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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

There might be a neat way to work around these laws...

Make all the data, including the financial data public. But make sure the people you want to see the data can access it first.

Arrange the data in the air so every error recovery block is mixed with financial and non-financial data.

Send the non-financial data out of band, and ahead of time, to your paying customers.

Now when a data block starts being transmitted, the paying customers can combine the non-financial data with the transmitted block (for example with xor) and decide to extract the data they want after just some proportion of the block has been transmitted.

The public have to wait till the end of the block to decode the data, by which time the data isnt valuable anymore.

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This is effectively the same as sending an encryption key first to paying customers, and then broadcasting to non-paying customers later.

I am dubtfull this would hold in a court of law.

Publish the non-financial data beforehand on a public website, where theoretically anyone could scrape and transform it into exactly the data-blocks needed for fountain recovery; but where in practice, there’s no specification for doing that, so you’re going to need exactly one particular piece of scraping+transforming software (or at least a running copy of it under test, to do a black-box reverse engineering of it.)

You could go a step further and publish that scraping+transformation software, too—on Github, even!—but just make it finicky as hell to set up, and with no documentation, either. (I would suggest writing it as a microservice architecture, split up between 1. a network of Ethereum smart-contracts, 2. a BeOS server, 3. a dongle program written for a Java Card smartcard, 4. a LambdaMOO object. Use an exactingly-frail implementation of IBM 5250 for the message bus.)

Such that, in practice, you need installation engineering support from—who else—your company.

I'm surprised that it is not possible in US to buy air time on commercial stations for exclusive use of the buyer and their customers. Surely it would be similar to buying an advertisement.

Here in the UK we already have data transmission over AM radio[0], nominally for remotely switching electrical equipment on and off but could be used for anything that only needs a low data-rate channel. I would not be surprised if the HFT people are using it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch

AM radio (medium-wave/long-wave) is different from shortwave.

In US, similar "utility response" is permitted as well for AM broadcasters, since 1981 https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-81-258A1.pdf

Subsequently, permission was granted to all AM and FM broadcasters for "subsidiary communications" of any kind, https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-84-113A1.pdf

But that's not "shortwave"/International HF broadcast

Sounds like a judge will have to decide if that's in the spirit of the law. But it's very neat, I have to agree.

The decision is whether it meets the threshold "public interest" (which includes meaning of "broadcast"). And it'll be made either by FCC Media Bureau, or by Commission itself. It's highly unlikely it'll get appealed to courts.

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