Every time someone pings you, your wabpage stops loading.

Oh noes! Not my wabpage!

Those wascally wabpages...

Ham radio is losing a generation of geeks who've grown up on a more-free network and aren't interested in a restricted one. Should we just let them go?

Ham radio is absolutely hemorrhaging operators, and allowing encryption will do absolutely NOTHING to stem the tide. It's a moot point.

If you really want to get people back, the thing to do is set aside a few of the frequencies for part-95 certified devices any kid can pick up for $50 at Wal-mart. That kind of massive commoditization would be the way to get long-distance inter-operable radio communications into the hands of police/fire/medical as well as the general public, who will then have a way to make (long-distance) emergency calls when the cell network goes down. These days, you could even include high-tech features like digital trunking, digital radio mondiale, and things like GPS coordinates in every message, so that first-responders can track down distress calls, or the FCC can immediately find any idiots that need to be shut down quickly.

We had a 5.29 repeater in the SF Bay area that took years to pull, but got pulled. It turned out the control operator had moved away! He said he'd left the repeater in someone else's care, but if that person existed they did not police the repeater.

If you care about this, start writing letters to FCC. They really do enforcement if pushed, the letter file is here.

It would be legal to send a message in the clear, with a digital signature along with it. You can't obscure the message.

It might make sense if governed properly, but the filer didn't propose any means of governance and didn't even know about HSMM-MESH when he wrote his proposal. He's a winlink node owner and his intent was to use GNUPG to encode text messages, and did not consider the abuses that could happen with TCP/IP. So, I am spending the whole day to write an FCC comment and hopefully fix this.

Personally I'm more interested in some of the MIPS chips like the Loognson Dragon that has built in X86 hardware acceleration, supposedly you get 80% of X86 speed

Last I heard, the latest Loongson processors were performing about on-par with the earliest 1GHz Pentium-4 processors. A processor well over a decade old. That's something to look forward to...

They get surplus business band radios, mostly. One reason is that the Federal Government has required several frequency, bandwidth, and mode changes of municipal radio users, so almost-new radios that were too wide or didn't run APCO-25 became available at low prices.

For the most part, commercial radios are really overpriced. It is not unusual for a police car transceiver to come in at $5000. FCC certified GMRS radios seem rather overpriced for their performance. There are cheap chinese radios for land-mobile which are not certified for GMRS, these are really just broad-banded ham radios.

I have worked really hard to fix that D-STAR issue. See FreeDV and Codec2. We expect to have that on VHF/UHF soon.

Actually, it would be a simple matter to gateway https back to http. And since the rule prohibits encryption for the purpose of obscuring information, authentication through encryption is OK. Your password need not be transmitted in the clear. Just don't obscure the message traffic.

In general, though, the web doesn't belong on ham radio just because it's private use. There are lots of other services for private communications. There is also of course the fact that advertising isn't allowed on ham radio, because the rules prohibit commercial use.

OK, since you are not interested in supporting censorship, I will give you some uncensored material.

You snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of eldeberry! I fart in your general direction!

Now, that really contributed to the conversation, didn't it?

But what type of "IP" is relevant here? What is the legal basis for the restrictions?

If you had RTFA you would have seen nice little quotes like this one:

"not covered by patents so can be implemented without a license from ARM."

The original Intel Pentium was released in March 1993. This means that the patents on it should either be expired or nearing expiration

Before June 1995, patents in the US weren't 20-years from filing date. If they were, MP3, and perhaps AAC (-LC) and MPEG-2 would be free and clear by now. Instead, patent expiration was based on the patent issue date, which could be many YEARS after filing. And filing can also be up to a year after first publishing the method. I've seen pre-1995 patents that are valid for as much as 25 years after first publication, so you need to look up the USPTO patent issuance date for each patent.