6 ms·

Radio Engineer Files Objection to WIPE

65 points by wglb 6y ago

totetsu 6y ago
"WIPE is suspected to be intended mainly for secret, non-broadcast message transmission for private trading clients while broadcasting financial and economic news for the public."
pjc50 6y ago
Confusingly, despite relating to encrypted messages, "DRM" in this context is "digital radio mondiale" which appears to be this: https://www.drm.org/technical-info/ https://www.drm.org/technical-info/ Use of COFDM for digital radio in the current AM bands, part of the final AM phaseout?
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Thank you. That significantly changes my understanding of the story.
- MrRadar 6y ago
  There's no mandate for phasing out AM broadcasting on the HF bands, especially not in the US (where the use of digital radio broadcasting by any station is still completely optional at the discretion of the station and where there is no mandate to decrease or remove analog radio broadcast services).
- PoachedSausage 6y ago
  There are currently no signs that Longwave and Shortwave AM broadcasts are going away here in the UK. If Droitwich Transmitting Station[0] can stay operational for another 14 years it will be 100 years old! [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station
- reaperducer 6y ago
  To my knowledge, digital radio mondiale is only used on shortwave bands, and not on conventional ("broadcast") AM radio stations in the United States. I haven't kept up on the SW scene in a decade or so, so I may be mistaken.
londons_explore 6y ago
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.
- jacobush 6y ago
  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.
  - alexpil 6y ago
    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.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  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.
  - derefr 6y ago
    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.
yholio 6y ago
This should be understood as high frequency stock traders fighting for turf. One shop tries to access broadcasting bands to enable higher powers, thus, more reliable transmission, by multiplexing the payload with general purpose economic news - allegedly. Another HFT shop is trying to preempt this. The race for speed in financial markets has reached a point where no existing fiber optic or satelite based system can compete; the state of the art are short wave radio that bounce back on the ionosphere and enable intercontinental communication at the speed of light over the shortest path and with no intermediary hops. Fiber optics, for contrast, can only do about 2/3 of the speed of light and impose non-direct routes and multiple hops.
- p49k 6y ago
  A HN comment in another thread (which I can’t find atm) states that this is no longer relevant because exchanges now allow colocation in the same buildings as the servers running the exchange, and it’s relatively inexpensive. Is that comment inaccurate?
  - blutack 6y ago
    These links are often used for executing strategies or sending information between different exchanges (a classic example being the cross-exchange arbitrage).
    - bluGill 6y ago
      To put it more concrete, there are a number of very large companies that have their stock traded in many locations. Japan, London, and New York all have big stock exchanges (that is just what I know of without looking - if you told me those were the only 3 cities with global stock markets I'd call you a lier). If you see a big company in London trading for slightly less than the same company in New York then you should buy stock in London and see it in New York, but you need to be first - there are several others trying to do the same thing that have enough money to make the price even alone. (my guess is that we are talking about needing $10,000 in cash ready to pull this off for the biggest companies)
flerchin 6y ago
HFT leeches can all DIAF.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  When I am appointed Lord Emperor, I'm going to make capital gains taxes inversely proportional to the amount of time you held the asset. Oh, you just flipped $1M in 30ms? That's going to be painful come tax day.
  - ISL 6y ago
    Man, it'll be hard to be a grocery store, or any other intermediary, under that regime. Such a rule would slaughter credit-card processors, too. Anyone who makes a market or facilitates a transaction would have a problem. To expand a bit -- an antidote to HFT front-running is the limit order. If you can buy the thing you want at a price you believe is acceptable, HFT front-runners simply get paid for providing you liquidity. Don't like the price? Set your limit lower.
    - ficklepickle 6y ago
      I don't think grocery stores pay capital gains tax on the sundries they sell. If you sold a whole grocery store, then yes. But inventory is not considered a capital asset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset
    - maxbond 6y ago
      How are any of those operations effected by capital gains? They aren't talking about moving money around, they're talking about selling stock that has appreciated in price. With regards to frontrunning, the problem isn't that XYZ is trading at $5 and I get charged $5.05 because I put in a market order - or at least, the problI don't think you fully understand frontrunning either.em isn't _just_ that. The problem is that between when I send my limit for $5, the price drops to $4.95. But through whatever mechanism, latency arbitrage, order flashes, whatever, the HFT knows my order is coming in at $5, and they scoop up all the liquidity and sell it to me at $5. Sure, if I priced the security correctly, $5 is a fair price. But I took market risk and I deserve the reward of buying at $4.95. The HFT, entering and leaving positions only when they know someone is coming, is taking no market risk, and is stealing my gains without providing any liquidity or hazarding the market with the rest of us. This is a simplification of course, in order to place teaser orders the HFT has to endure some market risk. But they've cranked it down to a rounding error. Another problem is that the retail brokers have gone to 0 commission by selling their order flow to the same HFTs. What this really means is that commissions are variable, arbitrary, and unknowable. Try putting that in a spreadsheet.
dcminter 6y ago
So at what point does it become economical to use particle accelerators to send neutrino/pion/whatnot beams in a direct line through the earth between trading datacentres? Sounds like the setup for a B-movie though...
- joezydeco 6y ago
  The Chicago Mercantile Exchange's data center is a stone's throw away from the Fermilab facility in Batavia (the same town where Parable wants to install their HF/HFT transmitter). It's not out of the realm of thought!
- alexpil 6y ago
  pfft. One nucflash=buy, two nucflash=sell
smkellat 6y ago
I’ve listened to a few shortwave industry experts hammer out the issues with this. Despite the novelty of the technical application this is an end run around the Commission’s rules. As there are other operators carrying out such data transmissions licensed under the Experimental Radio Service the major question is what exactly has changed in the rules to suddenly make this permissible.
- grokhz 6y ago
  Thank you smkellat. You get the point. I'm the author of the article linked in this post (and thank you HN for blowing us up today).
alexpil 6y ago
I'm the guy who filed it. AMA.

