I would say right about now is when you'd get your bag for helping to create a market for radio altimeters, but I think they exclusively do kickbacks in Spirit Airlines miles.
191 karma · joined November 12, 2014
Why Senators? They’re high ranking US government officials, they’re a prime target for state sponsored attackers.
Other than Protonmail I wouldn’t trust anyone else with my email. Gmail is close to if not the #1 non-governmental target for state sponsored attackers. The NSA runs secure email for TS-SCI communications but they don’t want to have to teach John Podesta how to not get phished, and Google has the best defense against those attacks if you enable advanced protection.
The almost complete inability to moderate due to 1A is the largest of many fatal flaws in government run email
fun fact: SIM cards can run applets based on Java. That’s how mobile payments are able to work in developing nations. I think there was a DEFCON talk about it a few years ago.
Then it’s a question of why is someone looking for a small, inexpensive PoE switch and PoE cameras are the most likely use I can think of.
Gogo provides inflight Wi-Fi in the US through its ground based towers and all the antennas are pointed at the sky :)
Flights (at least in the US) fly roughly a direct route, but ATC spaces out planes and small weather diversions are common. So it’s more like a band of coverage needed between cities. Also, the combinatorics of considering every US city pair that currently or has previously had commercial service between gets long. Then you would have to consider every route that an airline in the future may offer, even just seasonally. Then if you calculated the optimal route between each pair and figured out the width of the cellular coverage at 30,000 ft from a single cell tower below, I don’t think it would be possible to offer service to every domestic flight in the US without achieving complete coverage of the US.
China on the other hand has a limited number of very narrow flight corridors that all commercial aviation is restricted to because the majority of the airspace is government controlled. That’s the only nation I can think of that would have enough air traffic to justify terrestrial tower installation but whose domestic flights are confined to a such a small part of the airspace that it would be possible to provide service to all domestic flights without achieving coverage of all Chinese airspace.
As a private pilot and software engineer interested in spectrum policy, I’ve been following this closely for years as it’s wound it’s way through the FAA. I have yet to see any convincing, reproducible evidence that any radio altimeters that are operating within specification (filtering out all signal below 4.2 GHz) have malfunctioned due to interference from 5G cellular signals. The one thing the FAA and airline industry claim as evidence is a study by an industry group (Radio Technical Committee for Aeronautics), whose members include radio altimeter manufacturers who would benefit from large retrofits/upgrades. The RTCA didn’t actually do any of their own testing, they received aggregated data from AVSI, a Texas A&M aerospace research group, which had done a study in 2019 on radio altimeters interference. In 2020 the FCC determined that AVSI study “does not demonstrate that harmful interference would likely result under reasonable scenarios (or even reasonably 'foreseeable' scenarios to use the parlance of AVSI)”. Then, two years later when the FAA went to the NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration), which is the agency tasked with managing federal spectrum and agency spectrum disputes, and demanded they stop the FCC from letting carriers turn on networks in the C-band, the NTIA refused because its own technical experts had already evaluated the technical data that RTCA used as evidence that any 5G use of 3.7 GHz - 3.98 GHz band would cause interference severe enough to cause a catastrophic crash resulting hull loss.
Also, when this whole fiasco unfolded neither Verizon or AT&T had spectrum even close to the radio altimeters band. Of the C-band spectrum (3.7 GHz to 3.98 GHz) that was auctioned off a few years ago, only Block A which is between 3.7 GHz and 3.8 GHz was being used. So in addition to the existing, and potentially larger than technically required, 220 MHz guard band between 4.2 GHz (where radio altimeters start) and 3.98 GHz, when the airlines were threatening to cancel service to the US and the FAA was waging a PR war against the FCC the spectrum in question was 3.7 GHz - 3.8 GHz. Even if Verizon and AT&T rolled out 100% of the 5G spectrum they had the ability to use in 2021, it would have meant 5G cell service was within 400 MHz of the radio altimeter spectrum. The entire allocated band for radio altimeters is only 200 MHz (4.2 GHz - 4.4 GHz). Additionally, other countries like Japan have cellular providers operating in 4.0 GHz - 4.1 GHz. Japanese aviation officials (unlike the FAA) actually configured different types of 5G equipment and radio altimeters and tested them, including to see the minimum guard band needed. They found 60 MHz was the minimum guard band needed and therefore the “standard” 100 MHz guard band would be fine. They also found you shouldn’t install 5G towers directly below the approach path of an airport, but that even high powered 5G base stations won’t interfere with radio altimeters if they are 200m away.
I think by far the most comprehensive explainer for this whole saga is by Harold Feld of public knowledge, which if you’re not familiar is a nonprofit advocating for an open internet which includes white papers and FCC testimony on spectrum policy they view as beneficial the public, such as allocating more of the federal government, specifically the military’s, huge bands of essentially unused spectrum. It’s on his personal blog. https://wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/what-the...
I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done for other forms of media. Movies, albums, maybe even software licenses.
This system will likely result in a fairly minor decline in VOD revenue due to fewer individuals purchasing their own digital copy because they are once again able to loan works to others and take advantage of the same sharing of works that was taken for granted with physical media. If someone borrows a friends license to a movie to watch it once instead of being forced by the studios to buy or rent their own copy then there will be some lost revenue but I think that revenue only existed in the first place because of the walled garden scheme of owning nothing that exists right now. I also think if VOD licenses actually had value and guaranteed longevity they would be more appealing to consumers.