People who make their living from their exceptional hearing tend to take their music seriously.
That's right. But irrelevant. He's not saying he won't listen to streaming versions of his songs because they aren't good enough, he's saying NOBODY can listen to streaming versions. Even those people who couldn't tell a woofer from a tweeter or think MP3 means "Monty Python's Third album".
He's from that hippy era, though, where principles mean something. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
The same hippy era where every hippy car had an 8-track "hi fi", which was "hi fi" in name only. I remember listening to Edgar Winter on someone's 8-track and wondering "why the hell would anyone pay for such crappy reproduction of music?" I especially loved when the tape "ran out" and Frankenstein faded out in the middle of the good part, the tape machine went KLUNK to change tracks, and the music faded back in. Wow. Hi Fi you can hear with your ears and everything!
If there's a principle here, it's don't let your music be sold where you can't reap a good part of the profit. It's certainly not that a modern distribution medium is not good enough but 8-tracks and cassettes are.
Neil Young is available on 8-track and cassette tapes, if you recall what those are. A cassette of "Harvest" can be bought through Amazon for as little as $1.50, or if you are using a high fidelity system composed of oxygen free copper speaker cables, 00 gauge AC power cables (to allow the amps to reproduce the bass better), and typically use a green sharpie on the edges of your CDs, you can get a copy here for only $517.45, shipping included.
If he's willing to allow cassette tapes, he has no excuse for claiming that streaming is not good enough for his music.
Sure, but around 900Mhz is, inaddition to amatuer and ISM also "private land mobile" certified, which means that the manufacturer could be licensed to produce devices that transmit in that range for a variety of things. The proxyham seems to use this radio module
No, from the pictures and text in the Hackaday article, it is using this product, which is an unlicensed bridge. (As is the one you link to.) Manufacturers of products that use licensed allocations do not obtain the licenses, it is the end user who does, or one party to the communications (as is done by cellphone providers to cover the licenses for Part 22 cellphone use.)
Manufacturers must have FCC certifications that authorize manufacture and sale of products that meet the technical standards for the intended frequency and regulatory use. If this device did not meet the FCC rules for the intended use, then the FCC could, and would, confiscate the offending products and levy a fine for violation of the rules. They do this on a semi-routine basis when they uncover a dealer who is selling illegal power amplifiers that can be used in the 11m (CB) band.
If "over 200 distributors", including NewEgg, are selling this device, then it is a good assumption that it is not illegal for manufacture or sale. Ubiquity states that this is for unlicensed wireless. Thus use of the device in a system where it is performing its intended function is not the issue.
Yeah, I get that the name implies it operates at ham frequencies. However, the articles all say 900 Mhz.
From here, you will see that the 33cm amateur band runs from 902 to 928MHz, with all modes (except "pulse") authorized for all classes of amateur licensee except novice.
If you want to see what is allocated where, then this chart might be handy. Or this table may be more readable.
If the confusion is that you think a reference to "900 MHz" in marketing documents means 900.000 MHz only, then you should know that, in general, a reference like this means "an allocation somewhere around 900 MHz" and not the exact frequency. For example, when a ham says he's operating on "2 meters", he doesn't mean he's on 150.000 MHz (2 meter wavelength in free space), he's somewhere between 144 and 148 MHz. Likewise, when a public safety agency says they are operating on "700 MHz", they don't mean 700.000MHz, they mean in the allocation for public safety users up near 700 MHz (which actually extends into the 800's.)
With a name like "proxyHAM", there's a reasonable suspicion that it was indeed operating on an amateur band.
Operating "on an amateur band" is not the same as "operating under the rules of the amateur radio service." The 2.4GHz WiFi allocation in the US is "an amateur band", but when you buy your home router you are not "operating under the rules of the amateur radio service". Similarly, there are overlapping amateur/non-amateur allocations at 900 MHz. And there are a lot of 434 MHz things (lower end of the amateur 70cm band) that aren't operating under the rules of the amateur radio service.
I didn't need a ham license when I bought and installed my wireless weather system (one of those "434MHz things"), and I don't need a ham license to use one of the Ubiquity M900 links this system is based on.
Do you really think a bunch of guys in dark suits didn't show up and basically threaten them with jail time?
Yes.
As paranoid as is sounds, these days I think it is entirely plausible that a national security letter or somesuch was used to say "if you tell anybody about this, we will put you in a deep dark hole...
It is using a commercially available product for the purpose it was designed. If it was that illegal to do, the FCC would have confiscated all of Ubiquity's product and levied a fine for violation of the FCC regulations.
This technology will never see the light of day,
You can buy them from more than 200 distributors worldwide. The genie is out of the bottle, the horse has left the barn. It's not the full system, but anyone with any technical proficiency in networking can put it together in their sleep almost.
I have a system with a pair of COTS 5GHz bridge wireless boxes that does exactly the same thing this system is supposed to do. I fear no dark suits telling me to stop.
On the other hand, the FCC allows anyone to use the 900MHz band but tightly regulates what can be done there (for example, no "retransmission of.. signals emanating from... radio station other than an amateur radio station",
If anyone can use the frequency, it is really hard to impose a regulation that applies ONLY to the amateur radio service upon those users. You might have to explain how Ubiquity is managing to sell the 900 MHz device that the article points to if the only data it can "retransmit" is from amateur radio stations.
This system isn't designed with amateur radio equipment, so Part 97 of the rules are irrelevant.
I haven't looked in to it, but the statement "They said it would use low-frequency radio channels to connect a computer to public Wi-Fi hotspots up to 2.5 miles away, thus obscuring a user's actual location." makes me believe it would be using the portion of the amateur radio spectrum that borders the wifi range (as is used by HSMM) and thus encryption is not allowed.
You're right, you haven't looked into it.