65 points by wglb 6y ago

"WIPE is suspected to be intended mainly for secret, non-broadcast message transmission for private trading clients while broadcasting financial and economic news for the public."

pjc50 6y ago

Confusingly, despite relating to encrypted messages, "DRM" in this context is "digital radio mondiale" which appears to be this: https://www.drm.org/technical-info/ https://www.drm.org/technical-info/ Use of COFDM for digital radio in the current AM bands, part of the final AM phaseout?

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
Thank you. That significantly changes my understanding of the story.
MrRadar 6y ago
There's no mandate for phasing out AM broadcasting on the HF bands, especially not in the US (where the use of digital radio broadcasting by any station is still completely optional at the discretion of the station and where there is no mandate to decrease or remove analog radio broadcast services).
PoachedSausage 6y ago
There are currently no signs that Longwave and Shortwave AM broadcasts are going away here in the UK. If Droitwich Transmitting Station[0] can stay operational for another 14 years it will be 100 years old! [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station
reaperducer 6y ago
To my knowledge, digital radio mondiale is only used on shortwave bands, and not on conventional ("broadcast") AM radio stations in the United States. I haven't kept up on the SW scene in a decade or so, so I may be mistaken.

londons_explore 6y ago

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.

jacobush 6y ago
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.
- alexpil 6y ago
  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.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
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.
- derefr 6y ago
  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.

yholio 6y ago

This should be understood as high frequency stock traders fighting for turf. One shop tries to access broadcasting bands to enable higher powers, thus, more reliable transmission, by multiplexing the payload with general purpose economic news - allegedly. Another HFT shop is trying to preempt this. The race for speed in financial markets has reached a point where no existing fiber optic or satelite based system can compete; the state of the art are short wave radio that bounce back on the ionosphere and enable intercontinental communication at the speed of light over the shortest path and with no intermediary hops. Fiber optics, for contrast, can only do about 2/3 of the speed of light and impose non-direct routes and multiple hops.

