Slashdot Mirror
Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy
js7a writes "The New America Foundation has published The Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy (pdf). An excellent 14 page guide that everyone should print a few copies of to have handy in the backpack or car. Learn what would happen if the government regulated speech the same way they regulate airwaves. Learn the truth about microbroadcasting, smart radio, and so-called intererence (all previously covered on Slashdot.) Learn more creative ways to tell Congress to stop giving away public resources to private corporations. Make the most of your rights to use unlicensed wireless, before it's too late."
The FCC needs to regulate the air waves. Given, they do go a bit far in some cases. What if they did not? Personally, I would not like to be driving down the road listening to some nice music on the radio only to have it interrupted by death metal or the sounds of porn. That 802.11a/b/g connection you are using would be a whole hell of a lot less secure and reliable if they did not regulate.
...this pdf looks like a japanese VCR user's manual?
This sort of thing is the best way to get something through to the public. What's more likely to get people interested: pages of plain text or a comic strip?
Norml have some excellent comics which do exactly the same thing: put across an issue in an interesting way.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Not sure what a few copies of this in the back of your car would do? Maybe you can hand it out with candy at your local school. It doesn't add to any debate, it provides no support for its assertations and propagates myths.
Not helpful
your loud speaker can't be heard fifty miles away, and your whispering can't be intercepted or interefere with everyone within a few blocks of your location. Left out that minor detail. It's all a matter of scale.
Everybody has the right to transmit on the FM radio band!
What, you don't believe me? Just go to your local Best Buy or Circuit City location and look at the iPod accessories. You'll see several models of battery powered FM transmitters. Yep, you can plug those into to your iPod and go, no FCC license required, but batteries are not included.
Of course, the catch is that it has to comply with some pretty low power limits but that's the point. You're only allowed to affect the radios in your immediate area, not to set up a major broadcaster that'd interfere with the already licensed stations.
See, everybody else has the right to hear what the licenced transmitters are putting out, and your right to broadcast falls when it comes into contact with their right to recieve.
What happens when I decide to be an asshole about it? Say you are happily using your WiFi connection at home, along with others in the neighbourhood. You are happier still since there is no power restriction, so you've cranked it a bit and it reaches all corners of your house.
Then I come along and decide that I don't like you all, for whatever reason. So I build a transmitter that operates on the WiFi band, but spews noise with 2000 watts of power through a massive antenna. Suddenly your WiFi is worthless. However there's nothing you can do, since there's no regulation. What I'm doing is legal, though assinie.
We have to share the airwaves just like we have to share roads. As we've found out all through history, you need rules when people have to share something or some assholes will abuse it. Hence, regulations on the airwaves.
I'm not saying they are perfect and need to changes, but they ARE necessary.
The question is, how much of the spectrum should remain open to the public and how much of the spectrum should be allocated to licensees, and how much interference (if any) on licensed airwaves is permissable and is it practical to allow portions of the spectrum remain unlicensed?
Most of their analogies seem relavent. Yeah, you may not be able to shout over/interupt a candidate (which would essentially be the equivalent of attempting to use the same part of the spectrum that the candidate is "shouting" over), but you are, generally speaking, allowed to speak in softer tones to those in your immediate vicinity (referred to as "whispering" in the cartoons).
If it is true that advances in technology allow radio signals to more intelligently distinguish and filter out different signals from different sources, perhaps instead of licensing the entire spectrum (or letting a lot of the spectrum go to waste), they should simply mandate that devices have the technology to "intelligently" distinguish and filter signals.
The valid point here is that spread spectrum could allow significantly more dense communication using RF. This would lead to more microbroadcasters (read whisperers) to be able to broadcast.
I read an article a few years ago that said that Italy allows anyone to open a radio or tv station that wishes to do so.
According to the article the results were pretty interesting. An enormous choice of things to listen to, some with really limited interest to most of us. One example the article gave was a 24 hour Hare Krishna station broadcasting nothing but chanting 24 hours a day.
I've long wished that the same rights were available in the U.S. If the law was changed tomorrow, I'd be in the market tomorrow for the equipment to set up my own radio station. If it could reach 20 miles, I'd be happy.
Here's a little tidbit of knowledge for you folks:
Modern FM receivers work by mixing a beat frequency with the frequency you want to receive. You wind up with (a+b) and (a-b), one of which is trivially filtered out with a high (or low) pass filter.
Now there's a nice, simple, standard design (and corresponding set of chips) for handling FM at a particular frequency. So given your target frequency (a), you can choose a beat frequency (b) such that (a-b) matches the standard chip frequency.
For standard US FM radio, that beat (b) frequency is right in the middle of the aircraft band.