If you click on the link in TFA, you'll wind up looking at a Ubiquity M900 bridge product, which while it uses the 900 MHz band, is NOT an amateur radio device. Amateur radio has nothing to do with the discussion, therefore. And the amateur radio prohibition on encryption to hide content is irrelevant.*
Nine hundred megahertz is also not "low-frequency". It is in the ULTRA HIGH frequency (UHF) portion of the spectrum. It is lower than the normal 2.4GHz of WiFi, but low it is not.
It seems pretty clear that this entire fiasco is intended to draw attention to the author or his company. There is nothing illegal about using a license-free wireless bridging device to extend a network connection. There is nothing illegal about connecting to a public WiFi access point using a device within the normal coverage area of that AP, and that's where the connection is being made, no matter how far away the user happens to be. Imagine someone putting a laptop with a wired connection in range of the public WiFi point and accessing that laptop from Lithuania, e.g., to use the WiFi. Would anyone think that was illegal? Or try this one: I have a computer at home with a wireless connection to the public WiFi in the library next door. I put a modem on the system and dial in from a remote location. Am I breaking the law if I do anything remotely over the wireless connection? Of course not.
There's nothing to see here, it's a waste of time. "ProxyHam" is using COTS gear to do what it was designed to do.
* the "prohibition on encryption" is not as absolute as some try to claim. The prohibition is on hiding content because the amateur rules have restrictions on what content is legal, and the amateur radio service is mostly self-policing. Other hams have to be able to see your content to know if you're breaking the rules and should be reported. As everett mentions, there is something that used to be called "HSMM" (high speed multimedia), now referred to as "meshnet" or something like that. Users of that system, because it coincides with the license-free 2.4GHz WiFi band, regularly use WEP or WPA as an access control method. Because it is for "access control" and not "hiding the content", the FCC has not acted to shut such systems down.
The escape clause, so to speak, for that system is that it uses one of a few standard "passwords" that are published on various websites so, in theory, the wireless traffic can be monitored by others but the general public will be kept out.
"She kept saying it's a crime." It's in the damn summary. "Kept saying" == "more than once". "it's a crime", when spoken by a member of the police, is an instruction to stop. It doesn't matter if she "just" asked him to unplug, the request was made along with the information that he was committing a crime. He decided to push the issue and he got what he wanted.
And "de-arresting" him doesn't mean what he did wasn't a crime, it only means they dropped the charge. Why should they keep the minor charge when he helped them by resisting?
I guess you didn't bother to read the post I was replying to which is where the discussion went from TFA to analogous situations.
I don't care what other specious analogies you've come up with, right here we're talking about the person who asked him to stop multiple times and he refused. She wasn't the business owner, she was a part of the police. The business owner didn't call her to come deal with this, she was on her regular rounds. The business owner has nothing to do with this.
What "the real cops" call her is irrelevant, she's still a part of the system.
This is a text based forum. You have the ability to slow down and read carefully if you can't keep up.
You have the ability to stop resorting to personal insults. You should try it.
She was a community support officer (AKA "plastic plod" or "hobby bobby").
She is a POLICE community support officer. That makes her a member of the police system.
She didn't have to escalate to getting the actual cops to make an arrest.
No, she didn't, but she chose to when her request to stop doing something illegal was refused. Cops tend to do that. If you continue to break the law after one of them asks you to stop, then you get what you want: an escalation of the confrontation. If a cop thinks what you're doing is important enough to actually ask you to stop, then you should be smart enough to know they think it is important enough for you to actually stop.
The actual cops with arrest power decided arrest was the wrong call once they got the full story.
She's not the one who arrested him, they were. They didn't have to arrest him, either, but they did, and then later changed their mind. But he's still charged with disorderly or whatever they call resisting over there.
This has nothing to do with how a business owner treats customers, so your attempt at sidetracking the issue will be ignored.
and I think it's even an electrical code violation to make the socket unavailable.
You must be kidding. You think it is a violation of the electrical code if I tell you not to plug your crap into my outlet?
Unless you're hurting someone or breaking something, the only punishment for violating one of these "rules" should be being asked to leave, and then being detained or removed if you refuse to do so
How much would "abrupt phase changes" affect the switched-mode power supply in a typical USB charger?
If the change resulted in a spike that doubled or tripled or more the voltage (keep in mind the inductive nature of electrical wiring and the motors attached to them) it could blow it out.
Even the transients caused by switching the motors (how the speed is controlled) can be huge.
If you can buy a USB charger for $2, you have to realize how cheaply made they are. Cheaply made means all those bits that would make them survive abnormal use and protect the device being charged are left out.
If you did that, I MIGHT pull the plug and tell you you can't use it (only if it was a frequent problem),
She told him he couldn't use it. She is probably not authorized to yank it out herself due to liability issues. ("You broke my charger when you pulled it out, buy me a new one...")
but I certainly wouldn't call the cops.
She IS the cops. She's not one that can arrest people, but she's part of the same system.
Or for a perhaps even more apt comparison, if you had a business office and someone was there for a meeting with you, would you call the cops if he plugged his phone in?
If the outlet was marked "not for public use", it was a crime to use it to start with, the cop caught him using it, and he refused to simply unplugged when instructed to do so, I MIGHT step in to try to defuse the situation if I cared about the guy.
If he was just one of an endless number of customers and I wanted to make it clear that the outlet he was using was not for public use so I didn't have lots of people abusing it, I might not bother interfering with them.
Given that this guy is a captive customer (whose train are you going to take except mine?), a tiny part of my revenue, and creating a problem, why should I interfere with police doing their job?
Maintenance. Liability. Increased customer expectations ("you have some outlets for us to use, you should add more..."). Three issues his use of that outlet create for me.
Imagine a 50 mile section of track all powered by one substation. Imagine the IR drop of running the power for all the trains on that track for an average of 25 miles. Imagine the changes in IR drop as the I changes as trains use more or less current to accelerate or come to a stop.
