4 ms·

It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it. Part of the beauty of ham is being able to go along the dial and be

It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it. 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.

charcircuit 3y ago
>It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it. 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.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  You conflate unicast web traffic with city-wide and world-wide broadcast. It's a different medium.
  - nullc 3y ago
    Pedantically, use of amateur radio as a broadcast medium is prohibited in FCC land except for special exceptions like beacon stations. This, like the wholesale prohibition on music is also antiquated in my view -- already commercial broadcast radio is dying because of streaming. The public interest would be maximized by allowing a degree of non-commercial broadcast and music usage over amateur bands, subject to restrictions. 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.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  > On the internet trasitioning from a hobby website to a commercial one is seamless. 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.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >And that's exactly the kind of transition people into ham radio don't want. 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.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      > 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.
- Sporktacular 3y ago
  The Internet has the bandwidth to accomodate private channels. You don't know what you're talking about. There are no security vulnerabilities where there are no secrets. That's the point of ham. 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.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >There are no security vulnerabilities where there are no secrets. 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.
    - Sporktacular 3y ago
      I have. You're talking about the demands of non-hams now. These bands aren't for them.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  You seem to be implying HAM should be something different than it is, to the point the two become largely undifferentiated.
- wl 3y ago
  Obscuring a message, by itself, does nothing to prevent MitM attacks. If you're worried about message integrity on the amateur bands, the rules do nothing to prevent the use of digital signatures.
nullc 3y ago
> It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it. 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). :)
- ilyt 3y ago
  > 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.

charcircuit 3y ago

>It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it. 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.

unethical_ban 3y ago
You conflate unicast web traffic with city-wide and world-wide broadcast. It's a different medium.
- nullc 3y ago
  Pedantically, use of amateur radio as a broadcast medium is prohibited in FCC land except for special exceptions like beacon stations. This, like the wholesale prohibition on music is also antiquated in my view -- already commercial broadcast radio is dying because of streaming. The public interest would be maximized by allowing a degree of non-commercial broadcast and music usage over amateur bands, subject to restrictions. 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.
GuB-42 3y ago
> On the internet trasitioning from a hobby website to a commercial one is seamless. 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.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >And that's exactly the kind of transition people into ham radio don't want. 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.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    > 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.
Sporktacular 3y ago
The Internet has the bandwidth to accomodate private channels. You don't know what you're talking about. There are no security vulnerabilities where there are no secrets. That's the point of ham. 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.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >There are no security vulnerabilities where there are no secrets. 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.
  - Sporktacular 3y ago
    I have. You're talking about the demands of non-hams now. These bands aren't for them.
TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
You seem to be implying HAM should be something different than it is, to the point the two become largely undifferentiated.
wl 3y ago
Obscuring a message, by itself, does nothing to prevent MitM attacks. If you're worried about message integrity on the amateur bands, the rules do nothing to prevent the use of digital signatures.

nullc 3y ago

> It's a hobbyist set of bands, and encrypting traffic is against the hobbyist spirit of it. 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). :)

ilyt 3y ago
> 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.