Air-gapped PCs leak data via heat, magnetic fields and FM radio — 1 bit/hour to 40 bits/sec
StefanoGogioso · x · 2026-09-21
A shared post rounds up wild side-channel "hacks" that let air-gapped computers communicate, plus a new Dwarkesh Patel podcast with Noam Brown covering multi-agent systems, Navier-Stokes, math progress and recursive self-improvement, alignment verification, and chain-of-thought degradation.
Air-gap exfiltration examples:
- 1–8 bits/hour via one computer's heat emissions read by another's built-in thermal sensors
- 40 bits/sec by regulating CPU core load to generate low-frequency magnetic fields that pass through a Faraday cage
- 13–60 bytes/sec by generating FM radio signals from a display, picked up by a nearby phone
Podcast chapters span multi-agent and Navier-Stokes, how AI firms will work, what math progress says about RSI, Hugging Face and alignment, the internal/external model gap, degrading chain of thought, and how we'd know alignment is solved.
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