If you don't want to imagine one long stretch of track all powered from one substation, then imagine that there are multiple substations and the train must switch from one to the next, and that the IR drop at the end of the one being left will be high (i.e. low voltage) and the voltage of the next will be higher until the train starts drawing current from it.
Electric trains use power from those wires overhead and the tracks below (or sometimes a third rail). If you need a citation to understand why there might be huge fluctuations in voltage during travel, I'd suggest Halliday and Resnick for a review of the physics of electronics.
In that case, I would likely just explain that and then say you can't use that outlet (if you still wanted to after being told it would spike your phone).
Which is what happened here. The community service officer kept telling the guy that he wasn't allowed to use the outlet, which means she told him the first time and he kept doing it. And doing it, until the train reached the station. She then turned it over to the police on the platform.
He should have said "ok, sorry", unplugged, and the matter would have ended. He wanted to make a point. So, the police made a point, too.
It's just plain stupid to argue with a law enforcement official (even if she can't arrest you herself) about something that is plainly marked as not for public use, and which is technically illegal. When you force her to call for backup, you've just escalated the matter much further than it deserves to go and you are going to lose. Even if all the cops did was pull you from the train for a discussion, you've lost more time that it is worth.
We're talking a cellphone (or even a laptop) that is going to draw about 100-200 mW (that's 0.1 - 0.2W) from the AC line at roughly 230VAC
I have cellphone and tablet chargers that provide 2 amps at 5 volts. That's 10W. And cellphones and tablets that use that full current to charge faster. Assuming 90% efficiency in the charger, that's 11W at the AC side.
My Dell laptop charger is rated at 3.34A at 19.5V, which is 65W.
Your 200mW charger would provide less than 40 mA to charge your phone. You'll need to ride the train for a VERY long time for your phone to get any reasonable charge at that rate, and your laptop will actually be discharging while it is plugged in.
The USB system has 500mA as the design spec. That's 2.5W minimum. No, nobody is talking about a charger that would use just 200 mW.
The issue is not how much electricity it uses. There are two major issues.
1. Liability. Rail company allows people to plug in. Surges and brownouts in power as the train crosses power boundaries cause damage to an $800 cellphone. Who pays for that? And the lawyers when the passenger sues.
2. Wear and tear. Hundreds of people plugging and unplugging every day will create wear and tear, and increases maintenance costs. A broken or worn outlet can cause shorts, which can cause fires.
The guy should have said "sorry" and unplugged instead of trying to make a point. The outlet was marked, he was in the wrong. The police should have pulled him from the train, discussed the matter with him long enough to make him late for wherever he was going to make THEIR point, and then sent him on his way.
But turning it into disorderly, that's all on him.
I didn't say that it's faster by reducing the wait time for the next transport.
I know what you said. But buses don't avoid traffic, they operate on the same streets I use to drive my car. They, in fact, hinder traffic, since they stop in the street to pick up passengers and force all the traffic behind them in that lane to either stop or try to change lanes to go around.
I have yet to compete in travel time with a bus while driving and have the bus win. I can drive the shortest route from A to B and don't have to stop every two blocks to pick up or drop off; the bus has a fixed route that takes it a roundabout way. It has a semi-fixed route, so the only way to speed up service is to buy more buses. That costs money. And costing money is the enemy of making things cheaper.
That is, taking a train can be faster than driving.
It can be. It can also be longer than driving. A lot longer. I can take the train to the nearest "big city", but it sure won't be faster than just driving it myself. First, I have to drive over to the train station, and that's 20 minutes. I wait for the train that shows up four hours late. I'm now 4:20 into a trip that I can make in 1:30 by car. Let's say it takes just an hour to get to the city in that train. That's now 5:20. But I don't wind up where I want to go, I'm at the train station. I have to find other transport to get where I want to go. Add:30 as an estimate. Six hours for a 90 minute door-to-door trip. Ok, we'll give the train system the benefit of the doubt and the train leaves one minute after I get to the station. Still two hours. And I have to drive to the station anyway.
The FACT is that if you live near a train station and work near a train station, taking the train will probably be faster than driving. IF everything works right.
About the only way to speed up train transit is to run more trains so you don't wait as long at the station for the next one -- you can't just have them go twice as fast. It costs a lot of money to run another train, if you can even fit one in the schedule. Speed it up and make it cheaper? Sorry, two opposing concepts.
Your argument only makes sens if you had assumed I was saying that taking a bus can be faster than taking a slower bus while also cheaper than taking a slower bus.
No, my argument is with your statement that you can speed up public transit and have it still be cheaper. The only way to speed up a bus system is to add more buses to cut down the waiting time, or spend a LOT of money creating dedicated bus roads. Even then, if the bus takes a roundabout route and I'm going straight, the bus loses. You can't "speed up" service and still have it be cheap.
If you have a system that's cheaper, easier, and faster to take a train rather than drive a car, then a lot fewer people buy cars.
You're right, I've never lived in a city that needs to have trains to get from one side to the other. A lot of the US is like that. Unfortunately, to make the train system faster and easier would cost a lot of money, therefore eliminating the "cheaper" bit. For trains you'd need more trains, more stations, and more tracks to make it "easier" and "faster". For buses, you need more buses, more bus lanes, and more routes. There goes "cheaper".
Yes, it will. And it will create a lot of jobs in the short term,
Government run, taxpayer funded jobs tend not to be a long-term benefit to the economy. They tend to be exactly the opposite.
It will also take a sea-change in the demographic structure in the US, moving people to where it would be feasible to support public transport in place of automobiles, OR building so much public transport infrastructure that you turn the entire country into urban blight. Too many people live too far away from each other to reach the population density necessary to support trains or buses everywher
If it takes you 5 minutes to drive to work. Then walking or riding a bike would probably be a better solution than a bus.
It's a long walk, and I'd rather not show up to work sweaty from a bike ride, thanks. The issue is not whether walking or biking is better than a bus, though.
but for ~40 of those minutes I can sit down and answer email, read journal papers, write course material etc.