Aircraft use AM for their comm gear.
So your little FM walkman receiver can jam air-to-ground comms.
That's a RECEIVER! Once you get into transmitters, it's really easy to jam everything around for miles. Not only on your frequency, which may be quite wide, but also on all the harmonics.
Take it from someone who used to jam his little brother's radio reception. "Turn it down or I turn it OFF!"
Last I heard the military is losing out to commercial interests as well. They're losing out on new freqs for expanded comms and radar to commercial interests. Main reason...government agencies are forbidden to lobby other government agencies. In the end the military is fighting for the scraps as well since they can't "contribute" (cough, cough) to the FCC's decision making process the way corporations can.
Don't reform the FCC. Auction off frequencies, with permanent ownership rights, to the public!
Oh, for fuck's sake, do we have to apply the property meme to every fucking thing humanity discovers?
Shiny rock? Mine! Sexy mate? Mine! Territory? Mine! Land between fences? Mine! Prisoners of War? Mine! Novel? Mine! Audio recording? Mine! Right to build a telephone? Mine and mine alone!
OBEY, proles. I own all.
Et cetera.
"The line must be drawn here!"
- Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Abolishment of private property might be a bit extreme, but can we please stop inventing new forms of it? It's not benefitting anyone.
None of the great innovations, discoveries, or achievements in human history were made for material gain.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
> Here is a primer on spread spectrum.
Key word being primer.
Look, Spread Spectrum isn't a magik nostrum to solve all ills. It makes it harder to actually intercept the signal but it raises the noise floor across the band it is operating on. Get enough devices operating and the noise floor comes up and smacks you. Toss the regulations and everyone starts cranking up the outpower and that floor will hit you pretty damned fast unless YOU crank up your power, which means your neighbors have to up THEIR power to overcome your contribution to the noise level, spiral out of control to madness.
Fact: Spectrum is not an infinite resource.
Fact: Spectrum, like every other finite public resource will be allocated in some fashion.
Discussing whether the current bandplan is sensible in the age of WiFi and other emerging technologies is a different debate, one I would love to get into; however there isn't much point of trying that in this thread:
1. This cartoon is a bunch of propaganda from some corporate consortium wanting to SELL lots of small RF devices who managed to tool some leftist think tank to make their arguments for them in terms of anti-corporatism. Kinda silly if you think about it. But with that sort of red meat hanging, the "down with authority" crowd is going to be out in force on this article.
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
Democrat delenda est
1) The right to say something offensive to somebody before they beat your ass. You're protected under the law as a victim of the crime of battery, but the perp didn't violate your free speech rights.
2) The right to say something at work that gets you fired. Your employer has no obligation to let you say anything you want. They have the right to put their own best interests first with regard to your speech.
3) And yes, the right to broadcast on radio and television. It's not a right, it's a privilege. More about that in a moment.
So, what is this mysterious freedom of speech that people talk about all the time? Well, it's hard for many Americans (most westerners, actually) to understand what it really means, because we've never known anything else. Well, like calling President Bush an idiot, for example. You're allowed to do that. You won't get shot or thrown in jail for saying it. You're allowed to say basicaly anything you want to and the federal government can't come after you for it, with some obvious exceptions:
1) If you suggest that you're going to harm the President or anybody else under Secret Service protection.
2) If you call in a bomb threat or any other kind of threat.
3) If you lie to an investigator or in a court of law
Now, back to the topic at hand. It's probably a great idea, now that radios are getting good enough to distinguish the signal they want from the signal they don't want. Of course, you can't really expect the government to jump on this development immediately. One great thing about radio is that it's really backward compatible. You can still use radios from many decades ago and they work just fine.
The part where I get upset is when people get upset about evil corporations buying the airwaves. Yes, the FCC has had some pretty crappy decisions in the last 15 years or so about their ownership rules, allowing companies like Clear Channel and Cox to reallly build major empires. But it's not a free speech violation. We do not and have never had any right to broadcast on public airwaves within certain frequencies. The reason for this is that those frequences are not unlimited. In fact, they're quite limited. So they are a public trust and must be regulated by the government. Don't like it? Go invent something better.
RP
from their site "The Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum."
...after all, for all we know, next month they'll get hired by neo-nazis and start promoting death camps and slavery!
and they're funded by "public intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." Although if these "intellectuals, civic leaders, and business executives." are so public, why don't they want to publicly put their names to this organisation.
It seems to me that they're a professional political lobbyists - guns for hire, if you will - but who pays their wages? I don't like the idea of raising the profile of an organisation without knowing exactly who they are...
--
I bet people don't borrow your CDs much