't confuse it with WMMS-FM, aka The Buzzard, unless you like good music
@@spaceflight1019 yeah, I've heard of the buzzer! With all the other Eastern European numbers stations, I've been wondering if there has been more activity lately.
Hasn't the buzzer broadcasted a few more vocal messages in the past year or so?
@@cartermize6651 Yes they have be broadcasting voice, or its bootleggers.
That E05 over the top of E10 is in fact E06.
Wait is this what Kraftwerk “numbers” is about?
Hi Lewis, thank you for another great video. Given that many Numbers Stations have ceased broadcasting do you think this is because it is easier to get encrypted messages to recipients using other technologies or because many western agencies have reduced the number of agents working covertly? Also, could you speculate on how Numbers Stations could be reimagined for the Internet age but still retain the qualities of radio in making it hard to locate the recipient? Bit of a long question…
Host a slideshow full of steganography on the web with only a certain image or that shown at a certain time containing the proper data.
The recipient could capture the image over Starlink (or similar) so it would be difficult to get a fix on them.
Also an opportunity to honeypot a whole lot of dis-information, and/or trace back a mac address if the visitor is sloppy.
the internet allows for all kinds of information to be Hidden in plain sight. I'd bet money that youtube Comments are used, since it's perfectly normal to watch youtube videos, no trace Is left of which comment the clandestine recipient viewed, And messages can be easily in long text comments like this.
See "TOR", The Onion Router.
Commonwealth during 1950 to 1980 was lots of fun.
Information from London spread to all parts of the empire, than the commonwealth.
So School children had a lot to talk about......first radio, then TV, then FM, colour TV, mobile phone.....
Therafter internet, 1g , 2g, 3g, 4g, 5g.
🤣
Are you aware that there is a Twitter numbers station? I believe it's called tango four. Numerous number tweets be day.
because the Eula doesn't force them to share data and computing power with microsoft, who are getting progressively worse every version since windows7
I'm not sure why, but the "Goodnight" message creeped me out
I used to hear E10 all the time. "Charlie...India...Oscar...Two..."