In other words, your employer has convinced you that you should do his work on your own time.
Every so often I think that maybe I ought to buy a good laptop computer because it could do so much more than the netbook I've got. Then I think about what I'd be doing so much more of. Most of it would be work related. Why should I spend my money so I can do more work for my employer?
For that 25 minute car ride you can listen to audio books on any subject that interests you. You can think about non-work stuff. You can listen to news or sports and learn about the world. You can get podcasts on thousands of topics.
The idea that a mode of transportation gets bonus points because it allows you to perform more work for other people instead of for yourself, well, that's sad.
Let's say their birthday wish is granted and all of the big tech companies implement backdoor decryption that only they can access.
(Outright laughter.) You haven't been paying attention. There is no wish left to grant. It's already done.
One of those two major corporations listed in the summary provides system encryption for their users to protect their data. They also can undo that encryption whenever they want to. A friend's Mac Book was set up to encrypt his data, and to make a long story short, when his employer needed access to it the local Mac store was able to turn off the encryption for them. Whatever safeguards they currently have now to limit who can get the encryption removed are just policy writ on paper. The technical fact is that users of those products who think their data is safe because it is encrypted are living a pipe dream.
Maybe the next part of their amazingly forward-thinking plan is to convince Richard Stallman to bend a knee and put a backdoor in GnuPG.
I have discovered an algorithm which can be used to decrypt any content protected by assymetrical key encryption, but the margins of this posting not large enough to record it here.
It can be much faster by avoiding traffic and parking. It can be much cheaper,
You have mutually exclusive things there. If you make it fast enough (by reducing the wait time for the next transport) you increase the cost considerably. Running a bus every ten minutes vs. running one every hour -- six times the cost in fuel and probably the same in vehicles. In my case, this six-fold increase in cost would cut the time to get on the bus down to an average of 10 minutes, which is still twice the time it takes to drive it. That doesn't even count the time the bus takes wandering back and stopping to pick people up every couple of blocks before it get where I'm going.
since each person taking public transportation means one fewer person in a car, driving themselves.
Uhhh, no. It means one fewer person using some other means of transportation. The people who ride for free are, in my observation, mostly people who would otherwise walk or ride a bike.
The US government decided long ego to invest in roads and car companies, and it'll take some sustained investment to turn things around.
Government at all levels invested in what worked best. It will take a LOT of sustained investments (i.e. taxpayer money) to build sufficient infrastructure to make public transport anywhere close to convenient for most people. A LOT of money. And a LOT of deliberate degrading of the existing infrastructure for cars.
5 miles takes 2 hours additional with public transport? You could crawl 5 miles in 2 hours when drunk.
Except a large part of that time involves waiting at a standstill for the bus to appear at your stop. Five miles in two hours is 2.5 MPH, which is a pretty good walking pace, and much faster than a drunk can crawl.
If people wanted to walk five miles to work (in the rain, snow, etc) they would already be doing it and free public transport would be irrelevant. The issue comes when taking the free public transport adds time to the commute compared to using a car.
Our city public transport is free. (Actually, taxpayer funded through a fee on the water bill, of all places.) I live four miles from work. I've walked it once or twice -- it's not pleasant. It's a five minute drive. It's a five minute walk to the closest bus stop, so the bus already loses when it comes to commute time. Then wait for it (half an hour on average). Ten minutes ride.
But what if I need to go home in the middle of the day? I just did that a month or so ago. I had to use the bus because I had locked my keys in the car. I was going home to get another set so I could get them out. It took an hour and a half round trip for what would have taken 15 minutes in the car.
To answer the general question, yes, if public transport were free, more people would use it, but they will be people who were likely to not take a car in the first place. That's the experience here in my town.
To hack the account, they need both the account number and either the PIN or password. This allows them to brute force the PIN, and retrieve the account number as a byproduct of that.
No, you don't get the account number that way. The "forgot account number" page uses the customer name and one of the listed items of information to identify your account. If it can identify your account it sends an EMAIL with the account number to the email address of record on that account.
The horrendous failure is that they don't simply pretend to send an email if you get the PIN wrong, they report that they can't find the account. I've had a bank that pretended to send an email and it was VERY confusing. It kept telling me it was sending an email with my forgotten user ID but I never got anything. I had to go into the bank to find out I didn't have an email address listed on the account -- even though they kept saying they were sending email to me.
Knowing the email address or home address only gets you the account number.
No. It gets you nothing of value, unless you've already hacked into the target's email.
I'm not saying they should disable all automated methods to retrieve your account number, just the method that requires a PIN.
I thought you were saying that you were unhappy because they ignored your brute force attack and report of same and didn't hand you a million award miles.
Remember, I said that the "Forgot your account number?" page lets you retrieve your account number if you enter your name along with any ONE of the following:
your e-mail address
So you're perfectly happy if someone can "hack" into a United account by knowing someone's name and email address, but not if they know the name and take up to 10000 guesses at the PIN.
your "old MileagePlus number"
And it's ok to brute force the old Mileage Plus numbers (six digits, IIRC), but not a four digit PIN.
Are you sure a pilots license is required? No license is required to fly an Ultralight aircraft.
The definition of "ultralight" includes: "(4) Has a power-off stall speed which does not exceed 24 knots calibrated airspeed." I.e., it must not stall if you go faster than 24 knots. If your fans stop and you're still going 40 knots (74 kph), but you have zero lift, you've stalled. As you fall you will reach terminal velocity. That will probably be more than 24 knots, but you will still have zero lift.
I don't see any technical details other than planned cruise speed, but if it carries more than 5 gallons of fuel or weighs more than 254 pounds dry, it also isn't an ultralight.
If it is an ultralight, the prohibition that it cannot be operated over congested areas of cities, towns, or settlements, or over any open-air assembly of persons makes this a pretty expensive toy.
