Issue #37: The Hack that Nearly Hammered Amateur Radio

That's a good one Chip. My Dad did that for many years with General Electric. He was on the road to schools and to public meetings of all kinds to talk about science and innovation at the General Electric Lighting Institute. Cool demonstrations and so on . . . got a lot of interest in EE careers going as a result.

Your idea sounds like one for the ARRL. I'd contribute, and I'm sure others would, to get that moving.

Dave

 

I think that one is up for grabs by lots of clubs

 

People do not have an interest when 1) repercussions for bad behavior fail to happen 2) pretty much no one that looks like them is in any position of importance and 3) there is word of mouth about bad behavior which travels very fast, very quietly, and very far.

The people that stay are ones that are comfortable and are unchallenged. When you see people talk about privilege, this is what they are talking about. Whether people are aware of these privileges and actively leverage them, or unconsciously enjoy and benefit from them, believing that the playing field was level all along, doesn't matter. Privilege is granted to people that look and act like an "average Joe" or "home knitter" or "typical ham" or "nurse" etc.

Don't underestimate how much a subtle difference in treatment of individuals can make long term. Like, assuming all the women at a club meeting are there because they are the wives of the "real" amateur radio operator in attendance that night, and simply never making eye contact with them or approaching them. Or, assuming the latino dude at the counter at HRO doesn't have a license and isn't really in line. This stuff happens all the time, is hard to spot if you're not affected, and is not easy to prevent. While it might go unnoticed by most, it's very loud to the people affected. For example, "And that is your husband's call?" was a frequent question at the San Diego HRO when I still shopped there. It was super annoying. I stopped going long before it closed down.

We can put this in scientific terms. In the Schelling segregation model, it's a very small amount of individual preference for living beside someone of your race, rather than someone from a different race, that rapidly results in total segregation of neighborhoods across the globe. If we believe this model represents reality, and there's a lot of reasons to believe it does, then segregation is not proof of racism. However, after a generation of never having any friends outside your own race, it's easy to "other" and "demonize" the brown/black/red/yellow people, and this is where things really start to hurt. No Black friends? The theory is that racism has a much easier time. This is why so many people spend so much time talking about diversity. It short-circuits the Schelling effects. This is good, but it doesn't work in a vacuum! Your experiences working hard for the right things make sense to me given this model.

Diversity is a necessary but insufficient condition to reinvigorate amateur radio. It will also take (I believe) decades to see effects. It took decades to get here, so a couple years of ARRL efforts to put out a magazine that is readable to target demographics is wonderful, but won't result in measurable effects for a while. I have only empathy and support for anyone doing this hard work because it will take a very long time to see results.

-mdt

 

It would seem you answered your own question...here's the answer.

Could not agree more.

This beating the diversity drum is exasperating, give it a break. We need to do our best to ensure that those that do want to pursue the hobby have an equal opportunity to do so. It's not our duty to assure any sort of diversity by the numbers. Why would you want anyone to join the hobby that does not truly have an interest just to satisfy some conjured up need to diversify?

It never helps one's cause to substitute phrases like "old white men" for convincing intelligent conversation. One tends to win people over the other is alienating.

 

Sorry,

I don't buy it.

In no time in American history has there been LESS privilege and MORE opportunity for those that seek to make something of themselves.

And as to privilege...if you think having the name 'Nathan Cohen' opens OR opened doors, then think again.

Plenty of people are happy to open doors for others. They just don't want to hand them the building out of hand because of some new emphasis on alternative 'adjectives'..

I am well familiar with your argument. It just is not correct. I know: I've lived it. Privilege is not innate to melanin concentration or anything else. You are not BORN --in--privilege.

Discrimination OTOH is learned, ingrained and abhorrent. It takes many forms and is always shifting. It is a stupid waste of human potential. At the cost to everyone.

73
Chip W1YW

 

This is one of the reasons why I've always thought that open source of certain things is a bad idea. The Linux desktop mess proves it - multiple distros, incompatibilities among them, security holes. But the flip side is that closed source can stifle innovation and create monopolies.

There is no winning answer.

 

Horses for courses. These are different tools. Use the right tool for the job.

 

Sure there is: you do whatever works, and whatever works for you. If open source is your preference, then work with open source.

I have heard that 'closed source' stifles innovation?

How is that?

I'd really like to know.

BTW we live in a monopolistic society in the US: private ownerships imparts unique ability to decide the use and outcome of things 'owned'. IOW others do not have ownership, cannot dictate use, nor outcome, without consent of the 'owner'. I have the monopoly of ownership of my house. Yep. An example.

Monopolies are common, ingrained, and it is axiomatic that they work in the US.

Can they be ABUSED? Well, of course! And THAT is where the problem lies;-)

Just want to be sure we don't conflate monopoly, with abuse of monopoly.

