Why wouldn’t aliens work in a simulation model? The universe could be a shared sandbox to cross pollinate models or expose them to similar realities. Hah.
It’s not just the education system. It’s our structures of information that are based on engagement (to drive ad-revenue) instead of value to the reader.
- You are not entitled to force it upon a subgroup repeatedly.
- You are also not entitled to hurl hate towards participants, since that would disrupt communication.
- If you cannot stay respectful and friendly after being asked to, I will unsee you and advise others to do the same with a clear and brief explanation, so they can take an informed decision.
The Wikipedia article is incorrect, Monero still uses ring signatures. Bulletproofs are used as efficient range proofs in RingCT to hide the amount in transactions.
Honestly, comments like this are why I stick with hacker news.
Thank you! There's a lot of difficult-to-google info locked up in comments like this, and I truly appreciate the effort spent replying to randos like me :)
To get one of the big things out of the way: bandwidth. The FCC don't want anyone taking up big chunks of spectrum without using a license or service appropriate to that use. Notably, they don't want a few users to be able to chew up entire bands.
But there's a philosophical part to the discussion also. The tradeoff goes like this: hams get some really nice spectrum assignments, low fees, self-regulation, experimental modes and techniques, etc. In exchange, they can't use the amateur radio service commercially or for non-personal aims, and specifically they are expected to focus mostly on learning, community interaction, public service, experimentation, and so on. They also want amateur modes to be somewhat approachable, i.e. not requiring exotic or expensive hardware, necessarily.
Should an operator wish to use the radio spectrum for commercial or highly productive use, especially one requiring significant bandwidth, secrecy, exclusivity, etc, they are expected to use a different license / service more appropriate to those needs.
Basically:
Tinkering, chit-chat, community service, narrow bandwidths => amateur radio
Anything else => get a different license
To that end it was long the FCC's stance that high symbol rates sort of implied that you're going outside the purposes of the amateur radio service. With digital communication having developed as much as it has, though, it's reasonable that hams want to be able to do more interesting things with digital modes, which generally means higher symbol rates.
An interesting twist to the regulations is that you're not allowed to use ham radio as a substitute for cell service. I never quite understood this rule, nor how it was to be enforced; but it would seem to place some limits on the permissible chit-chat.
47 CFR 97.113 Prohibited transmissions,
(a) No amateur station shall transmit:
(5) Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services.
The FCC has a perfectly good part 22 service for cell phones.
Or FCC part 73 regulates "old fashioned broadcast radio"
Per 97.1 (a) thru (e) explain the purpose of amateur radio but it boils down to something like a national park, sorta. The purpose of the service is NOT to avoid existing regulation.
"on a regular basis" means experiment as much as possible, for free, non-professionally, as a ham, but if you try to set up a formal cell phone company business for the public just like AT&T, and try to tell the FCC you prefer being regulated under part 97 and pay only $35 for a license, the FCC will be very very very mad at you, wave 47 cfr 97.113(a)(5) at you, then regulate you under part 22.
The FCC has nothing against people building broadcast radio services; but if you try to demand they regulate your public broadcast FM radio service under part 97 rules, the FCC is warning you they will absolutely insist on regulating and charging you under part 73 rules...
> Communications, on a regular basis, which could reasonably be furnished alternatively through other radio services.
I guess this was the bit I had in mind. It means that one can’t use amateur radio for what a cell phone is normally used for, doesn’t it? Like calling your ham friends to make arrangements for poker night. Or is that the wrong interpretation?
Note you can run a business on a cell phone or do financial transactions or speak swear words or all kinds of things common carriers supposedly don't care about but would be banned on ham radio. Also ham radio has no SLA or mandatory 911 access like a phone. Consider... if you are a casino operator and you're trying to book hotel rooms for these guys to play poker night at your casino, that would be forbidden under part 97 because its a business and part 97 isn't for business use.
Its definitely an intent based situation. "Fooling around with radio technology while having convos of a non-commercial personal nature to promote international goodwill and gain radio operating experience" is literally what part 97 was designed for, and fits the poker game example perfectly. "We built a nationwide cellphone network but forgot to budget for FCC licensing fees so we'll reprogram to use ham radio freqs and lie to the FCC and tell them its a part 97 ham radio, while we sell it to the general public as a cell phone" would be quite stunningly illegal because it would be perfectly reasonable to operate a commercial cell phone network under existing FCC regulations for commercial cell phone providers, and its done on a regular basis by the famous big name nationwide cell phone services every day...
