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

[Eddan Katz]

Marvin Ammori who wrote that Op-Ed in Wired used to head up policy for 
Free Press in DC and was a key figure in making net neutrality a 
political issue that penetrated the mainstream. (He's also a colleague 
and old friend). He is most poignantly addressing the clerks working for 
the DC circuit court judges to mitigate the impending damage. And the 
decision will likely be less bad as a result of the attention he and 
Wired gave it.

In related news, Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge was just named to a 
senior staff post at the FCC this yesterday. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/business/fccs-chief-hires-a-critic-of-the-agency.html. 
She will be an invaluable advocate on the inside for public interest 
telecom policy.

Net Neutrality has been a national issue - given the FCC & DC Circuit 
jurisdictions - telecom being a centralized regulatory system. Another 
thing that makes Net Neutrality a harder top issue because it has much 
less support amongst the libertarian branch of digital rights than with 
the DC-based progressives. Agreeing on the specific guideline rules and 
more significantly who should be administering those regulations is 
where consensus has been most difficult, even within like-minded 
communities.

I do think net neutrality has not yet been talked about enough as a 
hyperlocal issue - disadvantages to local products & services in terms 
of resources. It seems to me that it should be approached from a 
different anti-discrimination angle than Telecom law. But I would also 
imagine that there may be some Sudo folk on the list that would be in 
favor of network traffic prioritization for the hyperlocal.


sent from eddan.com

On 2013-11-05 08:47, Steve Berl wrote:
> Re. CONELRAD:
>
> Interesting stuff. A bit more digging and I did find reference to the
> low power mode, and stations near the designated frequencies needing
> to retune their transmitters. One article said that it took the
> engineer of one station up to an hour to retune to the new frequency.
> Hope those bombers were flying pretty slow. The round robin thing is
> also referenced in several articles and how turning the transmitters
> on and off, as well as transmitting off frequency (which I guess
> causes a high VSWR). 
>
> Sounds like a scam to sell lots of replacement power tubes for
> transmitters.
>
> I like the idea of "Civil Disobedience IS Civil Defense!" and
> adopting the symbol..
>
> As for getting this to be an electoral issue, I have my doubts that
> you can get a significant number of voters interested enough to care,
> until it is too late. 
>
> -steve
>
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 6:48 AM, GtwoG PublicOhOne
> <g2g-public01 at att.net [3]> wrote:
>
>> 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 isnt paying through the nose.
>>
>> For example a typical small biz websites 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
>> its 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 its 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 "dont 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 dont 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 Im 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 isnt 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:
>>
>> Ive 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 Ive 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 [2] 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/
>>>> [1]
>>>>
>>>> That means say byebye to internet radio.  Small-scale
>>>> community netcasters wont 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 thats
>>>>> just the beginning.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 2:01 PM, David Keenan
>>>>> <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 theyd 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? Cant
>>>>>> exactly remember..i should have a certificate somewhere)
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> sudo-discuss mailing list
>>>>> sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org
>>>>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>>>
>>> --
>>> -steve