And just to clarify, the patent system is actually rigged to favor open source . Here's why:

1) Hundreds of thousands of patents are filed each year;.
2)Potential monopolists disclose--TEACH-- how the innovation(s) (read: invention) in each patents work, thereby making public ( actually published way before grant)what would otherwise be a learning curve to get to the same point, often what would take MANY YEARS to get to as OPEN SOURCE;
3) The patent applications chugs away. One to 5 plus years goes by;
4) A patent issues. The monopolist has, say 10-15_ years (20 years from filing) to 'exploit' the monopoly of the invention;
5) The invention gets insuffient traction;
6) Avaricious 'maintenance fees' come due;
7) Patent expires early after only about 4-6 years from filing;
8) the TEACHING on 'how' and the invention itself are now OPEN SOURCE;
9) this happens for about 75% of patents.

Because the patent application is published EARLY in the game, it allows OPEN SOURCE advocates to exploit the knowledge base and get along FASTER than without the patent sytem in place. Then as with the COMMON example, the patent expires (early), the monopolist no longer has control. The invention becomes available for all, and the OPEN SOURCE advocate has a huge headstart .

That sounds rigged in favor of open source, doesn't it?

The next time you hear that a technology is locked by monopolistic interests for 20 years, well, think again. In most cases its about 8-10 years, and the technology has already been taught to those skilled in the art.


73
Chip W1YW

 

1) Kudos to Andreas Freund, the 'real' hero in all of this.

2) When something is 'free', or at least, seen as free, expect trouble at some point.

3) When working for a large telecom here in AK some years ago, I supported/we used a lot of Red Hat Linux, as the community seemed to be self-supporting.
Red Hat also has a long litany of well-known problems, but still gets used in commercial enterprises. Why? - nobody wants to pony up the $$ to fill in the holes.

4) While this was a real life 'whistling past the graveyard' moment, I doubt much will change. See 'free' comments above.
***
I use the most recent Raspbian distro, itself a variation of the Debian branch. Since it is for trivial use - a bit of web browsing and supporting a SDR rx, security is not a real issue here.

Seems Linux is not common in ARS for the vast number of hams using computers, IMO, so watching the comments has been interesting, to say the least.

 

Yes, Andreas discovered this because one of the processes he was looking at in the pre-release version of Linux he was using was running a half a second slower than he would have expected. Can you believe that? One half of a second and the guy is suspicious! Now that's a person I want on my security team, for sure. But, even if you don't use Linux at your computer, you'd be connecting to the Internet, Don, and if the website you were on uses Linux on their server (most of them do, as in your experience with Telecom) it would have been capable of sending you downstream some new malware that you'd find on YOUR pc. Anyway, glad it was stopped! Dave

 

The point is not about hacking in to your computer, but instead getting full access to all the intermediate systems and servers across the capital I Internet that you use from your computer.

Several other folks missed this point, from the comments here. Please spread the word.

 

Thanks Cliff - a tough point to make, for some reason, Dave

 

Thank you for speaking up about this. The pressure to do videos - especially short videos - is intense on content creators like Dave and many others. They aren't really very accessible, it's hard to search for details, has connectivity and bandwidth requirements, and it's hard to skip ahead or sit and think about something without fumbling about for the pause button.

-mdt

 

Enthusiastically agree. This is such a neat post because my Dad did a traveling booth exhibit for Southwestern Bell Telephone early in his career. I remember him having to keep the exhibit supplies in the garage and him practicing at home. He had to "sell" telephony, but the big draw from the "show" was "light sticks". These were plastic tubes with a glass module inside. You bent the stick, the glass module broke, you shook it up, and the chemicals mixed up and glowed. Wow did my sister and I LOVE this. He'd hand out the glowing light sticks to audience members and Bell Telephone usually asked to have their demos scheduled late in the day so it would be as dramatic as possible. The future was bright and science and technology were the way to the future.

We absolutely can do this in amateur radio.

We've had a lot of success at ORI with the "SDR petting zoo", where we have all sorts of SDRs on a table, with adhesive googly eyes making them silly and approachable, and people can pick them up and then we tell them what each of them do. This is fun because most all SDRs are totally boring boxes with no UI and just connectors, and people LOVE googly eyes and view the little boxes now as animated characters.

Then we show off painting images with OFDM on a spectrum analyzer, or what the entire 2m or HF band looks like, all at once.

There's so much true beauty in modern amateur radio, and it is being shown off to great effect. ARRL isn't that far off from really helping here. I was able to facilitate a return to IEEE IMS conferences, and recent changes really do bode well for increased communication between TS and TC volunteers. There is good news, but positive steps forward must be reinforced. It's important for people who care about this stuff to speak up about it.

-Michelle Thompson

 

Thanks Michelle. Cool overlap in our Dads' experiences with show-and-tell's around the country! I admire the work you've done with IEEE and also at DEFCON, which also had one of the single largest group Ham testing exams in recent memory. Dave, W7DGJ