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Comment by gpsx | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what is going on in the ham radio space, but it does seem like there are a lot of potentially interesting applications.

Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.

I think it would be very popular even with just a clear text internet over ham radio. You would probably even need additional restrictions to keep it from being overrun - like maybe only dedicated "ham radio internet" web sites would be allowed, as opposed to being just access to the (standard) internet.

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>Regarding mesh networking, you don't have to have encryption to do that. It could still be very interesting, you just have to know that people can inspect your transmissions. If they didn't allow this restriction, I imagine the system would just be overrun.

You can't have traffic that is ssl, ssh, or any other encrypted protocol. Stop and think how useful a network you can have without that, no emails, no websites, no authenticated connections between computers.

The only things we have left are http, telnet and anonymous ftp.

Welcome to the 80s Arpanet, but anyone can modify your packets undetectably.

Keep in mind the bandwidth is pretty limited. Even a single page view takes a fair amount of data these days.

However, signed packets do not violate the HAM rules, and is pretty common. People controlling systems (like repeaters) can ssh to them, with encryption disabled (there are patches), but still using signatures to avoid worries about packet modifications.

js8call for instance can do "mesh" networking, but the bandwidth is a few 10s of bytes per minute. But you can send messages through multiple hops to allow things like getting messages through to people you can't directly contact.

I get your point that a node in the network can transfer a different packet. But I think people will have to be more creative with the protocol. For example, other nodes can hear both your transmission and next hop and can detect the packet was changed. I'm not sure you could make it 100% reliably, but the network could be self policing. Hopefully it would be one of those things that doesn't work in theory, only in practice. (And if not, then the rules would have to be updated.)

Signing packets is not a new idea.

The problem still is that you have no way to authenticate on any layer above the hardware.

Ham radio as is is stuck in the 1960s which given the age of the people on it isn't really surprising.

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