They don't belong to the police, they're not public information, and the police can't walk in and demand videos of you.
They can, however, ask, and be given, without requiring a warrant. That's the point here. The plaintiff here says a warrant is needed. You and I seem to agree that one is not. You want to go further and talk about whether the police can demand something without a warrant, but that's outside the scope of this legal issue.
If the police order you to allow them to search your house, sans warrant,
Nothing about this case deals with the police ordering anything.
Wiretapping laws actually go further: the police can't tap the phone lines just because Verizon says it's okay;
This case has even less to do with wiretapping. Getting location data is not wiretapping.
The courts have thrown out that justification when people used it to descarmble signals they picked up out of the air
"Descarmble" [sic] is not what I was talking about. Analog cell calls were not scarmbled, they were in the clear, and could be picked up by TVs of the day.
What is bad about all traffic being treated equally?
Because the net was designed with the ability to differentiate. And because not all data is equal in terms of need. VoIP and streaming video need consistent data rates. VoIP needs low latency to work. Email and file downloading needs neither to be functional.
How is it helpful to customers for ISPs to decide the speeds of different services?
Ask that to someone whose VoIP service is unusable because the guy next door has decided that his download of the latest linux distro is of absolute highest priority and needs full bandwidth for the full download.
I think the term is "nobody has an obligation to give you a platform". And yes, nobody does. Unless of course they are a monopoly. Then it starts being a bit iffy.
There is one print newspaper serving this area. (We have a statewide one from 90 miles away.) Does our "HomeTown Newspaper", as they like to call themselves, have a legal obligation to print my letter to the editor? They're a monopoly on the local print media. Is it "iffy"?
If an ISP is going to argue to decrease the regulatory requirements with which it must comply, it needs competitors.
And how do you force there to be competition? Do you have government regulations that force companies to come provide service where they don't want to?
If they behave badly, the 'market option' is to give up broadband.
No, the market action when one provider does not provide the service people want AND WILL PAY FOR is for another company to provide that service. The hitch is the "will pay for" part, since so many people seem to want more internet for less money always.
The feedback page was rather clear that, if asked, most people explicitly prefer Net Neutrality.
And if asked, most people will define NN in some odd illogical way. Like "all packets treated the same". Or they'd prove a lack of NN by silly things like comparing their home service with their business class service at work.
but ISPs can't have de facto monopolies and also decide they aren't willing to be regulated more heavily than if they were one of five options for 96% of Americans.
So the question comes back to how you force other companies compete when they don't want to. Unless you put the company with the "de facto monopoly" completely out of business, they'll still be a provider, and if there is nobody willing to compete they'll still be the de facto monopoly. The difference with the Bell divestiture is that there were a lot of companies that wanted to compete but could not. There don't seem to be that many competitors who want to enter the market for ISP, even though there are typically several in every market.
and yet Verizon halted it's rollout of FIOS, having no intention of ever deploying it to many locations (as I was told by a Verizon lineman).
THAT'S the reason it is so hard to get a Verizon lineman to come fix my service. He's busy in high-level strategic planning meetings! Foolish me, I thought he was a contractor paid to do grunt work.
but the cableTV division is degrading everyday with more commercials and less content.
The cable TV company is not responsible for ad time inserted by the content providers. If ESPN or CBS decides to double the number of ads, the cable company has no say over the matter.
These two mega-corporations are prime examples of when gov't regulation *is* needed.
Government regulation over the number of ads in a TV program? Truly first world problems.
Police can go and ask but the phone company should be under no obligation to comply without a warrant.
That's significantly different than the claim that the police MUST have a warrant just to ask. Can you not see the difference?
The issue is not if the phone company was under an obligation to comply, it is about the cops asking and the company complying.
My legal right to privacy doesn't change just because someone is nosy.
But it does change when you voluntarily carry a device that someone else can use to track you. "I am carrying a device that responds to regular pings from a fixed land-based radio system that has the ability to triangulate where I am" is a significant statement here. Given the simplicity of preventing that tracking...
You can get a warrant for a wandering dementia patient. Look up the Silver Alert.
I know what you can do. I know how cellphone forensics works. I deal with SAR. Most companies won't require a warrant, though, just a signed statement from an official party.
What can be done is irrelevant to the point. The point is, time matters for some situations, and being forced to get what shouldn't be necessary is a waste of time that endangers a life.
In which case you know there was a robbery and you have reason to believe the video contains the details of the crime.
That's a bit different than walking in and saying, hey, give me all the video on this guy. No reason, just I want it.