While there is no legal definition of "congested area", the FAA has said it will be determined on a case by case basis, and cases come about when someone complains. So, if you're flying one of these things over someone's head and they complain, you are going to have to defend yourself.
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People who make their living from their exceptional hearing tend to take their music seriously.
That's right. But irrelevant. He's not saying he won't listen to streaming versions of his songs because they aren't good enough, he's saying NOBODY can listen to streaming versions. Even those people who couldn't tell a woofer from a tweeter or think MP3 means "Monty Python's Third album".
He's from that hippy era, though, where principles mean something. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
The same hippy era where every hippy car had an 8-track "hi fi", which was "hi fi" in name only. I remember listening to Edgar Winter on someone's 8-track and wondering "why the hell would anyone pay for such crappy reproduction of music?" I especially loved when the tape "ran out" and Frankenstein faded out in the middle of the good part, the tape machine went KLUNK to change tracks, and the music faded back in. Wow. Hi Fi you can hear with your ears and everything!
If there's a principle here, it's don't let your music be sold where you can't reap a good part of the profit. It's certainly not that a modern distribution medium is not good enough but 8-tracks and cassettes are.
Neil Young is available on 8-track and cassette tapes, if you recall what those are. A cassette of "Harvest" can be bought through Amazon for as little as $1.50, or if you are using a high fidelity system composed of oxygen free copper speaker cables, 00 gauge AC power cables (to allow the amps to reproduce the bass better), and typically use a green sharpie on the edges of your CDs, you can get a copy here for only $517.45, shipping included.
If he's willing to allow cassette tapes, he has no excuse for claiming that streaming is not good enough for his music.
Sure, but around 900Mhz is, inaddition to amatuer and ISM also "private land mobile" certified, which means that the manufacturer could be licensed to produce devices that transmit in that range for a variety of things. The proxyham seems to use this radio module
No, from the pictures and text in the Hackaday article, it is using this product, which is an unlicensed bridge. (As is the one you link to.) Manufacturers of products that use licensed allocations do not obtain the licenses, it is the end user who does, or one party to the communications (as is done by cellphone providers to cover the licenses for Part 22 cellphone use.)
Manufacturers must have FCC certifications that authorize manufacture and sale of products that meet the technical standards for the intended frequency and regulatory use. If this device did not meet the FCC rules for the intended use, then the FCC could, and would, confiscate the offending products and levy a fine for violation of the rules. They do this on a semi-routine basis when they uncover a dealer who is selling illegal power amplifiers that can be used in the 11m (CB) band.
If "over 200 distributors", including NewEgg, are selling this device, then it is a good assumption that it is not illegal for manufacture or sale. Ubiquity states that this is for unlicensed wireless. Thus use of the device in a system where it is performing its intended function is not the issue.
Yeah, I get that the name implies it operates at ham frequencies. However, the articles all say 900 Mhz.
From here, you will see that the 33cm amateur band runs from 902 to 928MHz, with all modes (except "pulse") authorized for all classes of amateur licensee except novice.
If you want to see what is allocated where, then this chart might be handy. Or this table may be more readable.
If the confusion is that you think a reference to "900 MHz" in marketing documents means 900.000 MHz only, then you should know that, in general, a reference like this means "an allocation somewhere around 900 MHz" and not the exact frequency. For example, when a ham says he's operating on "2 meters", he doesn't mean he's on 150.000 MHz (2 meter wavelength in free space), he's somewhere between 144 and 148 MHz. Likewise, when a public safety agency says they are operating on "700 MHz", they don't mean 700.000MHz, they mean in the allocation for public safety users up near 700 MHz (which actually extends into the 800's.)
With a name like "proxyHAM", there's a reasonable suspicion that it was indeed operating on an amateur band.
Operating "on an amateur band" is not the same as "operating under the rules of the amateur radio service." The 2.4GHz WiFi allocation in the US is "an amateur band", but when you buy your home router you are not "operating under the rules of the amateur radio service". Similarly, there are overlapping amateur/non-amateur allocations at 900 MHz. And there are a lot of 434 MHz things (lower end of the amateur 70cm band) that aren't operating under the rules of the amateur radio service.
I didn't need a ham license when I bought and installed my wireless weather system (one of those "434MHz things"), and I don't need a ham license to use one of the Ubiquity M900 links this system is based on.
Do you really think a bunch of guys in dark suits didn't show up and basically threaten them with jail time?
Yes.
As paranoid as is sounds, these days I think it is entirely plausible that a national security letter or somesuch was used to say "if you tell anybody about this, we will put you in a deep dark hole ...
It is using a commercially available product for the purpose it was designed. If it was that illegal to do, the FCC would have confiscated all of Ubiquity's product and levied a fine for violation of the FCC regulations.
This technology will never see the light of day,
You can buy them from more than 200 distributors worldwide. The genie is out of the bottle, the horse has left the barn. It's not the full system, but anyone with any technical proficiency in networking can put it together in their sleep almost.
I have a system with a pair of COTS 5GHz bridge wireless boxes that does exactly the same thing this system is supposed to do. I fear no dark suits telling me to stop.
On the other hand, the FCC allows anyone to use the 900MHz band but tightly regulates what can be done there (for example, no "retransmission of .. signals emanating from ... radio station other than an amateur radio station",
If anyone can use the frequency, it is really hard to impose a regulation that applies ONLY to the amateur radio service upon those users. You might have to explain how Ubiquity is managing to sell the 900 MHz device that the article points to if the only data it can "retransmit" is from amateur radio stations.
This system isn't designed with amateur radio equipment, so Part 97 of the rules are irrelevant.
I haven't looked in to it, but the statement "They said it would use low-frequency radio channels to connect a computer to public Wi-Fi hotspots up to 2.5 miles away, thus obscuring a user's actual location." makes me believe it would be using the portion of the amateur radio spectrum that borders the wifi range (as is used by HSMM) and thus encryption is not allowed.
