Not needed if you've ever heard of Donald Knuth's reward checks, something that I'd expect most Slashdot readers have.

To clarify, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who isn't dumb, and isn't being intentionally obtuse, that Gmail does not provide the level of security I'm suggesting.

So I guess the question is, which are you? An idiot, or an asshole?

Who said those were the things that I wanted?

2006 is almost a decade ago...

Just use a variant of the Donald Knuth reward check method. The first patent that gets invalidated will incur a 1 cent cut from the patent office budget. The second one a 2 cent cut, etc. After a few weeks the USPTA would have no option except shut down.

I'm not sure whether this is what you mean, but I think you may be missing the point with your talk about "real encryption". It is not necessary that no third parties can decrypt your data or messages in order to have encryption be useful. Security is not about absolutes. In almost all real-life security scenarios, there are requirements that you allow certain vulnerabilities, and that you trust some people.

For example, you can say, "With GPG, I don't have to trust anyone. I encrypt a message, and then the only person who can read it is the recipient."

But that's not strictly true. First, you're still trusting the recipient. That recipient could decrypt your message and make it public. Technology doesn't help you there. Additionally, you're trusting the recipient's security. If that recipient has malware that snoops on communications or grabs their private keys, the message can be decrypted. If that recipient has an untrustworthy spouse with access to the recipient's computers and passwords, then your information isn't completely safe.

Beyond that, you're trusting the makers of GPG. You're trusting that they know what they're doing-- that when they say their encryption can't be broken, they're right about that. You're also trusting that those people are not malicious themselves, and haven't left any backdoors available. You might argue that people can audit the code, but then you're just trusting the auditors. Even if you audit the code yourself, you're trusting your own understanding, which relies on the accuracy of your education on the topic.

So I'm getting kind of picky here, but the point is, if you understand security, then you understand that there is no situation without trust and vulnerability. The trick is to understand your vulnerabilities, and to be careful in choosing who to trust.

So if, in order to protect yourself from the data loss that would result in losing your keys, you choose to trust some other third party, that is not necessarily bad security. The trick would be in making sure you understood the vulnerabilities it exposed, and to choose the right people to trust. I'd rather trust Google to secure my email then I would trust the internet in general not to read my unsecured email.

Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.

We think after we build this new PCB we can go for the croudfunded manufacturing run. It's mostly surface-mount, and we expect to sell assembled boards in this run, and then the next version will be fully-packaged radios.

Hi AC,

Matt Ettus has a story about a Chinese cloner of the USRP. The guy tells Chinese customers that it is illegal for them to buy from Ettus, they must buy from the cloner instead. Then, when they have problems and require serivce, he tells them to get it from Ettus. Who of course made nothing from their device sales and can not afford to service them.

This is not following the rules of Open anything. It's counterfeiting.

So, sometimes it is necessary to change the license a little so that you will not be a chump. I discussed the fact that the hardware is fully disclosed but not Open Hardware licensed with RMS, the software is 100% Free Software, and there is a regulatory chip you can't write. We can go for Respects Your Freedom certification that way..

I've paid my dues as far as "Open" is concerned, and Chris has too. This is all we can give you this time.

The case selection was so that we'd have at least one case that would work. We did not take much time on it. We'd be happy to have other people designing and selling cases.

The version after this one requires cases that look like real radios. That is going to be a bigger problem. We don't yet have a mold-design partner, etc.

We implement it as a chip that intercepts the serial bus to the VFO chip, and disallows certain frequencies. On FCC-certified equipment we might have to make that chip and the VFO chip physically difficult to get at by potting them or something. This first unit is test-equipment and does not have the limitation.

Anyone who is good at electronics can get around regulatory lockouts. We're not allowed to make it easy. But nor are we technically able to make it impossible.

U.S. regulation only allows Part 95 certified radios to be used on GMRS, and Part 95 requires that the radio be pretty well locked down. But all of those Asian imports are certified for Part 90 and there are lots of users putting them on both Amateur and GMRS. If FCC wanted to push the issue with any particular licensee, they could.

The D-STAR issue is not really ICOM's fault. JARL designed D-STAR (not ICOM) and put the AMBE codec in it because nobody believed that you could have a good open codec at the time. We now have Codec2 (a project I evangelized and recruited the developer) which is fully open. And we do have a software AMBE decoder in Open Source, although the patents won't let us use it. That is why I am working on the patent issue (as noted in the last slide of the presentation).

I know about the counterfeit FTDI chips, and Matt Ettus told me what has happened with the Chinese clone of USRP. We know what to do.