The story did not say that the police went to the phone company and asked for location data about every person in the area. They asked for a specific person's data. Why? Because they had a reason to believe the info relates to the crime.
Further, places with CCTV announce they have CCTV.
People carrying a cell phone are being tracked by the cell company.
If you commit a crime against their network, they have every right to bundle relevant data up and submit it with their complaint to the police or courts.
Two points you just made here. First, they own that data and can use it as they see fit without asking you. Second, they keep the data so they can prove any crimes, which may not come to completion for months. So: they own the data and they can keep it for a long time. If you truly thought the data was protected by warrant, then the phone company could not release it for their own benefit without your permission, but you claim they can do that. Thus, there is no need for a warrant.
No, they shouldn't be allowed to just request CCTV data,
So the CCTV images collected by the store or company you are near don't belong to them, they belong to you? If they belong to the company, can't they do with them what they please?
and they can ask you for the relevant recordings if the next guy over got robbed and they believe you captured something of that, as they'll have a warrant for obtaining that data.
You admit that the cops can ask for data. If the company gives them the data just by asking, they don't need a warrant. If they have a warrant, it isn't "asking" anymore.
Warrants are intended to stop involuntary release of information. If you let a cop in your front door he doesn't need a warrant to see what he sees. YOU volunteered to let him be in a place where he might see something. If a telephone company voluntarily releases their data about you, it doesn't need a warrant.
You've admitted that a telephone company can release location data about you if they are reporting a crime you've committed against them. Here's the interesting bit about legal theory. Do yo ever wonder why a criminal case is not "Joe Smith vs. Bob Jones", but is "The State of Michigan vs. Bob Jones"? The legal theory is that a crime is committed against the state -- all of us -- and thus is prosecuted by the state.
Police need a warrant to wiretap a land line. I see no logical difference in what our civil rights should be required of them merely because the signal is carried over radio waves.
If this were an analog cell call that can be easily received by radios and TVs, using the public airwaves, then why should anyone need a warrant to listen? You choose to transmit a radio signal in my airspace, I should get to listen to it.
But that's not the issue here. The issue is location data, which is not transmitted by radio, even though radio is involved. Is this different than the police knowing the phone number of a landline caller and using a simple reverse directory to find the address? No, not really.
So basically, what you're saying is, "If you don't want your phone calls eavesdropped, you should not use a device that broadcasts them over radio frequency."
That would be what I say. It's pretty obvious. If you want to keep a secret, don't transmit it via the public airwaves in a way that anyone who wants to can listen in.
I think that's a pretty common sense attitude to have. Unfortunately, we have precedent from morons who thought their analog cell calls were guaranteed to be private despite being able to be received by UHF TV sets. That led to 47USC302 that mandates frequency blocks on radios over parts of the cell bands.
People who transmit their voice using radio should be educated that they are doing that, not coddled into thinking there is some magic that turns the insecure medium they are using into a secure one.
And people who carry devices that they know can be used to track them whereever they go should learn to live with the natural result of their decision, not have artificial legal protections put in place to allow them their convenience while avoiding the results of their decisions.
If police should need a warrant to listen in on phone calls, they should need a warrant for location information as well.
Why? A conversation includes two people, one of which did not knowingly decide to participate using an insecure channel. The phone's location is not provided by the phone, it is a record kept by the artificial "person" known as "cell phone company". If a company is not a person, then it has no constitutional right to privacy, and no fourth amendment protections.
Remember, this location information is between you and the phone company.
You cannot "remember" something which has never been a fact. The location information is used and created by the phone company; you didn't give it to them. It wasn't "between you", it wasn't some shared secret. It's data they created.
And why is it such a horrible burden for law enforcement to obtain a warrant in the first place?
Sometimes there are time constraints that make it impractical. For example, there's a lost dementia patient who is carrying a cell phone. Where is he? The cell company can tell us. Why shouldn't it? The lost person can do a lot of damage to himself in the time it takes to get a warrant.
Is it because they're afraid a judge will look at their lack of evidence and say "no"?
So you really admit that any warrant requirement would be a rubber stamp hoop to jump through. Why create such things if you know they are going to be meaningless?
You're an idiot. UHF is 300 to 3000 MHz and the signal from the analog scope runs 1,860 MHz and is broadcast at 380mW antenna power.
Then it is not a USB microscope, now is it?
Please tell me which magical channel you watched this USB microscope on, when the top end of the old UHF TV band was channel 83 at a measly 890 or so MHz. Well below the 1.860 GHz you claim your microscope used for USB.
It is designed to work with either regular plain TVs or computers.