p49k 6y ago
A HN comment in another thread (which I can’t find atm) states that this is no longer relevant because exchanges now allow colocation in the same buildings as the servers running the exchange, and it’s relatively inexpensive. Is that comment inaccurate?
- blutack 6y ago
  These links are often used for executing strategies or sending information between different exchanges (a classic example being the cross-exchange arbitrage).
  - bluGill 6y ago
    To put it more concrete, there are a number of very large companies that have their stock traded in many locations. Japan, London, and New York all have big stock exchanges (that is just what I know of without looking - if you told me those were the only 3 cities with global stock markets I'd call you a lier). If you see a big company in London trading for slightly less than the same company in New York then you should buy stock in London and see it in New York, but you need to be first - there are several others trying to do the same thing that have enough money to make the price even alone. (my guess is that we are talking about needing $10,000 in cash ready to pull this off for the biggest companies)

flerchin 6y ago

HFT leeches can all DIAF.

kstrauser 6y ago
When I am appointed Lord Emperor, I'm going to make capital gains taxes inversely proportional to the amount of time you held the asset. Oh, you just flipped $1M in 30ms? That's going to be painful come tax day.
- ISL 6y ago
  Man, it'll be hard to be a grocery store, or any other intermediary, under that regime. Such a rule would slaughter credit-card processors, too. Anyone who makes a market or facilitates a transaction would have a problem. To expand a bit -- an antidote to HFT front-running is the limit order. If you can buy the thing you want at a price you believe is acceptable, HFT front-runners simply get paid for providing you liquidity. Don't like the price? Set your limit lower.
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    I don't think grocery stores pay capital gains tax on the sundries they sell. If you sold a whole grocery store, then yes. But inventory is not considered a capital asset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset
  - maxbond 6y ago
    How are any of those operations effected by capital gains? They aren't talking about moving money around, they're talking about selling stock that has appreciated in price. With regards to frontrunning, the problem isn't that XYZ is trading at $5 and I get charged $5.05 because I put in a market order - or at least, the problI don't think you fully understand frontrunning either.em isn't _just_ that. The problem is that between when I send my limit for $5, the price drops to $4.95. But through whatever mechanism, latency arbitrage, order flashes, whatever, the HFT knows my order is coming in at $5, and they scoop up all the liquidity and sell it to me at $5. Sure, if I priced the security correctly, $5 is a fair price. But I took market risk and I deserve the reward of buying at $4.95. The HFT, entering and leaving positions only when they know someone is coming, is taking no market risk, and is stealing my gains without providing any liquidity or hazarding the market with the rest of us. This is a simplification of course, in order to place teaser orders the HFT has to endure some market risk. But they've cranked it down to a rounding error. Another problem is that the retail brokers have gone to 0 commission by selling their order flow to the same HFTs. What this really means is that commissions are variable, arbitrary, and unknowable. Try putting that in a spreadsheet.

dcminter 6y ago

So at what point does it become economical to use particle accelerators to send neutrino/pion/whatnot beams in a direct line through the earth between trading datacentres? Sounds like the setup for a B-movie though...

joezydeco 6y ago
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange's data center is a stone's throw away from the Fermilab facility in Batavia (the same town where Parable wants to install their HF/HFT transmitter). It's not out of the realm of thought!
alexpil 6y ago
pfft. One nucflash=buy, two nucflash=sell

smkellat 6y ago

I’ve listened to a few shortwave industry experts hammer out the issues with this. Despite the novelty of the technical application this is an end run around the Commission’s rules. As there are other operators carrying out such data transmissions licensed under the Experimental Radio Service the major question is what exactly has changed in the rules to suddenly make this permissible.

grokhz 6y ago
Thank you smkellat. You get the point. I'm the author of the article linked in this post (and thank you HN for blowing us up today).

alexpil 6y ago

I'm the guy who filed it. AMA.