Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 12/01/2010 7:59:31 AM PST by maggief
In an effort to meet an Obama campaign promise, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski indicated Wednesday that he will propose new regulations for Internet lines.
He is expected to give a speech at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday laying out his proposal.
Genachowski's attempt to revive the long-delayed net-neutrality proceeding is a delicate balancing act designed to garner some industry and public interest support without completely satisfying anyone.
Genachowski has made concessions to AT&T, Verizon, and the cable industry that could forestall an all-out lobbying blitz by the nation's largest telecom providers.
But the concessions have done nothing to help him with House Republicans, who oppose net-neutrality rules as an "Internet takeover."
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
The military maintains fixed ground, airborne, and space based jammers. It might be tough for them to jam the entire spectrum nationwide all at once and continuously, even though they can do it, they can jam enough continuously to be effective.
In my neighborhood I can see thirty other routers.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if everybody in a city had an open mesh router. I'm not talking about sharing Internet access, I'm talking about using the mesh network as a local version of the Interwebs. If you could connect the local open mesh webs of all major cities together government control would be thwarted. About all they could do is use jammers.
As with every other Obama initiative, look for this one to satisfy nothing and no one, while, at the same time, solving nothing and, in fact, making everything worse.
At this point in the current administration, the moment Obama opens his big yap, you can set your watch by the decrease in the quality of life.
Would that include moonbounce or HF ionospheric propagation for long-distance communications? I would imagine with a directional yagi and enough power, one could get through somewhere. Jammers cannot be omnidirectional. They have to have a node somewhere.
DD-WRT is firmware for wireless routers and on most recent retail routers, you can create virtual WLANs.
I have several virtual WLANs using AP isolation to provide a few neighbors with secure but open wireless access. One of my neighbors is a tech geek, and we talked and agreed to team our routers for fault tolerance. We both use the same SSID, can access each others servers internally, and regardless of network availability (we have different ISPs) the routers know how to get out. When my network connection dropped last month, my connectivity was unaffected.
If we could have that sort of web set up in a small neighborhood, I don’t see why a team of local nerds couldn’t do the same thing in a much larger area.
Actually, it grew quite rapidly before then. What really spurred the growth you're thinking of, and coinciding with the government giving up as the sole backbone provider, was the invention of the WWW, the "killer app" that gave the average guy something to do in the Internet. The WWW was developed in Switzerland, so the Internet had obviously gone international.
Also spurring growth was allowing commerce on the Internet. Yes, allowing. You run it, you allow what you want. Using an Internet running under net neutrality, and still controlled by the government, companies figured out how to make a lot of money and futher expand the reasons for people to want to get an Internet connection.
Note, as I said, under net neutrality. It is net neutrality -- the neutrality of the network towards the content and services going over it -- that allowed the massive expansion of the Internet. Anybody could invent any service and know it could reach any online consumer. The little guy was suddenly on an equal playing field with the big guy. Barriers to entry in markets dropped drastically. Long established services like POTS telephone, newspapers and now cable TV could now be threatened by startup companies, or even free services.
It is this net neutrality that the telcos want to kill. It must be maintained to keep the growth and innovation going, even if that does mean the government telling the ISPs to quit trying to stifle the free flow of traffic on the Internet.
I have a Buffalo router that I have flashed with DD-WRT and Tomato for fun. Do those firmware versions basically give open mesh functionality?
Under current proposals there is nothing that the FCC would control. The proposals tell the IPSs to not restrict the free flow of information on the Internet on the basis of protocol, source or content, and to inform customers of their policies regarding network management. The former is net neutrality, the latter is more of a consumer protection measure. You won't wonder why things slow down, and what the limits are, it'll be right there in black and white for you.
The FCC's role would to be to take complaints of ISP violations from consumers and act on them.
Don’t quote me, but I believe Open Mesh is proprietary. DD-WRT is open source.
“Jammers cannot be omnidirectional.”
Some are (VHF/UHF), but to be more effective they scan and they scan fast. So, while 100% of the frequency is not jammed at all times, every frequency gets jammed at least a percentage and that percentage is enough to distrupt normal RF CW communications. This is why the military uses frequency hopping in the grass along with other techniques. It is unlikely that a jammer will hit the exact frequency as the transmitter at the same time. Getting jam proof communications is easy enough but we civilians do not have anything that does that.
Moon bounce is hard to accomplish all the time and is not a reliable communications technique. Plus, it can be jammed fairly easily.
I suspect we will have communications because if any enemy tries to jam us then we are no doubt in an all out war and we will take care of such transmissions.
Spread spectrum communication is effective for long-distance HF transmission of binary coded data (like faxes), and I’d imagine if the listening station could decode across a spread spectrum, they could decode a long-distance message. That’s also the beauty of Morse code. I can tap out long messages in code on HF and provided signal strength at the receiving end is at least audible, code can be understood by those who know it. I’ve communicated with stations in South Africa using HF wave propagation on clear nights with my yagi, and despite a lot of noise on the line, the code is easy to decipher.
I do wholeheartedly agree with your last assertion. If it gets to this point, we really are talking about tyranny in the country and I fear CWII will be in full swing by then.
Remember, however, that the initial conversation was surrounding the regulation of the Internet by the FCC. My point was that when they did the same thing to the Bells back in the 20th century, people seeking normal channels of communication invented ways to get around the taxes. For instance, how many people today have home phone service? I would bet the numbers are on the wane.
Necessity is the mother of invention, as Plato once said.
It says that “Congress shall pass no law”.
So we’ll take it by fiat. :)
Now pay your taxes...
They want to control it and if they can’t control it they want to destroy it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.