You're right, you haven't looked into it.
If you click on the link in TFA, you'll wind up looking at a Ubiquity M900 bridge product, which while it uses the 900 MHz band, is NOT an amateur radio device. Amateur radio has nothing to do with the discussion, therefore. And the amateur radio prohibition on encryption to hide content is irrelevant.*
Nine hundred megahertz is also not "low-frequency". It is in the ULTRA HIGH frequency (UHF) portion of the spectrum. It is lower than the normal 2.4GHz of WiFi, but low it is not.
It seems pretty clear that this entire fiasco is intended to draw attention to the author or his company. There is nothing illegal about using a license-free wireless bridging device to extend a network connection. There is nothing illegal about connecting to a public WiFi access point using a device within the normal coverage area of that AP, and that's where the connection is being made, no matter how far away the user happens to be. Imagine someone putting a laptop with a wired connection in range of the public WiFi point and accessing that laptop from Lithuania, e.g., to use the WiFi. Would anyone think that was illegal? Or try this one: I have a computer at home with a wireless connection to the public WiFi in the library next door. I put a modem on the system and dial in from a remote location. Am I breaking the law if I do anything remotely over the wireless connection? Of course not.
There's nothing to see here, it's a waste of time. "ProxyHam" is using COTS gear to do what it was designed to do.
* the "prohibition on encryption" is not as absolute as some try to claim. The prohibition is on hiding content because the amateur rules have restrictions on what content is legal, and the amateur radio service is mostly self-policing. Other hams have to be able to see your content to know if you're breaking the rules and should be reported. As everett mentions, there is something that used to be called "HSMM" (high speed multimedia), now referred to as "meshnet" or something like that. Users of that system, because it coincides with the license-free 2.4GHz WiFi band, regularly use WEP or WPA as an access control method. Because it is for "access control" and not "hiding the content", the FCC has not acted to shut such systems down.
The escape clause, so to speak, for that system is that it uses one of a few standard "passwords" that are published on various websites so, in theory, the wireless traffic can be monitored by others but the general public will be kept out.
And "de-arresting" him doesn't mean what he did wasn't a crime, it only means they dropped the charge. Why should they keep the minor charge when he helped them by resisting?
I guess you didn't bother to read the post I was replying to which is where the discussion went from TFA to analogous situations.
I don't care what other specious analogies you've come up with, right here we're talking about the person who asked him to stop multiple times and he refused. She wasn't the business owner, she was a part of the police. The business owner didn't call her to come deal with this, she was on her regular rounds. The business owner has nothing to do with this.
What "the real cops" call her is irrelevant, she's still a part of the system.
This is a text based forum. You have the ability to slow down and read carefully if you can't keep up.
You have the ability to stop resorting to personal insults. You should try it.
She was a community support officer (AKA "plastic plod" or "hobby bobby").
She is a POLICE community support officer. That makes her a member of the police system.
She didn't have to escalate to getting the actual cops to make an arrest.
No, she didn't, but she chose to when her request to stop doing something illegal was refused. Cops tend to do that. If you continue to break the law after one of them asks you to stop, then you get what you want: an escalation of the confrontation. If a cop thinks what you're doing is important enough to actually ask you to stop, then you should be smart enough to know they think it is important enough for you to actually stop.
The actual cops with arrest power decided arrest was the wrong call once they got the full story.
She's not the one who arrested him, they were. They didn't have to arrest him, either, but they did, and then later changed their mind. But he's still charged with disorderly or whatever they call resisting over there.
This has nothing to do with how a business owner treats customers, so your attempt at sidetracking the issue will be ignored.
and I think it's even an electrical code violation to make the socket unavailable.
You must be kidding. You think it is a violation of the electrical code if I tell you not to plug your crap into my outlet?
Unless you're hurting someone or breaking something, the only punishment for violating one of these "rules" should be being asked to leave, and then being detained or removed if you refuse to do so
He was asked to stop and refused to do so.
How much would "abrupt phase changes" affect the switched-mode power supply in a typical USB charger?
If the change resulted in a spike that doubled or tripled or more the voltage (keep in mind the inductive nature of electrical wiring and the motors attached to them) it could blow it out.
Even the transients caused by switching the motors (how the speed is controlled) can be huge.
If you can buy a USB charger for $2, you have to realize how cheaply made they are. Cheaply made means all those bits that would make them survive abnormal use and protect the device being charged are left out.
If you did that, I MIGHT pull the plug and tell you you can't use it (only if it was a frequent problem),
She told him he couldn't use it. She is probably not authorized to yank it out herself due to liability issues. ("You broke my charger when you pulled it out, buy me a new one...")
but I certainly wouldn't call the cops.
She IS the cops. She's not one that can arrest people, but she's part of the same system.
Or for a perhaps even more apt comparison, if you had a business office and someone was there for a meeting with you, would you call the cops if he plugged his phone in?
If the outlet was marked "not for public use", it was a crime to use it to start with, the cop caught him using it, and he refused to simply unplugged when instructed to do so, I MIGHT step in to try to defuse the situation if I cared about the guy.
If he was just one of an endless number of customers and I wanted to make it clear that the outlet he was using was not for public use so I didn't have lots of people abusing it, I might not bother interfering with them.
Given that this guy is a captive customer (whose train are you going to take except mine?), a tiny part of my revenue, and creating a problem, why should I interfere with police doing their job?
Maintenance. Liability. Increased customer expectations ("you have some outlets for us to use, you should add more..."). Three issues his use of that outlet create for me.
If you don't want to imagine one long stretch of track all powered from one substation, then imagine that there are multiple substations and the train must switch from one to the next, and that the IR drop at the end of the one being left will be high (i.e. low voltage) and the voltage of the next will be higher until the train starts drawing current from it.