Plain TVs don't have USB input; plain computers don't have 1.86GHz inputs. Your USB microscope that outputs 1,860MHz is an, umm, odd beast, to say the least.
Piss off until you have your HAM license.
How does him having a ham license change what you've described? I have one, by the way. I don't need it to know about frequencies and USB and stuff.
but since most TVs still accept and work with analog signals,
If your TV is tuned to a channel it knows is digital, it will not switch over to analog. It will be looking for the digital stream with the specific ID code of the channel you are tuned to. If that is disrupted for any reason, you get the black screen of "no signal".
There are very few analog stations in the US anymore. I don't know if the LPTV and translators are still analog, but they were the last holdouts. The likelyhood of anyone viewing an analog signal right when you want to take over the video is very small. If you do have a TV tuned to an analog signal, it is almost certainly the output of a DTV translator box and it would be very hard to get enough ingress into the cable between the DTV box and TV to cause issues.
If it's analog, the signal will be simple UHF with a frequency shift, because that's easy for the transmitter to then shift down again for broadcast.
"UHF with a frequency shift"? The transmitter will "shift down again"? No. You send the video and audio signal via whatever band you were licensed to use for your STL (UHF, SHF, whatever), the received baseband video and audio is modulated onto the TV carrier, along with any other subcarrier signals.
Generating the UHF source is trivial, especially in the 80s - every VCR and home computer had a UHF modulator.
That's funny, because all of mine had VHF. You got a choice of channel 3 or channel 4. You were pretty sure to have one or the other empty because the FCC would not license two stations in the same market next to each other, to prevent interference. The receivers were not that good back then.
I didn't get a UHF modulator until I picked up a Sony video redistribution system that was intended to put multiple sources onto a cable. That wasn't until the late 90's or early 2000's.
If I had to speculate, I'd say you are looking for a ham, or a friend of a ham. They'd have the skills to construct and use the equipment.
Most hams would not. Very few hams do ATV or would construct wideband transmitters. It's a better bet that someone got the transmitter equipment via surplus, all ready to go once it was tuned to the right frequency.
They were called wildfeeds, and some of them were rebroadcast live,
If the local anchor was interrupted in a story by hacked video, it wasn't because his video was being sent up to a satellite and the uplink or downlink was hacked. It was a simple terrestrial STL.
If it was Dr. Who, then it was a tape delay feed from Lionheart. You would not try to do such a program live because what happens if the feed fails? If the feed fails while you are taping it you have some time to find a replacement program, or you can call the source and say you need it again. If the feed fails during a live satellite feed, you have to find something NOW.
Local story, thought this happened everywhere when uplink signals were still sent up and down to national satellites in the clear.
The local news program does not uplink to a satellite for distribution to the transmitter. It's a simple STL - studio transmitter link. Studio in middle of city needs way to get programming to the hilltop where the transmitter is. Radio. Not magic.
If you have a transmitter that sends the same signal, and your signal is stronger, well, you get the idea.
Back in those days, stations did not do live link to satellite feeds, they recorded the downlink for later play. I remember watching many programs coming down and going onto two inch tape just that way.
The article goes into how they have defacto exclusive franchises.
The law says they do not. The law trumps Wired magazine's opinions. The fact that they have the only current franchise does not make that franchise de facto exclusive. "Exclusive" means it CAN BE the only one, which is exactly what the law prohibits.
You know, when someone gets the first business license in a city to provide auto repair services, all the others who want to open the same kind of business don't whine about how someone got an exclusive "franchise" to be the only auto repair business. They don't complain about how the playing field is uneven. They just get a business license and get on about their business. And they deal with the "pre-deployment barriers" that come their way.
its right there, "pre-deployment barriers"...
Every new company has "pre-deployment barriers". If there were no barriers, everyone would own a company. Usually they are economic, which is the case here. Nobody wants to start a new company that cannot make a profit, and trying to split a fixed market with prices that will have to be low means there will be no profit.
which can include literal bribery
If you have proof, then file a lawsuit. And standing. Literal bribery is also against the law. It would be hard to bribe someone to grant an exclusive franchise when so many people would be able to read the franchise and see what it says. When the competitor takes the municipality to court for unreasonable reasons to refusing to grant them a franchise, the bribed official would be on the chopping block.
"The real bottleneck isnÃ(TM)t incumbent providers of broadband, but incumbent providers of rights-of-way. "
The preview option will help prevent things like this. The incumbent providers have access to the right of way. The competition gets access by getting a franchise, just like the incumbent did.
You can say that they technically don't have exclusive franchise licenses...
