Incoming power at the satellite is stated as a nanowatt. I'm pretty sure this puts it way below the threshold of most, if not all, solid state optical detectors. I'm thinking some kind of FAST photomultiplier tube, but I really have no idea. Any thoughts?

Think of using something like this to transmit terrestrially through air of many miles/kilometers distance RELIABLY rather than the one or (if you're lucky) two you get today: it would be a godsend and could replace a LOT of metro microwave (depending on which city and its local climate, of course) without having to lay fiber. Its the unlicensed holy grail, really.

If the name doesn't ring a bell to younger Western audiences (and not to be confused with an Asian supermarket chain, apparently), it is now part of Glaxo-SmithKline (GSK):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

I'm guessing Schneier et al won't have a chance to analyze and reply until next week, but this is so important, who knows?

It also occurred to me that, since the mess with the NSA broke out, I have not seen anything about Suite B being modified--everything in there is still officially supported for "State Secrets". I keep wondering if we're missing something there...

Your GNSS primer has quite a few errors--except for calling them GNSS instead of using GPS like Kleenex, like most reporters do. :)

1a. GPS long in the tooth: not at all. From the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps#Timeline_and_modernizationGPS article, the next phase (III-A) is already approved and just needs to be built; 7 more from the previous phase still need to be completed and launched as the older birds die. And the math doesn't change over 30 years, only the corrections.

1b. Didn't notice this until after I wrote the above: Wikipedia has an entire article on the next GPS generation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

2. GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, and the newer Chinese Beidou expansion that's apparently been renamed Compass are all worldwide systems. The former three use medium earth orbit (MEO), but not polar so there's reduced or eliminated polar coverage (mainly above the (ant)arctic circles; Compass/Beidou uses both GEO and MEO. Also, I know first-hand that GLONASS works just fine here in Arizona as my Samsung Galaxy Note II with its SIRF dual-system chip receives it with no flags for inaccuracy compared to GPS.

3. "Planned Errors": This is Selective Availability and hasn't been used since the 90's.

4. Beidou/Compass' build-out vs GALILEO's: China's is happening, according to Wikipedia, unlike GALILEO, where the latest announcement is a pair of birds delivered to the Guyana spaceport and STILL no ETA to full deployment...

...because they're too greedy. Let's go down the list of what I've read here so far:

1a. CB radio: this band, 11 meters, was formerly an amateur radio band and was taken away to make the CB band. It became the total morass it is now when they stopped licensing it.

1b. This also shows what happens to a band in the absence of regulation and licensing. You can get away with this in the ISM portions of the microwave bands due to the massive propagation losses; this was originally the thought for using 11 meters for the CB band, but they didn't factor in amps. giant antennas, and especially ionospheric propagation: hence the need for "CB" bands up in the UHF range (aka GMRS/FRS/etc).

2. You "free band" too much and start interfering with people who actually care, and you'll find out how fast they come after you. This largely depends on what country you are in and what band. As an example, ask the Brazilian guy who was on US military frequencies in NYC, or the people regularly busted for jamming or at least operating on police frequencies.

3. As pointed out repeatedly, this has already been invented both by hams and commercially.

4. Encryption on amateur radio bands is explicitly banned in most countries including the USA and Canada; strangely, this doesn't seem to exist in the ITU regs. I'm sure the thought on this is that Amateur Radio must not be used for business or as a replacement for other communications except in emergencies; also Amateurs regularly communicate with foreign countries, so everyone wants to be able to listen to them. If you look at the preamble of the relevant section of the law, the part about "fostering goodwill" would be inherently violated with encryption. Remember, everyone getting so gung-ho with EMCOMM is a relatively recent phenomena, and the primary purposes have always been experimentation such. It's sad that newer people to the hobby and even the national organizations like ARRL/CRRL/JARL/RSGB/etc seem to have forgotten this.

5. All nations' regulations follow (more or less) the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) regulations as a guideline, though every nation usually makes changes. As long as these changes don't impact other countries, it doesn't matter much. I believe this is part of the reason the world is organized into 3 regions: Europe, Africa, and the old USSR and its satellites are Region 1, the New World including Greenland is Region 2, and the rest of Asia and Oceania is Region 3.

Oh, and just to drive home the interference point, I had to jump on ARRL's web site and these were on the front page:

http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/O...
http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-c...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Emphasis mine. I can't be the only one seeing this as a bad strategy (versus pushing this into Openxx).

You villify the MPAA/RIAA mafiaa, agree with Voltaire on defending the right to free speech, hate NSA and RSA,

AND YET

you say that EasyDNS is in the wrong here?!? I don't get it. I just don't. Regardless that the defendant here was another registrar rather than the City of London itself, the question remains the same: can a police department authorize the seizure of property without so much as a court order? If so, why not do away with the courts altogether since police agencies now play the roles of judge, jury, and executioner?

For me, EasyDNS has earned a customer when it comes time for me to renew my domain. And while I'm only one, I know that, as this news spreads, I won't be the only one.

