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I think once you escape the system you don't find games or other distractions enjoyable anymore. When you're fully actualized and are capable of "going your own path", satisfaction then comes from making things and trying to improve the world. That is if you don't want to have children, as is the case with me.

I think we've been conditioned from childhood to get a job, work for the corporate world and chase material goods. All of those further the interests of those in power.

Update: Wild foraging, living with nature, moving to another country, or doing what hunter gatherers did. Running your own business. Camping out in the wild, while still making money from something. There are so many other options, you need to be creative about it...

Anyway @NoMoreNicks I've flagged your post and I'm closing this HN account down (by deleting the password)....

But we have things like the Raspberry Pi, which are very low cost and completely open to tinkering. Add a keyboard and clip-on display then you have a tiny but capable development machine, in a smartphone like form-factor.

Such as tracking you every moment of your waking life. How modern technology has become so evil, looking back. Nowadays every device we have is clearly spyware, from the point of view of 1999.

You could alter the video timings on the Jornada a bit, by writing to the video chip registers directly. That would slightly improve its abysmal contrast ratio.

I had one running NetBSD together with a Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving purposes. With the driver for the WiFi card patched to enable monitor mode. Had two different antennas, a quarter wave dipole, which I made myself, and also an Andrew QD-2402, a 16dBi antenna (!) that could receive WiFi APs from more than 20km away, when on high ground.

You could even develop software on it, compile programs with GCC, write Perl scripts to do various things, e.g. automatically scan for and connect to open access points as you walked around town. I think that script even tested if the access point had Internet access or not, and blacklisted ones that didn't. Worked really well, there were so many open access points back in the day. Also had the "links" / "eLinks" web browser, that was text only.

And you could also overclock the bus to the Epson video chip, to allow for faster display updates. The video chip had 2D acceleration, I might have written an XFree86 driver for that, but cannot be sure about it.

I also wrote a flashing tool for the WiFi card, that let you alter the regulatory domain settings to enable full 100mW power output, and also change the MAC address stored in Flash. I think I have the source code to that somewhere...

It's just so amazing to see that the functionality of that enormous WiFi card has now been shrunk down to a tiny QFN chip, an ESP32.

It would be quite a lot of fun to make such an AI operate on the CB band, supervised and in compliance with the regulations, as a joke. A bunch of hams would quite easily freak out, hearing amateur style operation complete with valid sounding callsigns, that don't actually exist.

But we have to be really careful we don't really use a valid amateur's callsign there.... We don't want to spoof someone, which might be illegal. Again this all needs to be double checked that it's 100% in compliance with the law.

Anyway I'll take my ranting over to places like 4chan, rather than continue to spam this site.... And I'll continue to remain 100% within the law.

I don't really care if it's embarrassing or not. As long as my actions are entirely legal, anything pretty much goes. Encouraging people to install regulatory approved powerline networking adapters is completely legal. As it's likely I'm not the only one outraged about this here, the idea to do that might spread. If that happens it won't be secret anymore.

And we have the right to freedom of speech, to get emotional, angry, and even irrational when we see outrageous punishments being dished out by the government, for people being persistently rude on the radio. Especially so when we hear of other people supporting such draconian punishment.

And even more so when large parts of the amateur radio community agree with these punishments and also behave like they are the radio police and have the right to threaten those who might break the rules. When I see other people threatened in that manner it really strikes a nerve with me, and I vent publicly on the forums in response, as I'm doing here.

And if I want to think it's like a sit in protest then it's my right to do so. Under human rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of thought. I might be wrong about thinking that way, but I have the right to be wrong, to be incorrect. As long as I don't break the law.

It's like sit in protesting climate change, or a particularly bad corporation who pollutes the environment, the blockades are going to cause a nuisance for other people not involved in it, but again these protests are legal. This is how change happens.

Many of these amateur radio stations might pose a health and safety hazard to nearby homes. Having thousand watt power levels in residential neighborhoods, while legal, might not be safe for people, especially children. And the amateur community in general turns a blind eye to that. So yet another reason for protesting. Actually, in that case I feel lobbying to get that prohibited might have a better chance of success.