It's not a technical thing. It's a legal thing. The federal law says they cannot be granted one. If you examine any actual franchise laws, you'll see they are explicit in saying "non-exclusive". It's in black and white. I'm not the one saying it, it's the laws saying it.
but again, technically the imperial gardens are on the market for a trillion dollars.
You keep saying that but I doubt it is true. Do you have a link to a realtor that has accepted this listing?
de jura =/= de facto
That's right, assuming this odd =/= means "not equal". De jure trumps defacto when it comes to legal things, like franchises.
Why does everyone on the internet think that "argumentum ad autism" is a valid rhetorical ploy? Its baffling.
I don't know. You keep talking about the Japanese Imperial Gardens as if they applied to this somehow. You must think it works.
Then how about passing "government rights of way" neutrality?
There have been many attempts to do this but the money spent lobbying to prevent it is in the millions.
In 1992 the US Congress passed Public Law 102-385. Section 7 amended the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit the grant of an exclusive franchise and the franchise authority may not "unreasonably refuse to award" additional franchises. Franchises are how a government grants access to the government rights-of-way.
There hasn't been a new "franchise" granted in 70 years.
This does not change the fact that they are available. I would also question your statement, since 70 years ago was 1947 -- a year before the first CATV systems popped up. I doubt those had "franchises", but perhaps they did. That leaves a huge amount of the country that has managed to grant franchises over the last 69 years, and all of them would be new.
They are using their pre-existing mandates for the phone/cable lines
The "pre-existing mandates" for cable expired and have been recast as non-exclusive franchises. But thankfully, cable is not the only internet game available.
And when someone tries to get a "franchise" as you call it
It's not "as I call it". It's what the law calls it.
If that doesn't work they sue the local government for unfair competition! Hypocrisy at its finest.
When the local government puts contractual requirements on a cable company before they can provide service, and then tries to start its own cable or internet service without the requirements, and costs associated with them, that is unfair competition. It's hypocrisy when the city says "you must do X if you want to provide service here" and then doesn't believe they must also do X.
My money's on this whole thread being completely off-topic.
The fact it is about the meaning of net neutrality makes it on-topic.
Of course, this may all be rendered moot if your ISP decides/. should no longer be delivered to you over its wires,
In other words, it will never be moot. How many ISPs blocked/. before the 2015 net neutrality policy? That's how many of them would decide to start now. Where's the money in doing that?
You realize, I wonder, that there are ISPs that go into business specifically for the blocking of websites as a service. They are typically aimed at parents who want a child-safe internet for their kids. While the practicality and success of such ventures could be in question, I don't think there is any argument that they should not exist. At least no practical argument. The argument that "waaa! An ISP that I will never do business with is offering a service I would never buy! Waaahhh!" is pretty meaningless.
and other things which written on paper but aren't true in fact.
It's explicit federal law. Municipalities are prohibited, by federal legislation, from creating exclusive franchises. That was done so many years ago that any franchises today are non-exclusive.
When it comes to franchise agreements they often require that you commit to roll out service in a larger area than you wanted to roll it out.
It is a contract between the municipality and the company. If you want to negotiate a limited size, do so.
That means you can't have a local ISP in a city unless you're willing to provide service to the ENTIRE city.
You would have to provide service to the area that you contractually agreed to service. It's a two-party contract.
This puts the venture beyond the capital reserves of anything but a multi billion dollar corporation.
I'm sorry, but most cities don't require that kind of investment to be an ISP. Given that there is usually already more than one in a city, it doesn't seem to be a real issue. I've got access to at least four here, and none of them required multi-billions of dollars to start.
And that all by itself will limit competition.
So now you've finally realized that the real cause of defacto monopoly for certain kinds of ISPs is economic, not a government granted franchise. Yes, it costs money to start a business, or enter a new market when there is a physical presence involved. That's true for any company.
The title of the Wired article is absolutely correct. We need to stop focusing on cable when the issue is ISP. At one point in time, long ago, cable systems got exclusive franchises. Today they cannot get one, and nobody has one. ISPs NEVER had exclusive franchises to begin with.
I don't give a shit what Sling or any other greedy cable provider calls their services; keep that fucked business model away from the internet.
You might want to google for "sling TV" or just go to their website. They are not a cable provider. They are on the internet. They are content providers, carving up their content into tiers.
It's too late. That business model is already here. You can't keep it away.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't belong to the police, they're not public information, and the police can't walk in and demand videos of you.
They can, however, ask, and be given, without requiring a warrant. That's the point here. The plaintiff here says a warrant is needed. You and I seem to agree that one is not. You want to go further and talk about whether the police can demand something without a warrant, but that's outside the scope of this legal issue.