This! Mod parent way up! The question isn't whether your [insert endpoint here] is safe, but if the intermediate points are. Even if your own router is safe, what about the one upstream? I've assumed for a long time (way before Snowden) that all electronic communications are monitored, and when you realize that, and the insane difficulty of getting around that monitoring, you kind of give up. You have to decide what is important enough to secure from a worthy (non script-kiddie) adversary and versus letting them see what kind of pr0n you like. IMHO this has been the reality for years (probably before 9/11 thanks to CALEA and friends), but it took Snowden to wake most people up to the fact.

Now securing your own machine, that's whole other level: again, how secure to do need it to be? I'm *HOPING* that keeping the browser cache clean/disabled, using Linux and FF and shutting down the browser when accessing bank account info and such is enough to keep the CC guys from getting my info; OTOH, if you're doing something that the intelligence agencies (regardless of country) is interested in, your only real hope is to use the the 100% open software/firmware like the FSF advocated, and (of course) even then there's no guarantee the hardware doesn't have a compromise or some CIA/FBI/whatever spy doesn't physically attack your machine when you're not looking (which is normal if you're actually under investigation).

As others have pointed out, its you versus agencies with BILLIONS of US$ (or equivalent) funding: you can resist, but if they really want you, you have no chance of winning: think the end of Half Life when Freeman refuses--that's what you face, proverbially.

tl;dr YOU ARE SCREWED, and your barely computer-literate family and friends have probably already been pwned and not even know it.

http://www.viasat.com/news/high-speed-internet-now-flying-jetblue-launches-service-using-viasat-high-capacity-ka-band-broadband

I remember reading this a year ago or so when the home service launched, but I guess /. missed it. This kind of portable/mobile use is being heavily marketed for homeland security, SNG (Satellite News Gathering), and other high-end markets, while they continue to give the middle finger to RVers, truckers, etc--I guess the home system is locked to the spotbeam its activated on so you can't roam outside it, unlike HughesNet. Personally, I'd love their little portable flyaway system, but at a price of $20k or so, oh well.

Umm...the !Doctorow options (1,2,4) are not mutually exclusive; in fact, I'm convinced we have been in a Corporatocracy for a while, which controls us through the "utopia where the people are bribed into apathy/foolishness" (courtesy of MPAA/RIAA mafia + youtube and friends), and the "Totalitarian states in constant war" is right around the corner--hell, you can see THAT just in the other comments here!

Replying to myself: as if the drive prices weren't expensive enough, the prices for media are totally, well, consistent with Sony:

1.2TB rewritable $270 from B&H Photo: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1010742-REG/sony_odc1200re_archive_cartridge_1_2tb_rewritable.html
1.5TB WORM $280 from B&H Photo: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/983354-REG/sony_odc1500r_archive_cartridge_1500gb_write.html

And to top it all off, here's the obligatory DRM:

You didn't look too hard at the ODA specs. For starters, everyone here is talking AT LEAST 100 megaBYTES per second of bandwidth on and off the media SUSTAINED.

Now look at Phony's ODA: 35-50 megaBITS per second--MAX (it is a disk, after all). Connection is USB-3. Target machines are winblows and mac, no mention of Linux or any kind of server environment at all.

Time to fill a full 1.5TB 12 disk cartridge: 48 hours (2 days) at 50 Mbps, 72 hours (3 days) at 35 Mbps.

It was a joke when it was introduced, and an even bigger joke now: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/16/1924248/30-blu-ray-discs-in-a-15tb-minidisc-like-cassette

Not funny enough? Here is more hilarity (the prices): http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-datastorage/cat-opticaldiscarchive/

For some place that's supposed to be for nerds who, unlike me, finished college, this discussion is embarrassing. Parent post and 1 or 2 other posts have it right, and this is something that every radio guy knows as well.

Wikipedia references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_factor
More general discussion with heavy math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_velocity
The reason for it all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index
This is straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.corning.com/WorkArea/downloadasset.aspx?id=39403

First, I have no affiliation with these people, but they sell worldwide and actually show pricing for real VSAT, not crappy HughesNet, Viasat, Starband, etc: http://www.groundcontrol.com/

Second, almost all satellite internet is from GEO orbit, as everyone has said, with massive latency; reducing contention is done with spot beams, but the catch is that, if you're not in the spot beam, you're out of luck: this is especially true of the new Ka-band services (Viasat-1, Gen-4 Hughesnet, and probably more coming). And since ALL of these are on Ku or Ka band, unless you can afford a big dish, you can expect rain fade much of the time.

Third, up until recently we had a Ku-band Hughesnet connection here at work for our extranet. It sucked. BIG TIME. I have to echo what everyone else says: do not get satellite internet unless you have NO OTHER CHOICE!

Last, there are the slow-speed alternatives: Inmarsat is also in GEO, but much slower and more expensive; in exchange, you get portability (no dish, just one of those suitcase antennas). Then there's Iridium (2400 bps) and Global(aka Local)Star (9600 bps--no kilo!), which are only useful for e-mail without attachments or text browsing with Lynx (and even then it'll be slow): these are in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), but at these speeds from the 1980's, you won't notice the latency gain. :(

Hope this helps, Mike