And if it does become prohibited, we don't need to fine offenders $24,000, the FCC can get a warrant, and come in and seize their equipment instead, if they don't stop when requested.

When you start hearing about $19,000 fines for a single incident, it's no surprise you feel like wanting to encourage people to get those nice, perfectly legal, Comtrend powerline networking adaptors. With that manufacturer being fully approved, and happening to be one of the worst offenders. Not surprising one bit.

Those threats incite disobedience and rebellion. Meanwhile hams complain about being shut down because their 800 Watt linear amplifiers (11:14 into that video) are interfering with insulin pumps. Not giving a damn about the victim, and even blaming the victim.

And I will continue campaigning about such injustices in society, not only limited to amateur radio, using my legally protected right to freedom of speech, while fully staying within the law.

Even more: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-legal-penalties-for-trans...

" If on the other hand you thought you'd be a smart alec and jump on the bands to say hello or to wind up the Amateur community, then according to this link…

You could be fined $10,000 as an initial fine, and then multiple fines of $7,000 for each infringement. So it can get expensive very quickly.

You can also be sent to jail — particularly if you cause harmful interference to services such as Fire, Police etc.

And for those who believe you won't get caught, bear in mind that the Amateur Radio community are quite capable of easily tracking down anyone who screws with the licensed bands, and passing that information on to the FCC along with evidence such as recordings or logs of transmissions. "

Let's come up with some more ideas: Can we train an AI to imitate amateur radio operators???? That sounds interesting... We can capture large chunks of spectrum in one go, identify channel frequencies and train on everything simultaneously....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrsAsnl6XGA

High power ham radio has also been found to interfere with medical equipment, such an insulin pumps, apparently a ham got shut down over this. Although it's somewhat the fault of the pump manufacturer there. Another potential reason to prohibit it.

Just have a look at the comments in the video, that says everything about the ham radio community. Not all of them of course, but there are so many individuals with that mentality.

The video shows him having an Ameritron AL-811H, which is an 800W linear amplifier. I'm not surprised at all it's affecting her insulin pump, with those power levels being emitted just 3 doors down.

By the way, it's really worth watching the ending of that video... My God.

And unrelated, this is how the amateur community reacts if you talk about running an unlicensed station, this is so common: https://old.reddit.com/r/shortwave/comments/gv7r64/stupid_qu...

" The FCC has an automatic fine of $19,000 for getting caught on a single occasion and upto $149,000 for repeated infractions "

I think maybe it shouldn't be legal to operate high power amateur stations in built up areas, due to health and safety concerns?

That there might be enough people out there, once they are aware of the very high power levels used by amateur radio operators, that might absolutely not want this going on, because they have children around, and they don't want these extreme power levels inside their homes.

These hams are so willing to police people potentially intruding on their bands, but that's there's a chance that their very high powered signals, which are intruding onto nearby homes, are putting peoples' children at risk. I think we don't really know the full risk of it is right now, that the debate's out on it?

And it's worse than 5G microwave signals, because those are dramatically attenuated by the walls of the home. Which is not the case for amateur radio, which uses much lower frequencies, especially HF.

In the UK they have already passed legislation regarding EMF safety for amateur radio stations.

https://www.icnirp.org/en/differences.html

This is why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NorLTsOVFeE

He wanted to use the Baofeng radios on license-free FRS frequencies and got so much shit for that. He very much sums up how I feel about it. As long as it's programmed for the correct frequencies, who cares?

It's not just some operators, it's a large part of the ham community that's bent on policing "intruders" like that. I don't really care what other people think about my actions here. We can all have different ways we protest this issue, as long as it's lawful.

I'm just hoping that there's a tiny chance that idea might spread. As one of the many ways of fighting back against these draconian measures, without breaking the law. And I'll continue to come up with more entirely legal ways of countering this.

While I don't personally think it's hazardous to health, some people do believe that having a multiple hundred watt transmitter in the neighborhood might have health effects, and it could be especially harmful to small children. Lots of people used to complain about smart meters, and those are only 1 Watt at most, which is tiny by comparison.

Or even better, refuse to participate in the ham community and find something else to do, as the guy in the YouTube video does.

