FCC to require email addresses on applications for amateur radio licenses | Hacker News Reader

FCC to require email addresses on applications for amateur radio licenses

arrl.org

55 points740268 comments

I don't like it.

No public comment period on this?

The fact that they can cancel your license if the email is undeliverable is the worst aspect of this.

When you register a domain name you have to provide an email and street address. Failure to respond to communication at either of these and you risk the loss of your domain.

Doesn’t the FCC put all licenses available online for free lookup? Domains can have privacy masking depending on the registrar.

I recall a retro tech YouTuber I follow getting a HAM radio license (or something) and he gave out his code. I looked it up, and lo and behold, there was his address.

> No public comment period on this?

The public comment period was in 2019: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-electronic-licensing...

> Under new Section 97.23, each license will have to show the grantee's correct name, mailing address, and email address.

So mailing address will still be required?

Keep in mind that license information in public, so if you use your home address as your mailing address then you will be making it very easy for anyone to tie your email address to your home address.

If this matters to you, use a mailing address/email address combination that you do not mind being tied together publicly.

I’d be delighted if they replaced the mailing address requirement with email. The fact that I need to either pay for a P.O. Box or have my home address and legal name in a public database is ridiculous and dangerous.

In my country, the following information is available about each citizen, only a google search away:

Name, Personal Number, Address, Convictions, Income (Actually all taxation information), Vehicle ownership. In many cases, pet ownership.

Not searchable online, but an email away: All your grades (end of highschool through university). Drawings of your house for surveyor purposes (never had a reason to try this)

How differently we view privacy.

Do you think that lack of privacy is a good thing? If so you should update your profile with more information-- it's currently empty.

No, I think the situation is terrible here, in the pricacy sense. It worked when the community was more homogenuous, and more importantly before the internet. But the tradeoff transparency <-> privacy has shifted with the information age.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Fuck that.

"The FCC is fully transitioning to electronic correspondence and will no longer print or provide wireless licensees with hard-copy authorizations or registrations by mail."

They're so close, yet so far away.

I find this rather scary - the internet is not a public utility yet it is required for more and more government services.

Emails could certainly do with some maturing, both in protocol for security/privacy (yeah, I know...) and in terms of accessibility.

I am not sure society is completely ready for a fully digital world just yet; emails, phone numbers, authentication, username, passwords, 2FA codes, biometrics...

Gmail should absolutely be taken away from Google's influence and treated as a public utility (free for everyone for life).

I support the concept of USPS offering email services for official purposes. I don't really support nationalizing Gmail.

Yes, and the government would not provide you an email address, meaning you are given a choice of either using a "free" email service that would sell your data or paying a premium to a private hoster. I am not even considering self hosting because it's not something an average person could do.

While I have objections to internet-based government interaction, access is not one I worry much about.

We have government-funded libraries all across the country that provide internet access. While I believe that mail should always be an option, ease of access is something that I think is over-valued when it comes to government.

That's not to say that I don't appreciate convenience. Convenience and a broad range of availability are good things. But at the same time, I don't hold the belief that government owes us convenience.

So with that said, and excepting arguments of convenience of availability of internet, I think it's hard to make the case that someone may be excluded just because they don't have internet. Used to be some people had to ride half a day on a horse to conduct some government business. To me, that is the baseline, and anything beyond that is a privileged blessing, NOT a necessity.

I know this is a very unpopular opinion.

All the libraries have been closed for almost a year.

Must be relative from area to area- my fiancee and her sister do most of their college classwork at the library because campus is closed.

Every public library I've seen up and down the East Coast, dozens of towns and cities, is closed. Some allow book checkouts at the door.

Are you referring to campus library or public? What state?

Ahhhhh my mistake, she's informed me it's the campus library. The lecture halls and general campus is shut down, the library remains open for limited hours.

This is an unpopular opinion for sure!

- Although much improved over the last decade, library internet is still quite slow and often the desktop computers are riddled with spyware. Yeah, everyone has cell phones, but a temporarily homeless person should still be able to do coursework (obviously a very naive example but still happens)

- Here's an exaggerated counterargument to your convenience argument: What if you had to travel to your state capital to vote or register for a marriage license?