Service. In the sense of serving!? My two FM episodes, 25 years apart, were service. Not for regulatory purposes. To those, we but poor wee pirates were, and remain.
I've heard this several times about ham radio, and to me as an outsider the idea of shared access to the medium is a bit off-putting to me.
Is it possible to have two-way links "in the clear" but otherwise encoded or ciphered? Is there a regulation that says all transmissions must be in English, for example, or can I transmit in Esperanto/Navajo/hex?
You can speak whatever language you want on the air so long as you identify every ten minutes and at the end of your transmission. The ITU regulations for radio call signs cover their format however and use the Latin alphabet. Call books are also public so anyone can look up the stations and know who you are.
Speaking in shorthand to be clear and concise over the radio is fine. Even using terms of art or abbreviations is likely fine. If you're explicitly coding your communication to obfuscate its meaning you're definitely going to run afoul on the ban of encryption.
Part of the reason for no encryption on ham bands is there's precious little bandwidth available and unintelligible signals (intentionally obfuscated) are tantamount to interference. As a listener I can't reasonably tell if an encrypted signal is noise or a genuine call. I also can't reasonably receive a call sign so I can't know who is transmitting.
The big limitation is no encryption. So it's only a substitute for cell service if you're ok with being on a big party line with everybody else in the vicinity.
Fcc part 97.101 "General Standards" (d):
"No amateur operator shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communication or signal."
Pitiful we have to encode "the golden rule" of treat others like you'd have them treat you into law, but here we are its in the CFR.
As of 2021 no one has a technological answer to how to avoid various wide band digital technologies from interference against, well, absolutely everything else currently in use, without forcing everyone to operate in a channelized system with massive international coordination problems. The international part is a nightmare, what if, I donno, Bulgaria refuses to channelize? Nothing will work for anyone unless everyone cooperates.
Wideband digital modes do NOT play well with others.
There are channelized bands around 5 mhz (in the usa) and the FCC does relax quite a bit on wide open microwave bands, but people are going to request turning all of 20 meters into one single user digital channel, and to hell with everyone else currently using the band, apparently into infinity. Its an eternal meme.
I guess the best analogy I can come up with, is you can zone land as a public park for people to picnic, but that doesn't mean the land is completely lawless, if you blast your music at 160 dB the police will arrest you for preventing everyone else from enjoying their picnic.
We easily right now have the technological ability to turn the 20M band into a single channel, single user, very high speed digital path at 1500 watts. But that's a terrible idea, given the zillions of current users, local and international, who would be kicked off completely unable to operate.
There's very limited bandwidth available on most of the ham radio bands and other users don't want people taking up large chunks of bandwidth with wide, high-bitrate data signals and making the bands unusable for everyone else.
Truly. I have philosophical problems with the existence of the FCC but there's a great deal of interesting and educational discussion to be had here.
At the risk of delving further into conspiracy theory I suspect that may be a reason its downvoted; because there's room for debate. There's currently a lot of feeling that once the government is involved debate must be silenced.
I didn't downvote it, but I strongly suspect it was because of the sarcasm, the meta-sarcasm, and ultimately the unwillingness to believe that interesting opposing arguments might exist. That is, the post didn't encourage interesting and educational discussion, just derision. The merit of the resulting conversation was despite the initial post, not because of it.
Presumably for the same reason that GPS time signals had (have?) pseudorandom noise added: to prevent an adversary from using your own systems to steer missiles with high precision.
PRN (Pseudorandom noise) in the context of GPS is just a coding standard - it's just CDMA (aka Spread Spectrum) and it allows all satellite to use the same frequency. A side benefit is that the signals can be below the noise floor, and when you apply the gain from decoding, it rises the signal above the noise floor (exactly like how you can pick out a voice in a crowded bar if you know what that voice sounds like).
GPS uses PN codes for the timing difference measurement, as well as allowing multiple satellites on a single channel. I believe the dithering (selective availability) was turned off years ago, thus the L2 channel ads only ionospheric correction (which can also be accomplished with local sources).
The FCC symbol rate limitation needs to go. It’s a hindrance on HAM radio. Just regulate it by bandwidth, or better yet EIRP PSD, but that would be tough to control.