Electric trains use power from those wires overhead and the tracks below (or sometimes a third rail). If you need a citation to understand why there might be huge fluctuations in voltage during travel, I'd suggest Halliday and Resnick for a review of the physics of electronics.
In that case, I would likely just explain that and then say you can't use that outlet (if you still wanted to after being told it would spike your phone).
Which is what happened here. The community service officer kept telling the guy that he wasn't allowed to use the outlet, which means she told him the first time and he kept doing it. And doing it, until the train reached the station. She then turned it over to the police on the platform.
He should have said "ok, sorry", unplugged, and the matter would have ended. He wanted to make a point. So, the police made a point, too.
It's just plain stupid to argue with a law enforcement official (even if she can't arrest you herself) about something that is plainly marked as not for public use, and which is technically illegal. When you force her to call for backup, you've just escalated the matter much further than it deserves to go and you are going to lose. Even if all the cops did was pull you from the train for a discussion, you've lost more time that it is worth.
We're talking a cellphone (or even a laptop) that is going to draw about 100-200 mW (that's 0.1 - 0.2W) from the AC line at roughly 230VAC
I have cellphone and tablet chargers that provide 2 amps at 5 volts. That's 10W. And cellphones and tablets that use that full current to charge faster. Assuming 90% efficiency in the charger, that's 11W at the AC side.
My Dell laptop charger is rated at 3.34A at 19.5V, which is 65W.
Your 200mW charger would provide less than 40 mA to charge your phone. You'll need to ride the train for a VERY long time for your phone to get any reasonable charge at that rate, and your laptop will actually be discharging while it is plugged in.
The USB system has 500mA as the design spec. That's 2.5W minimum. No, nobody is talking about a charger that would use just 200 mW.
The issue is not how much electricity it uses. There are two major issues.
1. Liability. Rail company allows people to plug in. Surges and brownouts in power as the train crosses power boundaries cause damage to an $800 cellphone. Who pays for that? And the lawyers when the passenger sues.
2. Wear and tear. Hundreds of people plugging and unplugging every day will create wear and tear, and increases maintenance costs. A broken or worn outlet can cause shorts, which can cause fires.
The guy should have said "sorry" and unplugged instead of trying to make a point. The outlet was marked, he was in the wrong. The police should have pulled him from the train, discussed the matter with him long enough to make him late for wherever he was going to make THEIR point, and then sent him on his way.
But turning it into disorderly, that's all on him.
I didn't say that it's faster by reducing the wait time for the next transport.
I know what you said. But buses don't avoid traffic, they operate on the same streets I use to drive my car. They, in fact, hinder traffic, since they stop in the street to pick up passengers and force all the traffic behind them in that lane to either stop or try to change lanes to go around.
I have yet to compete in travel time with a bus while driving and have the bus win. I can drive the shortest route from A to B and don't have to stop every two blocks to pick up or drop off; the bus has a fixed route that takes it a roundabout way. It has a semi-fixed route, so the only way to speed up service is to buy more buses. That costs money. And costing money is the enemy of making things cheaper.
That is, taking a train can be faster than driving.
It can be. It can also be longer than driving. A lot longer. I can take the train to the nearest "big city", but it sure won't be faster than just driving it myself. First, I have to drive over to the train station, and that's 20 minutes. I wait for the train that shows up four hours late. I'm now 4:20 into a trip that I can make in 1:30 by car. Let's say it takes just an hour to get to the city in that train. That's now 5:20. But I don't wind up where I want to go, I'm at the train station. I have to find other transport to get where I want to go. Add :30 as an estimate. Six hours for a 90 minute door-to-door trip. Ok, we'll give the train system the benefit of the doubt and the train leaves one minute after I get to the station. Still two hours. And I have to drive to the station anyway.
The FACT is that if you live near a train station and work near a train station, taking the train will probably be faster than driving. IF everything works right.
About the only way to speed up train transit is to run more trains so you don't wait as long at the station for the next one -- you can't just have them go twice as fast. It costs a lot of money to run another train, if you can even fit one in the schedule. Speed it up and make it cheaper? Sorry, two opposing concepts.
Your argument only makes sens if you had assumed I was saying that taking a bus can be faster than taking a slower bus while also cheaper than taking a slower bus.
No, my argument is with your statement that you can speed up public transit and have it still be cheaper. The only way to speed up a bus system is to add more buses to cut down the waiting time, or spend a LOT of money creating dedicated bus roads. Even then, if the bus takes a roundabout route and I'm going straight, the bus loses. You can't "speed up" service and still have it be cheap.
If you have a system that's cheaper, easier, and faster to take a train rather than drive a car, then a lot fewer people buy cars.
You're right, I've never lived in a city that needs to have trains to get from one side to the other. A lot of the US is like that. Unfortunately, to make the train system faster and easier would cost a lot of money, therefore eliminating the "cheaper" bit. For trains you'd need more trains, more stations, and more tracks to make it "easier" and "faster". For buses, you need more buses, more bus lanes, and more routes. There goes "cheaper".
Yes, it will. And it will create a lot of jobs in the short term,
Government run, taxpayer funded jobs tend not to be a long-term benefit to the economy. They tend to be exactly the opposite.
It will also take a sea-change in the demographic structure in the US, moving people to where it would be feasible to support public transport in place of automobiles, OR building so much public transport infrastructure that you turn the entire country into urban blight. Too many people live too far away from each other to reach the population density necessary to support trains or buses everywher
If it takes you 5 minutes to drive to work. Then walking or riding a bike would probably be a better solution than a bus.
It's a long walk, and I'd rather not show up to work sweaty from a bike ride, thanks. The issue is not whether walking or biking is better than a bus, though.
but for ~40 of those minutes I can sit down and answer email, read journal papers, write course material etc.
In other words, your employer has convinced you that you should do his work on your own time.