If the police order you to allow them to search your house, sans warrant,
Nothing about this case deals with the police ordering anything.
Wiretapping laws actually go further: the police can't tap the phone lines just because Verizon says it's okay;
This case has even less to do with wiretapping. Getting location data is not wiretapping.
The courts have thrown out that justification when people used it to descarmble signals they picked up out of the air
"Descarmble" [sic] is not what I was talking about. Analog cell calls were not scarmbled, they were in the clear, and could be picked up by TVs of the day.
And the courts have never been wrong. Of course.
What is bad about all traffic being treated equally?
Because the net was designed with the ability to differentiate. And because not all data is equal in terms of need. VoIP and streaming video need consistent data rates. VoIP needs low latency to work. Email and file downloading needs neither to be functional.
How is it helpful to customers for ISPs to decide the speeds of different services?
Ask that to someone whose VoIP service is unusable because the guy next door has decided that his download of the latest linux distro is of absolute highest priority and needs full bandwidth for the full download.
I think the term is "nobody has an obligation to give you a platform". And yes, nobody does. Unless of course they are a monopoly. Then it starts being a bit iffy.
There is one print newspaper serving this area. (We have a statewide one from 90 miles away.) Does our "HomeTown Newspaper", as they like to call themselves, have a legal obligation to print my letter to the editor? They're a monopoly on the local print media. Is it "iffy"?
If an ISP is going to argue to decrease the regulatory requirements with which it must comply, it needs competitors.
And how do you force there to be competition? Do you have government regulations that force companies to come provide service where they don't want to?
If they behave badly, the 'market option' is to give up broadband.
No, the market action when one provider does not provide the service people want AND WILL PAY FOR is for another company to provide that service. The hitch is the "will pay for" part, since so many people seem to want more internet for less money always.
The feedback page was rather clear that, if asked, most people explicitly prefer Net Neutrality.
And if asked, most people will define NN in some odd illogical way. Like "all packets treated the same". Or they'd prove a lack of NN by silly things like comparing their home service with their business class service at work.
but ISPs can't have de facto monopolies and also decide they aren't willing to be regulated more heavily than if they were one of five options for 96% of Americans.
So the question comes back to how you force other companies compete when they don't want to. Unless you put the company with the "de facto monopoly" completely out of business, they'll still be a provider, and if there is nobody willing to compete they'll still be the de facto monopoly. The difference with the Bell divestiture is that there were a lot of companies that wanted to compete but could not. There don't seem to be that many competitors who want to enter the market for ISP, even though there are typically several in every market.
and yet Verizon halted it's rollout of FIOS, having no intention of ever deploying it to many locations (as I was told by a Verizon lineman).
THAT'S the reason it is so hard to get a Verizon lineman to come fix my service. He's busy in high-level strategic planning meetings! Foolish me, I thought he was a contractor paid to do grunt work.
but the cableTV division is degrading everyday with more commercials and less content.
The cable TV company is not responsible for ad time inserted by the content providers. If ESPN or CBS decides to double the number of ads, the cable company has no say over the matter.
These two mega-corporations are prime examples of when gov't regulation *is* needed.
Government regulation over the number of ads in a TV program? Truly first world problems.
Police can go and ask but the phone company should be under no obligation to comply without a warrant.
That's significantly different than the claim that the police MUST have a warrant just to ask. Can you not see the difference? The issue is not if the phone company was under an obligation to comply, it is about the cops asking and the company complying.
My legal right to privacy doesn't change just because someone is nosy.
But it does change when you voluntarily carry a device that someone else can use to track you. "I am carrying a device that responds to regular pings from a fixed land-based radio system that has the ability to triangulate where I am" is a significant statement here. Given the simplicity of preventing that tracking ...
Getting location records for thousands of cellular customers is an unreasonable search.
The story is about location data for one cellular customer. The court case is about that one convicted criminal.
You can get a warrant for a wandering dementia patient. Look up the Silver Alert.
I know what you can do. I know how cellphone forensics works. I deal with SAR. Most companies won't require a warrant, though, just a signed statement from an official party.
What can be done is irrelevant to the point. The point is, time matters for some situations, and being forced to get what shouldn't be necessary is a waste of time that endangers a life.
In which case you know there was a robbery and you have reason to believe the video contains the details of the crime. That's a bit different than walking in and saying, hey, give me all the video on this guy. No reason, just I want it.
The story did not say that the police went to the phone company and asked for location data about every person in the area. They asked for a specific person's data. Why? Because they had a reason to believe the info relates to the crime.
Further, places with CCTV announce they have CCTV.
