[sudo-discuss] Radio: Internet radio is about to get borked; just say CONELRAD.

Tue Nov 5 06:48:33 PST 2013

Re. Steve:

The nightmare scenario for "after the end of net neutrality" is that the
Bigs adopt _time-based_ or _QOS-based_ control of any content that isn't
paying through the nose.

For example a typical small biz website's main page is about 2 meg. 
Under the new regime they find it takes 60 seconds to load (long enough
to chase away customers), so they redo the site and now it's only 200K. 
But the 200K version of the page still takes 60 seconds to load.  And if
they slimmed it down to 20K it would still take 60 seconds to load. 

Even easier, just assign the lowest QOS priorities to "commoner"
traffic, so it's totally unreliable.  Think call-drops in bad cell
coverage areas, translated to the entirety of the internet over both
wired and wireless media, so it becomes totally but randomly useless. 
The reason you hear people say they "don't like to talk on the phone" is
because "the phone" has become crappy audio and unreliable connections
compared to what it used to be.  Translate that to the whole internet
with the exception of the "preferred channels," Google, Facebook,
Twitter, Amazon, and of course Fox News.  "I don't go online any more
except to buy stuff...."  Right, exactly.

Either of the above would shut down internet broadcasting, and also shut
down small business websites, for which reason Main Street USA ought to
be up in arms about it, pitchforks & torches included. 

If either of those censorship-by-"nudge" things happens, a huge
explosion of pirate radio would not be unexpected, including
deliberately stepping on big stations' signals to make the point.  For
that matter, revenge-jamming of the entire AM & FM broadcast bands by
"outlaws" is a foreseeable consequence.  Think of people running around
dropping off disposable jamming transmitters all over a city, that kind
of thing.  Argh...

What I'm thinking is:

Make this THE issue of the 2014 Congressional elections.  "The biggest
free speech issue of the 21st century."  Every candidate gets grilled on
it: where do you stand on net neutrality?  Anyone who isn't with us gets
dragged through a nasty primary battle.  And if they lie about
supporting it, and get into office and do nothing or worse, then they
get primaried in 2016, which will be a high-turnout year. 

And of course, back up the electoral strategy with a barrage of lawsuits
covering every possible angle, and with peaceful civil disobedience
designed to generate more trials where these issues can be brought up
again and again and again. 

Re. CONELRAD:

I've read plenty of Civil Defense material from the Cold War era and it
described the low-power broadcast scenario.  That Wikipedia article is
the first I've heard of anything like round-robin, and it would be
difficult to manage a round-robin system in the middle of a nuclear
attack. 

But either scenario might be adaptable to "modern conditions."  "Civil
Disobedience IS Civil Defense!"  Heh, may as well adopt the CONELRAD
symbol to go along with it, as a national logo for free radio. 

-G.

=====

On 13-11-04-Mon 10:46 PM, Steve Berl wrote:
> According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONELRAD the stations on
> other frequencies than 640 and 1240kHz shut down and the stations that
> normally broadcast at 640 and 1240 took turns round robin style
> transmitting. 
>
> So nobody switched frequencies or went to lower power. 
>
> As someone who has actually navigated a boat by AM band RDF I can say
> it would be very frustration if the transmitters kept moving around.
> It would definitely make it harder to find targets in the pre-GPS world. 
>
> Too bad about net neutrality. This might really suck. 
>
> Steve
>
> On Monday, November 4, 2013, GtwoG PublicOhOne wrote:
>
>
>
>     Federal circuit court in DC is set to rule on net neutrality and
>     appears poised to strike it down. 
>
>     http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/so-the-internets-about-to-lose-its-net-neutrality/
>
>     That means say byebye to internet radio.  Small-scale community
>     netcasters won't be able to "negotiate" fees with The Bigs to get
>     access, even at speeds that are common today in residential
>     broadband. 
>
>     If that occurs, it strengthens the moral justification for pirate
>     radio and similar solutions, by a decimal place or two.  In the
>     spirit of which...
>
>     ...anyone here ever hear of CONELRAD? 
>
>     That was the late 1950s - early 1960s plan for Civil Defense
>     emergency broadcasting in the event of nuclear war.  All FM
>     stations would go off the air, and AM stations would switch over
>     to low-power broadcast on 640 KHz and 1240 KHz.  Incoming Soviet
>     bombers (in the pre-ICBM era) would be unable to use RDF (radio
>     direction finding) to navigate, while citizens could pick up the
>     emergency stations that were nearest to them.  Radio dials were
>     marked with little triangles at 640 and 1240 to make the CONELRAD
>     broadcasts easy to find.
>
>     The signal interference issues Anthony and others brought up, must
>     have been addressed during the design of the CONELRAD system.  If
>     nothing else, AM reception is more directional, and the lower
>     frequencies (kilohertz rather than megahertz) would reduce the
>     problems of signal synchronization, including during times when
>     official announcements were being broadcast simultaneously over
>     all the stations in a region. 
>
>     If this is the case, then blanket coverage by low-power AM
>     transmitters might be technically feasible.
>
>     -G
>
>
>     =====
>
>
>     On 13-11-04-Mon 2:17 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
>>     There would be a moire pattern of regions of roughly the
>>     dimensions of a wavelength (~3 meters) within which interference
>>     would be mainly constructive or mainly destructive. Reception
>>     would suck or not exist in all the regions where interference was
>>     not constructive. Then the usual multi-path interference issues.
>>     Complicated and a good reason to keep transmitters well
>>     spaced-out. To do this right you are pretty much building a
>>     phased-array antenna which uses the interference intentionally to
>>     aim the beam by varying the synchronization among the signals
>>     from the different antennas and that is way too complicated for
>>     this - you have to track the location of the receivers somehow
>>     for one thing, and that's just the beginning.
>>
>>
>>     On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 2:01 PM, David Keenan <dkeenan44 at gmail.com
>>     <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'dkeenan44 at gmail.com');>> wrote:
>>
>>         Also - this is a really dumb question but in terms of
>>         interference, I actually have no idea what sort of
>>         interference results when two coverage-adjacent radios are
>>         broadcasting the exact same signal? Does it make any
>>         difference if they'd both be broadcasting the same signal? I
>>         should remember this, since I actually took one of those AARL
>>         tests wayyy back when (and I think I am technically FCC
>>         licensed, at least for certain spectrums like SSB? Can't
>>         exactly remember..i should have a certificate somewhere)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> -- 
> -steve

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