[Ground-station] How we talk about encryption can hurt us

[Peter Laws N5UWY]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 7:08 PM Bruce Perens via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:


> We should not be talking to the public about how important it is that we can encrypt commands to our satellite. We should indeed be minimizing the degree that this is necessary at all. By doing otherwise, we feed those who would like to expand the use of encryption in the Amateur Bands, and ultimately we do damage to Amateur Radio.

Yes.  2^20 times yes.  It's bad enough with the defacto encryption of
the sail mail stuff (it's "legal encryption" because you have to use
licensed software to decode it and in defense of PacTOR's vendor, they
are offering monitoring software for nothing, though I assume it's
still not open ... and I assume it actually works).

Yes, we should, in fact, petition the FCC to *remove* that exemption
for satellite tele-command (47 CFR 97.211(b)) for exactly the reasons
you cite - it's unneeded in 2021.

AREDN guys are the ones that are *really* intentionally blind to this.
"What's wrong with going to an https site over [terrestrial] AREDN?"

Amateur radio has enough issues without encryption ruining it.

-- 
Peter Laws | N5UWY | plaws plaws net | Travel by Train!