People carrying a cell phone are being tracked by the cell company.
If you commit a crime against their network, they have every right to bundle relevant data up and submit it with their complaint to the police or courts.
Two points you just made here. First, they own that data and can use it as they see fit without asking you. Second, they keep the data so they can prove any crimes, which may not come to completion for months. So: they own the data and they can keep it for a long time. If you truly thought the data was protected by warrant, then the phone company could not release it for their own benefit without your permission, but you claim they can do that. Thus, there is no need for a warrant.
No, they shouldn't be allowed to just request CCTV data,
So the CCTV images collected by the store or company you are near don't belong to them, they belong to you? If they belong to the company, can't they do with them what they please?
and they can ask you for the relevant recordings if the next guy over got robbed and they believe you captured something of that, as they'll have a warrant for obtaining that data.
You admit that the cops can ask for data. If the company gives them the data just by asking, they don't need a warrant. If they have a warrant, it isn't "asking" anymore.
Warrants are intended to stop involuntary release of information. If you let a cop in your front door he doesn't need a warrant to see what he sees. YOU volunteered to let him be in a place where he might see something. If a telephone company voluntarily releases their data about you, it doesn't need a warrant.
You've admitted that a telephone company can release location data about you if they are reporting a crime you've committed against them. Here's the interesting bit about legal theory. Do yo ever wonder why a criminal case is not "Joe Smith vs. Bob Jones", but is "The State of Michigan vs. Bob Jones"? The legal theory is that a crime is committed against the state -- all of us -- and thus is prosecuted by the state.
Police need a warrant to wiretap a land line. I see no logical difference in what our civil rights should be required of them merely because the signal is carried over radio waves.
If this were an analog cell call that can be easily received by radios and TVs, using the public airwaves, then why should anyone need a warrant to listen? You choose to transmit a radio signal in my airspace, I should get to listen to it.
But that's not the issue here. The issue is location data, which is not transmitted by radio, even though radio is involved. Is this different than the police knowing the phone number of a landline caller and using a simple reverse directory to find the address? No, not really.
This is not a phone tap.
So basically, what you're saying is, "If you don't want your phone calls eavesdropped, you should not use a device that broadcasts them over radio frequency."
That would be what I say. It's pretty obvious. If you want to keep a secret, don't transmit it via the public airwaves in a way that anyone who wants to can listen in. I think that's a pretty common sense attitude to have. Unfortunately, we have precedent from morons who thought their analog cell calls were guaranteed to be private despite being able to be received by UHF TV sets. That led to 47USC302 that mandates frequency blocks on radios over parts of the cell bands.
People who transmit their voice using radio should be educated that they are doing that, not coddled into thinking there is some magic that turns the insecure medium they are using into a secure one. And people who carry devices that they know can be used to track them whereever they go should learn to live with the natural result of their decision, not have artificial legal protections put in place to allow them their convenience while avoiding the results of their decisions.
If police should need a warrant to listen in on phone calls, they should need a warrant for location information as well.
Why? A conversation includes two people, one of which did not knowingly decide to participate using an insecure channel. The phone's location is not provided by the phone, it is a record kept by the artificial "person" known as "cell phone company". If a company is not a person, then it has no constitutional right to privacy, and no fourth amendment protections.
Remember, this location information is between you and the phone company.
You cannot "remember" something which has never been a fact. The location information is used and created by the phone company; you didn't give it to them. It wasn't "between you", it wasn't some shared secret. It's data they created.
And why is it such a horrible burden for law enforcement to obtain a warrant in the first place?
Sometimes there are time constraints that make it impractical. For example, there's a lost dementia patient who is carrying a cell phone. Where is he? The cell company can tell us. Why shouldn't it? The lost person can do a lot of damage to himself in the time it takes to get a warrant.
Is it because they're afraid a judge will look at their lack of evidence and say "no"?
So you really admit that any warrant requirement would be a rubber stamp hoop to jump through. Why create such things if you know they are going to be meaningless?
You're an idiot. UHF is 300 to 3000 MHz and the signal from the analog scope runs 1,860 MHz and is broadcast at 380mW antenna power.
Then it is not a USB microscope, now is it?
Please tell me which magical channel you watched this USB microscope on, when the top end of the old UHF TV band was channel 83 at a measly 890 or so MHz. Well below the 1.860 GHz you claim your microscope used for USB.
It is designed to work with either regular plain TVs or computers.
Plain TVs don't have USB input; plain computers don't have 1.86GHz inputs. Your USB microscope that outputs 1,860MHz is an, umm, odd beast, to say the least.
Piss off until you have your HAM license.
