Amateur radio will continue losing to the internet where actual growth and innovation is happening instead of old guys larping how they are going to save the world by knowing morse code or something.
Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial and be able to observe the traffic. That would die with widespread encryption.
Your insulting of people who try to maintain radios for emergencies is unnecessary, too.
No, it is not. Hobbyist web masters practically all use encryption. It should be possible to use modern protocols like HTTPS. Encryption is the default of modern network protocols. On the internet trasitioning from a hobby website to a commercial one is seamless.
>Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial and be able to observe the traffic.
MitM attacks are a security vulnerability. If people want to observe traffic they should observe their own traffic. His is like saying that we shouldn't use Rust because students will be unable to exploit vulnerabilities.
>Your insulting of people who try to maintain radios for emergencies is unnecessary, too.
Unneccessary, but their use case is rather niche compared to what we see the internet used for. It is a sign of stagnation.
For example, it would be pretty rad to have an event with an orchestra linked between two nearby cities with full duplex ultra low latency radio--- which can achieve much lower latency than ordinary internet due to the line-of-sight nature.
Now I realize that by 'broadcast' you don't mean the rule-violating one-way-communications kind but the literal propagation characteristics. But at UHF+ it's easier to have a directional signal than an omnidirectional one, and once you get to a few GHz it's quite natural to have laser beam like signals. Plus, at 2m+ signals are naturally limited to the radio horizon (except for exceptional cases).
Personally, when I've advocated for relaxations on encryption and other content restrictions I've done so for UHF+ (or even SHF+) bands where the degree of under-utilization and potential for spectrum reuse through directionality are very high, and abuse is inherently geographically limited by physics.
And that's exactly the kind of transition people into ham radio don't want.
> MitM attacks are a security vulnerability.
A vulnerability on what security? Everything done on the ham bands is public, it makes no sense to transmit on these bands and not want to be heard. It makes sense if you are trying to send a secret message, which is what ham is explicitly not about.
As for the comparison with Rust. The Rust memory model is about preventing bugs. But the lack of private communication on public ham bands is a feature, not a bug. The Rust of ham radio would be a system that prevents accidental encryption and ensures that everything is understandable by everyone.
If you want the internet, use the internet. There are already many frequency bands for that.
Which is a problem. It would be cool to experiment in these bands and then later switch to others when you want to commercialize.
>A vulnerability on what security?
If you wanted to send a private message to someone the expectation is that the message should be private and not publically snoopable.
>Everything done on the ham bands is public
Everything on the internet is public too in the sense that people who can listen in between have access to what is sent.
>If you want the internet, use the internet.
This is accepting defeat to the internet. I say that we should see more competition.
I think here is the misunderstanding. There is no competition. Ham operators happily use the internet to communicate when appropriate and at the same time use the ham bands for playing with their radio equipment. I don't think many of them want to use their radios to do what they do with their smartphones and vice versa.
It is like saying that gliders and airliners are in competition. Even if both are about aerodynamics, no glider pilot is mad because using a glider is inconvenient for travelling overseas, no one thinks gliders have "lost" to airliners because of the insistance on not using engines (motorgliders exist but they are still inadequate for practical travel). Glider pilots take the plane like everyone else when going on vacation.
It doesn't mean gliders are useless, a few of them have practical applications, and they make excellent training for "useful" plane pilots, in fact most of the best airline pilots have flown gliders, and some still do.
Same idea with ham radio. Mostly but not completely impractical, and many of the people who now work with "useful" radios like the one that's in your phone giving you internet access started as amateurs.
Go look at a spectrum chart. If you're worried about stagnation, go after the stupidly under-utilised swathes of military allocations. Let the hobbyists keep their narrow kHz. Not everything needs disruption.
Have you considered that there may not be any secrets because it doesn't allow for privacy? The law is holding it back from its true potential.
I disagree. The vast majority of modern hobbyist radio technology involves encryption as an integral part-- both because the ease of abuse has made cryptography a mandatory feature for communications generally, because radio censorship rules are incompatible with lots of perfectly reasonable communications (you can't lawfully read HN over the radio, for example, because posts can and sometimes do contain naughty-words... you can't even read most ham radio internet message boards over the radio!) and because it's a standard part of existing protocols and software designed for usage over the internet.