Used to be some people had to ride half a day on a horse to conduct some government business. To me, that is the baseline, and anything beyond that is a privileged blessing, NOT a necessity.

I'm sorry what? This isn't the 1800's anymore, this way of thinking just astounds me. How can you anyone look at our modern times and say as long as your a half days horse ride away from a government office you got everything you need. You're ignoring that fact most people don't even have horses. Cars have existed for over 100 years now. You could at-least factor that into your baseline.

If we never move the baseline up then we lose the will to advance. We strip the upward mobility of our poorer citizens.

ease of access is something that I think is over-valued when it comes to government

The harder it is for your average citizen to due something the less likely they are to do it. It discriminates against the people who need help the most and concentrates power into fewer and fewer hands.

Take starting a Business for example, the harder it is the less people will do it. This is bad for our economy and society as a whole. Less small businesses means less jobs, less ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty. The more difficult Government is to interface with the more time someone has to devote to dealing with it. It means less time to focus on education or a small business, or their family, or health. It means they are more likely to be stuck where they are.

Ease of Access to Government resources can be directly correlated to some peoples quality of life. Think of Food stamps or welfare to the people who need it.

I think it's hard to make the case that someone may be excluded just because they don't have internet

No, its pretty easy, most libraries have been closed due to Covid. Many people might not have reliable access to the internet atm. Which in the supposed best country on Earth is scary.

With statements like this, I can't help but wonder what the person's background is. Not to make an ad hominem, but because the stance seems simply unaware of the realities of life for a lot of people. I've lived in Baltimore, where simply walking around can be extremely dangerous. I also had friends growing up who couldn't afford to pay for bus rides in our hometown (which were less than $2).

If walking to the library literally entails putting your life and property at risk, and you can't afford public transportation, how would you not consider that somebody being excluded just due to not having internet at home?

Something having been worse in the past is not a good reason to prevent improvement.

If you want to make the case that an implicitly enforced delay somehow improves the service then you should provide an actual argument.

Otherwise this is basically: "Things used to be bad and I had to deal with it. Therefor, I would impose this hardship on everyone" which is a relatively toxic way to look at the world.

I’ve always been of the mind that the USPS should provide an official government email of sorts. Something you sign up for in person or in some other verifiable way and that is your email address that you can use for government services and the like. This would ensure you have an email that exists for public service and is managed accordingly

Bit of a pipe dream however I think the idea has real merit

This is not a pipe dream at all. Call your Congressional rep and ask for legislation to provide this. Asking only costs your time, and you're on the right track (USPS providing this service, so they can do in-person verifications). This would then enable more government services to move to email first for correspondence, but care would need to be taken that comms fall back to phone or physical mail for exceptions (for example, FCC should fall back to SMS and/or paper mail if email bounces back).

...and this is what you'll get back because I used to write responses like these for a congressional office for years:

Thank you toomuchtodo for writing to me about government services to move to email first for correspondence. As you know, I have always supported government accountability and efficiency, and will certainly consider this should legislation come up about it. Please continue to keep me informed about the issues that are important to you. Sincerely, your Congressional Representative.

> This is not a pipe dream at all. Call your Congressional rep and ask for legislation to provide this. Asking only costs your time, and you're on the right track (USPS providing this service, so they can do in-person verifications).

Do that, but go a little farther.

You should be able to register with the USPS to get a universal ID (UID), and then associate both a mailing address and an email address with that UID.

USPS would then provide both an email address and virtual mailing address that incorporate the UID. Email sent to that email address would forward to the real email address associated with the UID, and physical mail sent to the virtual mailing address would be delivered to the associated physical mailing address.

I'd like to see them also offer an ID verification service, that provides a way for you to verify to a third party that you control a particular UID. This could provide a robust account recovery mechanism for other services.

Right now, if an account at some service gets hijacked, or you simply forget or lose your credentials, recovery usually depends on SMS or on email. The problem with those is that they too can be hijacked, and their recovery also depends on SMS or email. You end up with a tangled mess of dependencies.

A way to fix this is to organize account recovery as a tree. At the root you have some service where recovery requires that you physically show up at their office and present proof of identity, such as a passport.