How does him having a ham license change what you've described? I have one, by the way. I don't need it to know about frequencies and USB and stuff.
but since most TVs still accept and work with analog signals,
If your TV is tuned to a channel it knows is digital, it will not switch over to analog. It will be looking for the digital stream with the specific ID code of the channel you are tuned to. If that is disrupted for any reason, you get the black screen of "no signal".
There are very few analog stations in the US anymore. I don't know if the LPTV and translators are still analog, but they were the last holdouts. The likelyhood of anyone viewing an analog signal right when you want to take over the video is very small. If you do have a TV tuned to an analog signal, it is almost certainly the output of a DTV translator box and it would be very hard to get enough ingress into the cable between the DTV box and TV to cause issues.
If it's analog, the signal will be simple UHF with a frequency shift, because that's easy for the transmitter to then shift down again for broadcast.
"UHF with a frequency shift"? The transmitter will "shift down again"? No. You send the video and audio signal via whatever band you were licensed to use for your STL (UHF, SHF, whatever), the received baseband video and audio is modulated onto the TV carrier, along with any other subcarrier signals.
Generating the UHF source is trivial, especially in the 80s - every VCR and home computer had a UHF modulator.
That's funny, because all of mine had VHF. You got a choice of channel 3 or channel 4. You were pretty sure to have one or the other empty because the FCC would not license two stations in the same market next to each other, to prevent interference. The receivers were not that good back then.
I didn't get a UHF modulator until I picked up a Sony video redistribution system that was intended to put multiple sources onto a cable. That wasn't until the late 90's or early 2000's.
If I had to speculate, I'd say you are looking for a ham, or a friend of a ham. They'd have the skills to construct and use the equipment.
Most hams would not. Very few hams do ATV or would construct wideband transmitters. It's a better bet that someone got the transmitter equipment via surplus, all ready to go once it was tuned to the right frequency.
They were called wildfeeds, and some of them were rebroadcast live,
If the local anchor was interrupted in a story by hacked video, it wasn't because his video was being sent up to a satellite and the uplink or downlink was hacked. It was a simple terrestrial STL.
If it was Dr. Who, then it was a tape delay feed from Lionheart. You would not try to do such a program live because what happens if the feed fails? If the feed fails while you are taping it you have some time to find a replacement program, or you can call the source and say you need it again. If the feed fails during a live satellite feed, you have to find something NOW.
Local story, thought this happened everywhere when uplink signals were still sent up and down to national satellites in the clear.
The local news program does not uplink to a satellite for distribution to the transmitter. It's a simple STL - studio transmitter link. Studio in middle of city needs way to get programming to the hilltop where the transmitter is. Radio. Not magic.
If you have a transmitter that sends the same signal, and your signal is stronger, well, you get the idea.
Back in those days, stations did not do live link to satellite feeds, they recorded the downlink for later play. I remember watching many programs coming down and going onto two inch tape just that way.
The article goes into how they have defacto exclusive franchises.
The law says they do not. The law trumps Wired magazine's opinions. The fact that they have the only current franchise does not make that franchise de facto exclusive. "Exclusive" means it CAN BE the only one, which is exactly what the law prohibits.
You know, when someone gets the first business license in a city to provide auto repair services, all the others who want to open the same kind of business don't whine about how someone got an exclusive "franchise" to be the only auto repair business. They don't complain about how the playing field is uneven. They just get a business license and get on about their business. And they deal with the "pre-deployment barriers" that come their way.
its right there, "pre-deployment barriers"...
Every new company has "pre-deployment barriers". If there were no barriers, everyone would own a company. Usually they are economic, which is the case here. Nobody wants to start a new company that cannot make a profit, and trying to split a fixed market with prices that will have to be low means there will be no profit.
which can include literal bribery
If you have proof, then file a lawsuit. And standing. Literal bribery is also against the law. It would be hard to bribe someone to grant an exclusive franchise when so many people would be able to read the franchise and see what it says. When the competitor takes the municipality to court for unreasonable reasons to refusing to grant them a franchise, the bribed official would be on the chopping block.
"The real bottleneck isnÃ(TM)t incumbent providers of broadband, but incumbent providers of rights-of-way. "
The preview option will help prevent things like this. The incumbent providers have access to the right of way. The competition gets access by getting a franchise, just like the incumbent did.
You can say that they technically don't have exclusive franchise licenses...
It's not a technical thing. It's a legal thing. The federal law says they cannot be granted one. If you examine any actual franchise laws, you'll see they are explicit in saying "non-exclusive". It's in black and white. I'm not the one saying it, it's the laws saying it.
but again, technically the imperial gardens are on the market for a trillion dollars.