The ham prohibitions on encryption are just keeping that usage out of ham bands which, particularly in UHF remain somewhere between dead and completely dead. This will ultimately result in our loss of these allocations, and the experimental usage is hampered by the restrictions in the ISM bands and the lack of potential for coordination that comes from having identified and competent operators.
> Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial and be able to observe the traffic. That would die with widespread encryption.
Digital modes in general break this, because there is a proliferation of them and some are only readable if you pay considerable licensing fees or buy special licensed hardware. I disagree that this is an essential part of the radio as it's already not true. Though, one could preserve it to a degree by requiring some amount of plaintext identification of the traffic, the identities of the parties and the purpose of the communication.
> Your insulting of people who try to maintain radios for emergencies is unnecessary, too.
If you're at all familiar with amateur radio usage in the US you've probably encountered wackers. Heck, even if you are considered one yourself by others you've probably seen people worse than you. The ancestors post didn't suggest that all emergency prep activity is excessively LARPY, at least by my read.
The excessive restrictions harm more boring usage like "I want to check my email from the woods on infrastructure that I built and maintain". The larpy usage doesn't care, because it's mostly fantasy and if there were some doomsday event no one is going to care what encryption you're using (or at least won't be able to do anything about it). :)
Amateur radio bands are not intended to work as ghetto ISP bands.
Whether there should be some lowers band available for that is another discussion.
So long as identification is still decodable, spectrum usage can be managed.
It's sufficient to prohibit commercial usage you don't need plaintext to do so. The old threat of tow trucks and cab services moving onto ham-bands had long since been mooted by ubiquitous cellular, but even if it weren't any significant commercial usage will eventually have a whistleblower. Usage that is obscure enough to not be vulnerable to whistleblowers could also be hidden just as well in "plaintext" traffic that was really uncrackable steganography.
As it stands you can't even lawfully log into your own personal systems over amateur radio even if you take the unreasonable steps of using specially modified software to authenticate-but-not-encrypt because inevitably some third party will send a message to you via the internet that contains some naughty words that aren't permitted over the radio.
Without relaxing the encryption rules, innovative radio usage like meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/) will continue to be pushed onto ISM bands where (1) they're still technically unlawful because the homebrew hardware is not type-accepted (amateur bands are the ONLY place where homebrew intentional radiators are allowed!) and (2) where the band choices, power limit, and EIRP limits are detrimental to full exploration of the possibilities.
Besides, the FCC has long allowed proprietary, license fee bearing, patent encumbered digital modes. These are very close to encryption in terms of their ability to lock others out of ham comms, and have frequently been used by amateur radio groups to establish "lid free" communications channels. (Because most of the more irritating people aren't technically sophisticated enough to adopt some new mode without help, and people won't help them...).
The rules as they stand punish honest people who follow the intent and spirit of the rule in favor of people willing to just ignore the rules (including operating unlawful devices in ISM bands), willing to use stego, or willing to use obscure protocols to achieve the same ends that they'd otherwise achieve with encryption. It blocks modern networking by disallowing standard internet-grade software use with radio since all of it has integral encryption which generally can't be disabled to prevent downgrading and cross domain attacks in contexts where the encryption is needed -- or because in some cases the protocols are designed in such a way that authentication without encypherment isn't possible.
73s, NT4TN
Practically in those locations the likelihood is that they won't interfere with anyone at all in any case. In which case it's irrelevant.
What's vastly worse than a bit of misuse is losing the bands entirely.
We've essentially lost 9cm (half already, the rest when the FCC finishes selling off the half). But for a few hundred KHz used for EMEers (whos numbers are only in the hundreds) the bands higher than 23cm are essentially unused, and 23cm has quite limited usage.
There is tons of UHF+ non-commercial and experimental radio activity going on _outside_ of amateur radio however, innovative things with SDR and mesh networking to gives some examples-- but due to antiquated content restrictions its operating (usually unlawfully) on the ISM bands and struggling with interference from other activity there and with low power limits (even though much of the experimental usage is unlawful, it still stays usually stays low power since folk wisdom says that's what keeps the enforcement away). These applications are squarely within the purpose of amateur radio and to the extent that they used non-certified homebrew hardware and antennas the amateur service is the only place they could lawfully operate.
But in practice the content restrictions have more force than the requirement for type-certification, and the ISM bands don't have hall monitors, so as a result the vast majority of interesting UHF+ radio experimentation is outside of the amateur service currently. This is a serious danger to the continuation of the amateur allocations. (at least up at those frequencies).