Yes, Selective Availability was turned off in 2000 and will never be re-enabled. In fact, the latest generation of GPS satellites do not even support Selective Availability: https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/
You make up things randomly as you go. You never thought ahead of any thought. Every thought you’ve ever had is essentially a procedurally generated prompt based on your biased models.
How long did you have to think to produce that thought? Or did it just pop into your head instantly?
The point is, you cannot think of an upcoming thought, before you have it in your head. Otherwise you would be seeing into the future.
What you are talking about in your comment is reaching a conclusion based on previous thoughts. Yes, often we link our thoughts together into a narrative or a conclusion after we've had the thoughts, but the thoughts themselves? Those seem to come out of nowhere.
The mind does a lot of unconscious work before coming up with some conscious results.
That's true even for very simple things like motion. You can measure things in the brain before those things become conscious thoughts. (Those experiments caused by the way a lot of fuss whether we have free will or are completely predestined in all we do; but that's another topic).
The consciousness only observes a small portion of the thought process. So for it a lot of thoughts seem to come out of nowhere. But the unconscious parts of thinking are very important to the whole process and it's outcomes. I think nobody disputes this by this time.
I have used GPT-3 and it works for most of the time. But it fails some of the time too. And thats the problem for use cases like programming or generating config files. Because if you cant trust the output 100% you are pretty much reading the output every time.
So, the only time save is that GPT-3 makes you type less.
In any case I don't type much anyway now a days. Its mostly copy paste from stack overflow update parameters etc.
I can't help but think of this scene in Westworld (spoiler S1) whenever GPT 3 (or earlier text prediction models) and this topic come up together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnxJRYit44k
I’ve read opsec material that no matter how many passes you do it can still be read. Hard to know for sure unless you know the stack in and out like the back of your hand.
1) Modern research suggests that recovering data which has been overwritten once on magnetic media is probably not feasible due to the high density of modern magnetic storage devices and the use of dynamically aligning heads (e.g. that follow track geometry as they read) instead of absolutely positioned heads (stepper motors) that allow for more error in alignment.
2) Nonetheless, there is an appreciable risk of data remaining on the device due to non-volatile caches, remapped disk areas, and other factors that are not always well understood or disclosed by the manufacturer. Manufacturers have also been found to be unreliable in their implementation of ATA security features (e.g. embedded secure erase). As a result, with few exceptions it is U. S. government policy to permanently destroy all storage devices rather than trusting any kind of secure erasure. The typical NSA-approved method is either to degauss (surprisingly tricky to do right) and then crush, or reduce to 2mm particles with a device resembling a large, terrifying blender.
> As a result, with few exceptions it is U. S. government policy to permanently destroy
And as a result, (probably) Iron Mountain makes bucketloads because we don't just encrypt the drives (let's face it, that would be perfectly acceptable for 99% of US government computers - maybe Top Secret stuff deserves proper destruction).
Is that fundamentally different from the question of whether overwriting data can make it unreadable? If yes then you can eventually make the "last data" unrecoverable by overwriting it. And if no then presumably you can recover anything previously written to the disk, ergo infinite capacity.
Presumably the original comment meant that you can't guarantee the original data is unreadable with any finite number of overwrites, not that you can always read the original data after overwriting. I'm not saying that's true, but it's a logical interpretation that doesn't imply infinite storage.
Even if you could find the original crypto header, You still need to know the password to unlock it. On iphones, the secure enclave will hold the decrypted key while its running but you need to enter the password after a reboot.
Also if someone had the technical capability to do this. I would be infinitely more concerned about them having an exploit which allows them to hack my next phone and grab all the data while its running.
A lot of that opsec material is very dated back from when density was lower and you had a spinning disk. Do you have any that’s evidence-based that such techniques are needed for flash storage? If anything the opsec concerns are different. There’s very little that would force the controller to actually perform erase of specific blocks (eg the flash could blacklist blocks due to errors). To my knowledge that’s the primary concern, not that the data is still somehow recoverable once erased (which used to be true but I’m not sure holds for modern storage).
That’s probably true but the GP is likely drawing the distinction that iOS tries to do an “unrecoverable” delete as best it can whereas presumably the Echo is not doing this (encrypting the data and then deleting the key as part of the reset).
Who will interpret what is meant by "service provider"? If it is just a data seller who buys it without receiving it in the course of providing a service to the first company, is it covered? Will it require a ruling to know for sure?
