Salon

Radio Free Software


Call them hackers of the last computing frontier: The GNU Radio coders believe that any device with a chip should be able to do, well, anything. It's the vision that elicited a beatific smile from Alan Turing, a Bela Lugosi-like cackle from John von Neumann, and a cannabis-tinged giggle from 1970s-era PC creators: Imagine a universal machine, a computation device capable of mimicking the functionality of any other machine.