There's nothing illegal about installing powerline networking adapters. Doing that to protest the absolutely outrageous fines being dished out there. And that so many radio amateurs support this kind of punishment for relatively trivial behavior, that has caused no physical harm to anyone. It's like a sit in protest, to disrupt it, without breaking the law.

It's not hams being jerks that's the problem. It's that their threats have the backing of the law. They have many petty rules, which if you break you can find yourself in trouble. With fellow amateur radio operators being the ones notifying the authorities. That's what really riles me up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20294483

This guy here is being fined $24,000 for what is essentially petty harassment, which is ridiculous.

It's been like this already, for quite some time (!), at lest here in the UK, VDSL2 to thank for that: https://rsgb.org/main/technical/emc/vdsl-interference-report... So it's already being jammed, with the noise floor going up, although not to the point of being unusable.

Especially with social media, the anger would spread throughout society like wildfire.

And mental health issues resulting from the soul-crushing school system itself. From boredom in the classroom, and from grading and testing of students. It's a prison environment that children are compelled to attend.

Well, yes because I don't want to be involved in things that are so authoritarian in nature, with draconian punishments enforced by the government for what amounts to being stupid.

I want to be involved with hobbies where you can be more playful and carefree, where the threat of such punishment is not present. Where there's freedom for exploration and experimentation, like the ISM bands, which are what I use instead. Without authorities dictating to you every minor detail of what you're permitted to do or not, under threat of force by the state. And requiring you do identify yourself at all times, or be ratted out by a fellow ham and prosecuted. No thanks.

Also I've been personally threatened by a ham radio operator (in the UK), over me constructing a perfectly legal, non-interfering high voltage power supply. And hearing other people having the same experiences as well, as if hams consider parts of the radio spectrum their "territory". I know myself, and many other people do as well, that the amateur radio community has this authoritarian streak, which is so eager to call out those breaking minor rules. And back that up with threats of prosecution.

http://home.ptd.net/~n3cvj/hamvcb.htm

Yes, from personal experience, so many in the ham community are very rule oriented, which is counter to my personality and philosophy. That's another reason I want nothing to do with it as a hobby.

And no wonder there's a lack of innovation in the field, it's all tied up with rules and the personalities that thrive in such environments.

https://wizehire.com/disc/high-c-personality

Also about overcriminalization in America: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/era-...

Even better if some product came onto the market, that used wideband powerline communications for its functioning, and practically everyone's got one. I think some electric car chargers might do so in the future. That would not go down well with amateurs, at all! When everyone down the street would have, in effect, legal jammers.

MaxLinear have some nice ones, complete with datasheet, it also works in MIMO mode, not for just powerline but pretty much anywhere.

https://www.maxlinear.com/document/index?id=23257&languageid...

Update: I think solar inverters are causing big problems here already, so it's only a matter of time now as they become increasingly popular. So we can kiss those amateur radio enthusiasts and their utterly draconian punishments goodbye in the long term.

https://hfdxarc.com/technical-pages/how-to-reduce-electromag... https://www.pa9x.com/how-the-replacement-of-solar-panel-micr...

Lobster fishing is usually a large scale operation run by a business. Yes the fines are appropriate for a business, they wouldn't be for an individual though.

If an individual was to be fined excessively over a handful of lobsters, then again it's another example of overcriminalization and it's likely environmental pressure groups behind these laws, and it's completely wrong.

Yes, I agree with you about the secondary users of the ham band, though. I forgot about that one.

In fact in that post, I was actually advocating for the hobby to be phased out, and replaced with some other unlicensed system, given that so much of it's community is in support of such draconian measures and punishments for those who trivially violate the rules.

As I said, it should be consigned to the "dustbin of history" because of the draconian laws surrounding it. The laws have to be changed, or it's got to go.

Makes you want to use powerline Ethernet for everything, which happens to stomp on the HF radio bands. Perfectly legal to install and use, a nice replacement for all those trailing cables.

Yes, civil disobedience is how these draconian rules get changed, assuming everyone does it. Notice ham antennas down the road? Then get some powerline Ethernet adapters, ensure they are fully regulatory approved for the country you are in.