Then directly under the root you might have your main email account or your main mobile phone account. Account recovery for those would involve verifying your identity with the root.

Below those, you might have your social media accounts, your utility accounts, and so on. Recovery for those would involved verifying you via your mail email or main mobile number.

How you organize it is up to you. They key, though, is to have something at the top that you can always recover, and make everything else be ultimately recoverable through that. (I'd probably personally do a 5 level tree: root; domain registrars; main email; mobile phone; everything else).

USPS would be good for the root because they have offices all over the country. Most people can get to a USPS office without too much hardship. (Banks would also be a good option for root identity providers).

Agree entirely! https://login.gov already exists. Extend it with PKI and smartcards (Estonia National ID style [1]). Have USPS be a trust anchor as well as integrate with Login.gov as an identity provider, and so on.

[1] https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card/

Write your representatives, start a grassroots movement to get usps to offer email addresses, the future is created by those who show up.

They tried something like that in Germany, but they got it wrong in the details:

Once you elect to communicate via this government blessed email, you are basically forced to check that email everyday notwithstanding your ability (e.g. when your computer/internet breaks) as the communication is considered delivered once it hits your (e-)mail box.

For example if you are summoned to court (and it is a felony to not show up), I'd think I'd prefer snail mail for those communications, as I'd trust my "tech stack" of a physical mail box on the receiving side a bit more than some government blessed email provider.

Good point.

Also, once spammers/scammers get ahold of it (I give it ten minutes), you are truly screwed.

I think if you limited it to only sanctioned communications you'd limit this problem quickly (think only .gov email addresses can email it, for instance, and/or other sanctioned domains)

If we wanted to, we should provide two emails to the general public. A restricted communications one following the rules I suggest above, and perhaps a more general purpose one for those who want to use that, with the only requirement that you already signed up for the first one).

I know that's convoluted. It's just one idea of course. I think we could deal with this problem.

Also the gov being the gov, they could just mandate Google provide spam filter protections or something.

That sounds more like mostly a technical problem. You could simply configure forwarding from your gov. email account to your personal one. You could create filters to only care about certain domains to prevent spam.

It's still a lot easier to check email than walk to a mailbox daily. But the best solution is probably to default to both email & mail such that the email can be send when the letter is sent but neither would be considered a delivered message until the letter itself was delivered.

Huh? I check my paper mail box once per month.

>For example if you are summoned to court

Aren't such thing delivered under signature?

exactly. How would that work in an electronic setting?

I think the Danish version of this, "E-boks", have been mandated for some years and it mostly works fine. There are a few issues now and then and it is difficult for the older population but I think that it overall have worked fine. And by far most people agree with it here.

Although this is not true email but a special message system that needs two factor auth to log in.

Not a pipe dream. I think it would be a marvelous public utility, and one that might keep the USPS a bit more solvent (think addons).

But...I think that most of us are familiar with how good the Government is at running these kinds of efforts.

That said, it is a quasi-private effort, and might actually be able to field a decent team.

That works for a lot of things.

For example, a pen is not a public utility yet it is required for more and more government services.

A pen is usually provided, for example at the DMV.

As is internet, for example at the library...

Banks are not a public utility yet it is "required" to pay non-trivial amounts to the government.

Are all government offices public-transport accessible? (in a practical way - not in "two busses a day per route" kind of way)

Is it wrong to consider a federal-taxpayer-funded open source E2E encrypted email hosting service for all US citizens? You’d need to trust the government is not putting in backdoors. Audits wouldn’t help since they’ve been spying on citizens with legislature since 2000. The alternative is... FAANGs spying on me. Pick your poison. One at least has the pretense of working for my benefit.

The E2E stuff would be at your end. Before anything fancier it would probably be good if the gov became technologically advanced enough to be able to send email to your public key and publish their own keys.

Previously the requirement was to have a physical mailing address. I'd say paying rent or owning a home is a much higher bar for a lot of people than operating an email address.

If you are homeless there are ways to get postal service from your local post office. Postmasters can grant free PO boxes at their discretion (1). You are also able to take advantage of general delivery (2). General delivery is available even for those who are not homeless but merely without a permanent address.

