Comment by dtaht | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtaht | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you very much for reading. It was the first, and last time, I ever took place in the public process and political action.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2993112/vint-cerf-and-...

We were within months of delivering a massive RFC8290-based fix for wifi performance and we´d been bricking routers left and right... and then got in a whole bunch that we could not modify... due to that proposed regulation... I lost my temper, organized 260+ to sign, made that filing, won, and went back to work. I should perhaps have pressed harder, as the binary blob issue has got ever more terrifying, deeply embedded into too many baseband processors.

If I hold your attention a little bit? It would be rather nice if modern fq + aqm algorithms went into the internet nationwide. "Bufferbloat" is at epidemic proportions. Most the fixes arrived for it in Linux in 2012, and are only slowly rolling out 10+ years later, due to the accompanying epidemic of manufacturers´ not tracking new Linux kernels, (with all those accompanying vulnerabilities). I care very much about addressing security issues, but care about internet "latency under load" and better videoconferencing experiences more.

There´s only a billion or so devices left to upgrade.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-h...

Thanks again -- will review both links (especially the latter!)

The FCC hasn't traditionally been a cybersecurity agency and will, most likely, never really be one; however, we can certainly do things through rules to empower experts, the public, and the agencies with cybersecurity expertise. If that one thing is all you ever did at the FCC, sounds like the public owes you a big debt of gratitude.

As communications increasingly overlaps with other elements of information --- data acquisition, storage, retrieval, processing, and transmission --- keeping the FCC out of the security space will become both more difficult and less tractable.

We've already seen instances where broadcast channels have been hacked or hijacked, where false reports have been injected into news streams (at times affecting global financial markets, or disrupting emergency / disaster responses), where communications providers have disabled public access to alerts (mobile providers and wildfires, Twitter's recent hostile takeover), and more.

There's also the overlap between communications and monopoly (generally the FTC's remit), which I realised a few years back: Censorship, surveillance, propaganda, and targeted manipulation (AdTech and similar tools) are all intrinsic properties of media monopolies:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20201014011009/https://joindiasp...>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470>

There are other concerns where media are highly decentralised or fragmented, including spread of rumours and confusion (e.g., "fog of war", or the general uncertainty in natural disasters or after political and military upheavals such as Germany as the Third Reich fell). But the monopoly -> media concerns issues seem well established. Most though not all of these are addressed by people such as Tim Wu, Bruce Schneier, Cory Doctorow, and Shoshana Zuboff, though I'm not aware that all the components I've identified had been linked previously.

I'm aware that regulatory agencies are constrained by their legislative mandates, but communicating concerns over those limitations to Congress is also possible.

Where cybersecurity is a critical aspect of being able to communicate in our modern world, I urge you to rethink that. I can't go by BestBuy and buy a TV that radiates rf noise all over the place, interrupting communications, but I can buy an IoT device that will get hacked and radiate packets all over the Internet and become part of a botnet, interrupting communications.

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