And that is perfectly legal civil disobedience too, which is likely to cause utter hell for that amateur operator, who likely supports this draconian punishment for such a trivial matter.

Of course they are, but fining someone $24,000 for behaving rudely, even repeatedly, on the radio is far far worse. And so many amateur radio enthusiasts support these absolutely draconian punishments, which is damaging the reputation of the hobby.

Some more information on this particular case on Reddit, there is a backstory to it as well: https://old.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/13w384h/fcc_f...

Yes, and those drivers licenses are obviously because cars are dangerous machines that can cause severe harm to someone if they are driven improperly. And the legal system surrounding it has penalties which are usually proportionate to the harm caused.

While low power transmitters, 100mW or so, are generally not dangerous, and thus should be deregulated in the VHF/UHF ham bands, so that the general public can use spectrum it legitimately owns. The "listen before talk" principle should be required by the regulations, and thus implemented in firmware. And even if misused and hacked to transmit on emergency frequencies, the harm a low power transmitter can cause is still limited.

In the end it comes down to if the industry and general public is a more powerful lobbyist than the amateur radio community, which is tiny by comparison. Who has more political power. And I think the general public might be the one with more political power here, and rightfully get to make the decision?

The radio spectrum is a shared space. In a democratic country, a small minority should not be dictating the rules for the majority here?

For playing music 5 years ago, that is still disproportionate, no emergency frequencies were disrupted, in any of his activities.

Did he cause any quantifiable harm here? Did the harm he cause ever justify that degree of punishment? My stance is no in both cases.

What is concerning to me is that some ham had to make the complaint there, maybe fully knowing the FCC would hand out a very large fine, causing him severe disruption to his family and childrens' lives, that far exceeds the nuisance caused by playing music on the radio.

Thus the ham that made the complaint is perhaps morally culpable in the excessive punishment. He acted, in conjunction with the state, to ruin this guy's (and his family's) life there. It doesn't matter if it's legal to do so, it is still morally wrong.

Fining the guy obviously causes him extreme stress, which he might end up taking out on his spouse or children afterwards, which far, far exceeds the harm from playing music on amateur radio bands. So the disproportionate punishment has knock on effects in society.

And these draconian measure are what so many hams find acceptable? I'm sure the general public doesn't though.

Absolutely ridiculous. That makes me want nothing to do with the hobby, period.

These hams are behaving like animals with a dominance hierarchy. With "newbs" and status in that hierarchy based on license class / callsign. And reacting aggressively, completely out of proportion, to outsiders who intrude on their territory. Akin to a dog with behavioral issues. This attitude in amateur radio is so common, we are supposed to be better than that.

Many years ago I built a high voltage power supply to drive a metal halide or sodium lamp from batteries, and one of my coworkers who was a radio ham, was threatening me that I could get fined thousands for interfering with amateur radio. That was my direct experience, and I have heard this kind of thing happening so many times to others.

It's always the hams making the bulk of complaints to the authorities, as well. And if I remember correctly it's actually tying up FCC resources...

I don't think such a huge fine is justified, how about confiscating his equipment, and banning him from using radio equipment capable of transmitting on amateur frequencies for a period of time?

It didn't cause any harm to emergency services, or disrupt anything other than a hobby. Fining him such a large amount for disrupting a hobby is ridiculous. And it makes me want nothing to do with amateur radio, and stick to unlicensed bands only.

The guy fined likely has children, a family to raise, which are all much more important than someone's hobby. You cannot impose such financial hardship for essentially what is trolling someone, on the radio. It's ridiculous.

Draconian penalties may only encourage miscreants to disrespect amateur radio, in an act of rebellion? And those miscreants might be able to get away with jamming it legally, by using powerline Ethernet adaptors, which will typically cause interference for the whole neighborhood. There's no law saying you can't have a really long piece of electrical wiring in your home, with absolutely nothing connected to it at the end? http://gm4fvm.blogspot.com/2018/06/power-line-adapter-noise-...

Maybe we non-amateurs should lobby the government to open up the VHF/UHF amateur bands for unlicensed operation at low power, just like 2.4GHz, and consign this hobby to the dustbin of history? How about getting industry involved in the lobbying as well? Can we find any good commercial use cases for those bands? In Europe we can already use a large part of the 70cm band (433MHz) at low power levels.

