Is there such a thing as a straight key or paddle (iambic?) key that connects to a USB interface? The amount of bandwidth required to conduct a CW QSO via the internet would be far less than a VoIP call. A Morse code chat program would make for an interesting Show HN project.
A lot of the gatekeeping and lack of interest in SDR, GNURadio, etc is from the older HAMs. Having local clubs with upper age limits of 45 or so might encourage more digital experimentation and openness to the kinds of innovation that used to go hand-in-hand with amateur radio clubs.
It's true, many of the clubs have not been doing a good job of marketing themselves to younger hams. Check out the photos at the top of the websites for a couple of our local clubs:
Not too exciting to say the least. How about some photos of people doing interesting things with ham radio? And as you said, there are plenty of those interesting things.
For example, here are some recent talks at PAARA:
- 3D printing for ham radio (coming up this week)
- Amateur radio communications during disasters
- Using piezoelectric material as a radiating element
for VLF communications
- Making waves at UCSC: from ham radio to SlugSats (University of California Santa Cruz's CubeSat research on high frequency communications and particle physics)
- From Faraday to Hertz: the birth of wireless
- Designing off-grid solar power systems
- Parachute Mobile (a local group that skydives with ham radio transceivers and makes contacts on the way down. Why? Because they can!)
About the age thing: don't sell the oldsters short. One ham I know is probably in his 80's, and is setting up a system to track down malicious interference using Gforth for realtime analysis of SDR data, and now he's learning Python to build an application around this for volunteers to help track down the jammers.
A friend of mine who's in his mid-20s works at an infosec firm where he and quite a few of his colleagues have recently obtained ham licences.
They went along and tried to engage the local club. They gave up and now refuse to deal with them. He suggested to me that either someone needs to start a digital-only club, or, as recently happened with our overarching national body, someone needs to intervene and take over the club to keep it relevant.
I think it’s a case of finding the right club. I’m licensed in Canada along with my dad and it took us a while to find a good club where we live (Toronto). A good club, IMO, has a mix between old and new technologies and that’s been in line with my experience in the hobby so far
But Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et al are still free to sell phone location data acquired through apps (or Android itself in the case of Google), right? I wonder if there is any hope of laws to limit the ability of companies to sell this data...
It's time to differentiate selling "Bob is in Location X" from "Show this ad to all people at location X".
The first case is a far far bigger privacy concern to me, and seems to be what mobile networks were doing. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are doing the latter.
Yes, there are a lot of malicious actors that actually sell data (apps, browser extensions, phone carriers, potentially ISPs, finance companies, etc.). Many of these actors even sell un-anonymized data. The big tech companies are very low on the totem pole of badness and will continue to stay that way for a long time because the incentives don't align for them to actually sell data.
+1. I care way more about the existence of an api that tells anyone with money exactly where I am (and where I've been) than I do about one that anonymously attributes (in aggregate) my ad interaction stats to some place I was at or interested in.
No, it isn't. Both are essentially workable to do the same bloody thing, and just mean the same outcome can be achieved with the minor inconvenience of an additional layer of indirection.
Geolocation information shouldn't be considered a desirable dataasset to hold onto as a monetizable asset at all at the level of granularity that enables individual resolution.
But Google created the entire damned infrastructure and environment which makes precisely that effect possible, no matter how thinly you slice the hairs on what it is you call the practice.
It's not. The extent to which old-line businesses like telcos and banks will literally sell your data is way beyond anything Google has ever contemplated. I can call a credit card data clearinghouse and order all of the transactions of every age 30-35 male in Akron, Ohio in December 2019 and they'll put that in a spreadsheet and send it to me. It really is important to distinguish between "selling your data" and what Google does in the course of business, because if you are unable to make that distinction then you aren't aware of the terrifying scale and specificity of the data provided by other industries.
In my opinion, what Google does is better than just selling raw data. But not that much better -- Google still has the raw data, after all, and other entities get most of the benefits of access to that data.
That's why I consider it splitting hairs.
> if you are unable to make that distinction then you aren't aware of the terrifying scale and specificity of the data provided by other industries.
I am aware of the difference, and you're right, it's terrifying. But it's no less terrifying that Google can still do this.