1. https://faq.usps.com/s/article/Is-there-mail-service-for-the...

2. https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-General-Delivery

Surely if they require you to have an email address, they are prepared to provide you with one themselves?

> The FCC is fully transitioning to electronic correspondence and will no longer print or provide wireless licensees with hard-copy authorizations or registrations by mail.

Good stuff, nice to see the FCC modernizing.

EDIT: They should fall back to SMS or physical mail notifications if emails bounce.

Sigh. The old licenses looked nice.

They've been printing them on normal copier paper rather than the basketweave for awhile.

I got my amateur license around a year ago. They stopped mailing paper licenses a while ago.

>They should fall back to SMS or physical mail notifications if emails bounce.

You can go to the FCC license database and print it out if you don't receive it for any reason. I got my license back in April, and that's the only way I got a hard copy.

Since the FCC's amateur license database is open to the public, anyone can get my e-mail address, street address, and call sign.

If I ever get an e-mail stating it's from the FCC, I'm not opening it. E-mail is not an acceptable form of communication which require any form of authentication or trust.

Idk about U.S. but in my country the government (or any of its subsidiaries) cannot officially contact you via e-mail. It’s either by mail or in-person.

email aliases exist for good reasons. ;-)

Am I reading this wrong? It says email addresses on radio applications for amateur radio operators?

I don’t see anything regarding software.

What about software? Was the headline changed?

The old headline was FCC to require email addresses for applications. That was it.

Looks like a bunch of commenters didn’t read the article and jumped to conclusions.

Does it need to?

Would it be frowned upon if I use this thread as an excuse to shamelessly advertise TricepMail.com? It's a better approach to catch all email that I've been working on. MVP released last month with polish and feature additions (but not feature creep) still in the works.

Funny I made an open source project for the exact same thing with API and even RSS access :D https://github.com/HaschekSolutions/opentrashmail

Looks like a cool project, maybe include setup instructions that don't require docker?

Looks good! Does the interface organize mail by mailbox? Can you also easily send email from any mailbox? And is there blocking/accepting from specific senders?

In TricepMail, messages to e.g. hn@loh.tricepmail.com versus ignore@loh.tricepmail.com are separated in the UI, and you can configure the "ignore" mailbox to block all incoming messages. You can also setup mailboxes that accept messages from specific senders only.

TricepMail also has everything (and a bit more) that you've listed under "Web interface". TricepMail isn't meant to be used for trash/throwaways, but you can use it for that if you want. It's meant to compartmentalize real email for the demands of today, especially for things like the FCC requiring email addresses on applications.

For example, I would consider incoming email from the FCC to be extremely important (definitely not trash), but I wouldn't want to use my usual personal email address for this. I would still want to see it without going through all the hassle of setting up a separate email server and/or using a separate email client. I want everything in one simple, organized place. This is why I created TricepMail.

I've starred your repo. Looking forward to seeing its progress. :)

If I know one valid address, say, reddit@john.tricepmail.com and send to random address N9CN20UQvT@john.tricepmail.com, will it be delivered as legitimate?

Yes.

It's not clear to me from your site what advantages your service has over already existing well-known services. Most people already have an email solution, so I think you need to make it clear how yours is different and why that might be better for them.

For example, I've already got Fastmail's standard plan ($5/month if purchased on a month-to-month basis). That allows 600 aliases, 8000 receives per day, 8000 sends per day, 30 GB email storage, 10 GB file storage. Your $5/month plan has bigger limits for some of those, and smaller limits for some of those, but I'm not seeing anything that tells me I might find your service useful either in addition to or as a replacement for Fastmail.

For email, I think a lot of people are going to lean toward an established provider in the hopes that this increases the chances of them being around long term.

Thanks for the very helpful feedback.

Last time I used Fastmail, I had to manually setup the aliases in advance, before they could receive mail. It also isn't possible to send from aliases on Fastmail. I find Fastmail's UI/UX to be too cumbersome for what I want to do with my email.

Once I've added a few more key features and polished the UI a bit, I am planning on revamping the landing page to make things clearer.

Thanks again for the feedback. It's incredibly useful.

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