You keep saying that but I doubt it is true. Do you have a link to a realtor that has accepted this listing?
de jura =/= de facto
That's right, assuming this odd =/= means "not equal". De jure trumps defacto when it comes to legal things, like franchises.
Why does everyone on the internet think that "argumentum ad autism" is a valid rhetorical ploy? Its baffling.
I don't know. You keep talking about the Japanese Imperial Gardens as if they applied to this somehow. You must think it works.
SlingTV delivers "cable" service via streaming.
No, they deliver video services via streaming.
Regardless, the rest of the internet sure as hell doesn't need to follow that greedy model.
You missed the news. Sling isn't the greedy model, it's the way things are supposed to be. Ala carte.
Then how about passing "government rights of way" neutrality?
There have been many attempts to do this but the money spent lobbying to prevent it is in the millions.
In 1992 the US Congress passed Public Law 102-385. Section 7 amended the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit the grant of an exclusive franchise and the franchise authority may not "unreasonably refuse to award" additional franchises. Franchises are how a government grants access to the government rights-of-way.
That was 25 years ago.
I gave you a link... you can ignore it
I referred to it explicitly. The title is correct, it's not "cable" that is the issue. And franchises are not exclusive. Whose fingers?
There hasn't been a new "franchise" granted in 70 years.
This does not change the fact that they are available. I would also question your statement, since 70 years ago was 1947 -- a year before the first CATV systems popped up. I doubt those had "franchises", but perhaps they did. That leaves a huge amount of the country that has managed to grant franchises over the last 69 years, and all of them would be new.
They are using their pre-existing mandates for the phone/cable lines
The "pre-existing mandates" for cable expired and have been recast as non-exclusive franchises. But thankfully, cable is not the only internet game available.
And when someone tries to get a "franchise" as you call it
It's not "as I call it". It's what the law calls it.
If that doesn't work they sue the local government for unfair competition! Hypocrisy at its finest.
When the local government puts contractual requirements on a cable company before they can provide service, and then tries to start its own cable or internet service without the requirements, and costs associated with them, that is unfair competition. It's hypocrisy when the city says "you must do X if you want to provide service here" and then doesn't believe they must also do X.
My money's on this whole thread being completely off-topic.
The fact it is about the meaning of net neutrality makes it on-topic.
Of course, this may all be rendered moot if your ISP decides /. should no longer be delivered to you over its wires,
In other words, it will never be moot. How many ISPs blocked /. before the 2015 net neutrality policy? That's how many of them would decide to start now. Where's the money in doing that?
You realize, I wonder, that there are ISPs that go into business specifically for the blocking of websites as a service. They are typically aimed at parents who want a child-safe internet for their kids. While the practicality and success of such ventures could be in question, I don't think there is any argument that they should not exist. At least no practical argument. The argument that "waaa! An ISP that I will never do business with is offering a service I would never buy! Waaahhh!" is pretty meaningless.
and other things which written on paper but aren't true in fact.
It's explicit federal law. Municipalities are prohibited, by federal legislation, from creating exclusive franchises. That was done so many years ago that any franchises today are non-exclusive.
When it comes to franchise agreements they often require that you commit to roll out service in a larger area than you wanted to roll it out.
It is a contract between the municipality and the company. If you want to negotiate a limited size, do so.
That means you can't have a local ISP in a city unless you're willing to provide service to the ENTIRE city.
You would have to provide service to the area that you contractually agreed to service. It's a two-party contract.
This puts the venture beyond the capital reserves of anything but a multi billion dollar corporation.
I'm sorry, but most cities don't require that kind of investment to be an ISP. Given that there is usually already more than one in a city, it doesn't seem to be a real issue. I've got access to at least four here, and none of them required multi-billions of dollars to start.
And that all by itself will limit competition.
So now you've finally realized that the real cause of defacto monopoly for certain kinds of ISPs is economic, not a government granted franchise. Yes, it costs money to start a business, or enter a new market when there is a physical presence involved. That's true for any company.
The title of the Wired article is absolutely correct. We need to stop focusing on cable when the issue is ISP. At one point in time, long ago, cable systems got exclusive franchises. Today they cannot get one, and nobody has one. ISPs NEVER had exclusive franchises to begin with.
I don't give a shit what Sling or any other greedy cable provider calls their services; keep that fucked business model away from the internet.
You might want to google for "sling TV" or just go to their website. They are not a cable provider. They are on the internet. They are content providers, carving up their content into tiers.
It's too late. That business model is already here. You can't keep it away.