I'm more worried when I CAN'T buy that data - because then I have no idea what they're holding onto (for private deals, either with corps, defense contractors, .gov, etc).
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it a lot, and we're trying for a bit better than that. We've already had to ask you once before.
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
About 15 years ago this kind of "application firewall" used to be really popular on Windows. IIRC, ZoneAlarm and/or Kerio was really popular? And some Antivirus software also included application firewall. Can't vouch for anything particular these days, though, haven't used such thing for a long time.
The problem with all such applications on Windows was (and probably still is) that it was too easy to install something that could bypass them at the network layer.
The other issue was that their blocking wasn't fine-grained enough; you couldn't, for example, do what others are describing elsewhere in this thread, allowing an application like firefox to connect to a particular site on a particular port only. You could only allow or block the application itself. You could tell the firewall to explicitly ask you on every request, but of course that wasn't feasible for apps like Internet Explorer. So anything that wanted to get around the firewall could just script Internet Explorer to send its request in the background and you would never see it.
Zone Labs released ZoneAlarm in 2000. Microsoft shipped Windows XP with the built-in Internet Connection Firewall (later rebranded to Windows Firewall) in 2001. ZoneAlarm was far more intuitive to use, but there was only one year when Windows did not have a built-in firewall while ZoneAlarm already out.
To be fair, Window XP's firewall cannot block Outgoing connection, only Incoming. Vista SP1 and later versions of Windows include a firewall with Outbound blocking.
I've tried various apps, including this. Other apps like this too, both on Linux and Windows.
On Linux, OpenSnitch and Douane. OpenSnitch is not optimized and results in high CPU usage when you move a lot of traffic. With Douane I had trouble using it for longer than a day since it resulted in my PC crashing caused by the kernel module that it installs. There seemed to be a bug in the C code somewhere, and it didn't go away when I checked back a couple months later.
Coming to Windows, most apps were really old. Only some actually worked with Windows 10 where NDIS 6.x came in and broke some things. Those that did work were so basic you could just use the Windows Firewall app. I tried everything I could get my hands on (in a VM) in search of the nice features that LittleSnitch provided. GlassWire was so far ahead in the features and control it provided, I made an exception in buying a subscription based software (which I almost never do)
Isn't this, at least in part, the goal of OStatus/Mastodon? It's a great idea but I find it humorous and ironic that many mastodon admins circulate block lists specifically meant to cut off nodes. I would prefer that users just use the block features available (and adding the ability for a user to block nodes or apply blocklists if they want to, but not for admins to make that decision for them).
You don't think that going the "Consequentialist Route" and funding bounties for developing F/OSS alternatives to the non-free components[1] if viable? What's not viable, in my opinion, is the shunning by the purists of everyone who doesn't believe and act like them. Some of us might if we're allowed to get there one step at a time and if they encouraged the transition the F/OSS as a whole would benefit.
> What's not viable, in my opinion, is the shunning by the purists of everyone who doesn't believe and act like them.
That is hardly consequential(ist). The group doesn't exactly wield much power. What influence they have is setting the bar higher so that others can get there one step at a time as you say.
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall works just fine in Ubuntu to install drivers. Also google chrome works, although video playback is not gpu accelerated.
I've been in the habit for years of making liberal use of the catch-all feature of email to make up email addresses unique to everything. This makes it easy to add NDR bounces to specific email addresses that end up on f-ing mailing lists I don't want or for which the address was sold/given to other groups (political parties are the WORST about this!).
Right there with you. There are exceptions in all the (US, at least) rules for spam email, spam sms, do-not-call list, etc. for political parties, and boy do they take advantage.
That's traditionally been the problem with voting machines: a "recount" just re-read some tally.
Combine this with voting machine companies being opaque, not recognizing obvious flaws and their executives promising to deliver states to particular candidates (https://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.htm), and you begin to feel that all the suspicion is justified.
Not just a paper record. A hand marked paper record. If it doesn't go through a computer first it can't be altered. There are several states that do it this way. It's a "Scantron" style ballot. Fill in the vote, run it through a tally machine and save the ballot. The tally machines could be messed with, but if there is evidence of tampering with the tally there is always the authentic original ballot.