Every so often I think that maybe I ought to buy a good laptop computer because it could do so much more than the netbook I've got. Then I think about what I'd be doing so much more of. Most of it would be work related. Why should I spend my money so I can do more work for my employer?
For that 25 minute car ride you can listen to audio books on any subject that interests you. You can think about non-work stuff. You can listen to news or sports and learn about the world. You can get podcasts on thousands of topics.
The idea that a mode of transportation gets bonus points because it allows you to perform more work for other people instead of for yourself, well, that's sad.
Let's say their birthday wish is granted and all of the big tech companies implement backdoor decryption that only they can access.
(Outright laughter.) You haven't been paying attention. There is no wish left to grant. It's already done.
One of those two major corporations listed in the summary provides system encryption for their users to protect their data. They also can undo that encryption whenever they want to. A friend's Mac Book was set up to encrypt his data, and to make a long story short, when his employer needed access to it the local Mac store was able to turn off the encryption for them. Whatever safeguards they currently have now to limit who can get the encryption removed are just policy writ on paper. The technical fact is that users of those products who think their data is safe because it is encrypted are living a pipe dream.
Maybe the next part of their amazingly forward-thinking plan is to convince Richard Stallman to bend a knee and put a backdoor in GnuPG.
I have discovered an algorithm which can be used to decrypt any content protected by assymetrical key encryption, but the margins of this posting not large enough to record it here.
It can be much faster by avoiding traffic and parking. It can be much cheaper,
You have mutually exclusive things there. If you make it fast enough (by reducing the wait time for the next transport) you increase the cost considerably. Running a bus every ten minutes vs. running one every hour -- six times the cost in fuel and probably the same in vehicles. In my case, this six-fold increase in cost would cut the time to get on the bus down to an average of 10 minutes, which is still twice the time it takes to drive it. That doesn't even count the time the bus takes wandering back and stopping to pick people up every couple of blocks before it get where I'm going.
since each person taking public transportation means one fewer person in a car, driving themselves.
Uhhh, no. It means one fewer person using some other means of transportation. The people who ride for free are, in my observation, mostly people who would otherwise walk or ride a bike.
The US government decided long ego to invest in roads and car companies, and it'll take some sustained investment to turn things around.
Government at all levels invested in what worked best. It will take a LOT of sustained investments (i.e. taxpayer money) to build sufficient infrastructure to make public transport anywhere close to convenient for most people. A LOT of money. And a LOT of deliberate degrading of the existing infrastructure for cars.
5 miles takes 2 hours additional with public transport? You could crawl 5 miles in 2 hours when drunk.
Except a large part of that time involves waiting at a standstill for the bus to appear at your stop. Five miles in two hours is 2.5 MPH, which is a pretty good walking pace, and much faster than a drunk can crawl.
If people wanted to walk five miles to work (in the rain, snow, etc) they would already be doing it and free public transport would be irrelevant. The issue comes when taking the free public transport adds time to the commute compared to using a car.
Our city public transport is free. (Actually, taxpayer funded through a fee on the water bill, of all places.) I live four miles from work. I've walked it once or twice -- it's not pleasant. It's a five minute drive. It's a five minute walk to the closest bus stop, so the bus already loses when it comes to commute time. Then wait for it (half an hour on average). Ten minutes ride.
But what if I need to go home in the middle of the day? I just did that a month or so ago. I had to use the bus because I had locked my keys in the car. I was going home to get another set so I could get them out. It took an hour and a half round trip for what would have taken 15 minutes in the car.
To answer the general question, yes, if public transport were free, more people would use it, but they will be people who were likely to not take a car in the first place. That's the experience here in my town.
To hack the account, they need both the account number and either the PIN or password. This allows them to brute force the PIN, and retrieve the account number as a byproduct of that.
No, you don't get the account number that way. The "forgot account number" page uses the customer name and one of the listed items of information to identify your account. If it can identify your account it sends an EMAIL with the account number to the email address of record on that account.
The horrendous failure is that they don't simply pretend to send an email if you get the PIN wrong, they report that they can't find the account. I've had a bank that pretended to send an email and it was VERY confusing. It kept telling me it was sending an email with my forgotten user ID but I never got anything. I had to go into the bank to find out I didn't have an email address listed on the account -- even though they kept saying they were sending email to me.
Knowing the email address or home address only gets you the account number.
No. It gets you nothing of value, unless you've already hacked into the target's email.
I'm not saying they should disable all automated methods to retrieve your account number, just the method that requires a PIN.
I thought you were saying that you were unhappy because they ignored your brute force attack and report of same and didn't hand you a million award miles.
Remember, I said that the "Forgot your account number?" page lets you retrieve your account number if you enter your name along with any ONE of the following: your e-mail address
So you're perfectly happy if someone can "hack" into a United account by knowing someone's name and email address, but not if they know the name and take up to 10000 guesses at the PIN.
your "old MileagePlus number"
And it's ok to brute force the old Mileage Plus numbers (six digits, IIRC), but not a four digit PIN.
Are you sure a pilots license is required? No license is required to fly an Ultralight aircraft.
The definition of "ultralight" includes: "(4) Has a power-off stall speed which does not exceed 24 knots calibrated airspeed." I.e., it must not stall if you go faster than 24 knots. If your fans stop and you're still going 40 knots (74 kph), but you have zero lift, you've stalled. As you fall you will reach terminal velocity. That will probably be more than 24 knots, but you will still have zero lift.
I don't see any technical details other than planned cruise speed, but if it carries more than 5 gallons of fuel or weighs more than 254 pounds dry, it also isn't an ultralight.
If it is an ultralight, the prohibition that it cannot be operated over congested areas of cities, towns, or settlements, or over any open-air assembly of persons makes this a pretty expensive toy.
While there is no legal definition of "congested area", the FAA has said it will be determined on a case by case basis, and cases come about when someone complains. So, if you're flying one of these things over someone's head and they complain, you are going to have to defend yourself.