The radio spectrum is supposed to belong to all of us? Not just a privileged few who possess a license, and are so willing to punish others so excessively for relatively minor infractions?

You mean those Predator drones used in the early 2000s that had a standard DVB-S uplink for the video feed, which were unencrypted back then? I think the video feed was IP encapsulated, inside DVB-MPE, but am not 100% sure about it?

Update, I found some more info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1002227

And in those early days many cable providers didn't even implement the Baseline Privacy Interface, so you could sniff the entire neighborhood's downstream traffic with a modified modem or possibly even a DVB-C capable TV card.

There was literally a register bit in the cable modem MAC to enable promiscuous mode, and you could just set it: https://pastebin.com/18702Ziq

Sadly the Broadcom modem hardware I used to experiment with then seemed to lack the ability to get at the raw MPEG-TS packets, so I didn't manage to repurpose it as a TV receiver. The idea was to tune to a TV channel and stream it over multicast RTP on the LAN.

As used modems were very cheap, I wanted to have a whole bank of them, to demodulate every carrier on the CATV system. All fed into a giant, noisy 24 port 100Mb Ethernet switch that had IGMP snooping support. That was back in the 2000s...

Modem photo: https://www.usbjtag.com/jtagnt/ambit120.jpg

From the article: “This is not what ought to happen in a free country.”

What do you expect from a country that's been a police state for the last 23 years or so.

With the introduction of the RIP Act in 2000, which compels those with encrypted data to divulge the keys, under penalty of imprisonment. From that, I could tell something had gone very wrong with our government, even back then.

The RIP Act opened the door to government policing of what information we are reading. Because you could no longer encrypt your data to hide it from the state's prying eyes. It was a watershed moment. And that point was where I could say the UK is no longer a free country anymore.

And I guess that satellite feed was Cidera/SkyCache? I have fond memories stumbling across that while scanning transponders on the Sirius satellite at 5 degress East back then. No encryption whatsoever and it didn't take long to reverse engineer the protocol, which was based on UDP multicast, over DVB-MPE. I still remember the packet headers beginning with 0xdeadd00d.

The service broadcast over 200 gigabytes of Usenet news each day. The satellite transponder was almost 1000 times faster (45Mb/s) than dialup, which was just completely mind blowing at the time.

I also remember configuring the INN news server as well, but sorely lacked storage space to carry any binaries.

The whole thing involved writing a FreeBSD kernel device driver for the satellite card, together with a user-space daemon to extract the IP packets from the raw MPEG-2 transport stream, yes it used the same modulation as for TV (DVB-S). All done from my bedroom, when I was 18, with a small portable satellite dish in the window.

Back then the sheer amount of unencrypted IP data out there in the clear on satellite transponders was absolutely incredible to see.

I still have the source code to the FreeBSD kernel driver for the satellite card, and have uploaded it at https://pastebin.com/QegFzVWy

The dish: https://img.kleinanzeigen.de/api/v1/prod-ads/images/43/43ffa...

The receiver card (one on the left): https://www.linux-community.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Ab...

Yes, it's insane, it's the rise of sexual authoritarianism or even fascism. We scare the whole population into fearing that there's predators everywhere, and punish people for minor transgressions or trifles, ruining their lives. Meanwhile these minor transgressions increase the figures and are used to justify even more draconian measures. A vicious circle.

I don't trust the data, even if it comes from academia, as it's very likely to have a pro-feminist bias. I need to know the methodology used, and also other sources of data to cross check it against. The bias in the coverage of these issues is absolutely shocking, and has been occurring for a long time indeed.

Yes, radical feminists are behind this, they have even taken over academia, and it's taboo to speak out against it, if you do, you will find yourself up against a mob.

I wonder if there is an evolutionary basis for such sexual conformity in humans. Because I'm trying to find an explanation for what's going on. How so many lives are being destroyed over trivial sexual transgressions, things that are really trifles and cause no real harm other than discomfort or unpleasantness. Of course serious transgressions such as rape are not trivial at all.

Or is it really down to our society instead?