Try trespassing on the White House lawn to pick up trash and improve the landscaping and see what happens -- even though you did nor intend no harm. If you violate the law your intent might change your punishment (or in some cases, prompt the judge to dismiss the case) but not the finding of fact of whether you are guilty or not.
Lots of theories about what that vehicle does... the one I like the best is that it intercepts "enemy" satellites and reprograms them. Of course, what comes around goes around and it would only be a matter of time before the Chinese do that to us if that's actually one of this vehicle's missions. A more likely scenario is that it is doing maintenance on and/or bringing home some of our own stuff -- as well as being an observation platform in its own right.
I don't know about reprogramming satellites but its possible it just grabs them and forces them to fall out of orbit. That's easier and quite effective.
Or it's just a moveable spy satellite that can hover over whatever it needs to.
Funny you mention the Chinese doing that to us. I just finished Snowden's book and he mentioned how he only learned what the NSA was doing after having to research what the Chinese were doing. Turns out, same thing!
The only place a satellite can 'hover' is directly above the equator in a geostationary orbit. Anywhere else and the best you can do is a highly eccentric orbit with a high inclination so you get lots of "hang time" over the target area, but that also means being very high up. From what I understand the X-37b was tracked by amateur astronomers to have a reasonably high inclination this time around, but an almost circular orbit.
Traditional spy satellites have very high inclinations because this lets gives them coverage of more of the planet (as the planet rotates beneath them.) The X-37 has thusfar to my knowledge not flown at a severely high inclination, from what I understand the most recent launch was somewhere around 54 degrees, and previous flights were lower. For reference the ISS is around 52 degrees.
The figures are all imprecise and the X-37b supposedly has the delta-v budget for relatively dramatic inclination changes, but even so 54 degrees is very far away from where earth-observing spy satellites traditionally are.
> its possible it just grabs them and forces them to fall out of orbit. That's easier and quite effective.
Honestly that seems neither easy, effective, nor subtle. To grab and deorbit something like that you'd need to grab it in such a way that let you thrust through it's center of mass which doesn't seem easy to do for a few reasons (not least because the distribution of mass inside the target satellite may not be known.) And since spy satellites can be massive, you'd need to burn a lot of fuel to do it. It's conceivable they're doing something a bit trickier, like slapping a time delayed ion thruster onto the side of victim satellites which would then slowly deorbit the target after the X-37 is long gone, but I'd still wager on the victim figuring out what was going on. Such anomalous thrust is something that would be noticed.
De-orbiting satellites I could see, but hijacking them seems more unlikely. Either they’re doing something physical to the satellite to hijack it (keep in mind every satellite is different, and this is an unmanned vehicle) or its over radio waves so why not do it from the ground?
Installing a modchip on a foreign satellite via robotic manipulation seems near impossible on the surface. Watching the Hubble service missions for example gives you an idea of just how much of a pain in the butt it is to service something in orbit, even when you have fully capable human beings doing the work. Building a robot to handle all of the unexpected hurdles of attempting such a task seems outside of our current capabilities. Even a waldo unit is a big ask.
Mostly because they aren't good enough yet. The manipulators struggle to balance small size, light weight, good grip, adequate cooling, and high strength. Getting the force feedback on the control solution correct is also difficult. And then you have to deal with communication delay as your bird is whipping around the world in LEO, constantly handing off between different ground stations, or worse, jumping through a sequence of Geo birds.
On the other hand, sometimes the government is willing to go to extreme lengths for intel purposes. The Glomar Explorer was outrageously ambitious, although ultimately only partially successful.
Even then you'd need intricate knowledge of the target satellite to hijack it - somehow opening and making electrical connections to a satellite you've never seen before seems rather infeasible - not even getting to the software side.
Nah I think it's far more likely it really was just a research vessel for more classified experiments they didn't want on the ISS.
Even just getting up close to another country's spy satellites would have value. The US keeps even the look of their current series of spy satellites classified; they're believed to be a lot like Hubble.
> "Working with the LST science groups and contractors, the team reduced the telescope’s primary mirror from a 3-meter aperture to 2.4 meters. This major change mainly resulted from new NASA estimates of the Space Shuttle’s payload delivery capability; the Shuttle could not lift a 3-meter telescope to the required orbit. In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing tech- nologies developed for military spy satellites."
