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Comment by Avicebron | Hacker News Reader

The US is so overdue for regulation/laws on privacy and electronic communications. The internet is too embedded into our daily lives for the existing rules that governed a bunch of hobbyists and early entrepeneurs to make sense.

Unless specified clearly and plainly (not obscure TOS), everything should be private by default and require a warrant. If that's not possible because "the data can live forever/be copied", then we need data laws that make holding data on cosumers so radioactively dangerous the companies are forced to adapt. It's not their decision to make, it's the people od the country where the live, work, and do business.

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Or users are due to finally wake up and opt into protocols and solutions that maximize their privacy rather than waiting for the government and businesses who both are incentivized to disrespect their privacy to suddenly have a change of heart.

Admittedly this is harder with LLM's due to the hardware costs, for now. But the fact that anyone's still using centralized social media platforms in 2026, for instance, is absolutely wild.

If you're going to walk around naked in public don't be surprised when someone takes a glance at your junk.

The government and business don't want privacy. And they have a lot of power and money.

I keep thinking about privacy and wonder -- this is the kind of thing like the declaration of independence, where a new government was formed when things got so bad. But then I think, business and (local) government wanted independence from the king's taxation and unfavorable business conditions, maybe that was the force behind the change.

So if some 14 year old wants to throw up a phpBB instance on his raspberry pi, he should need a license and regulators' noses in his business, like how we extinguish- erm, I mean, controlled HAM radio?

How do you differentiate?

If lawyers can't figure out the difference between a 14 year old throwing up an phpBB on a raspberry pi vs equifax, anthropic, meta, etc...idk what to tell you. Get better lawyers, it falls into "laws for hobbyists aren't working part of my comment"

Is HAM radio really extinguished? All it takes is passing a test, and the rules around it seem more valuable to sharing a public resource (frequency spectrum) than detrimental?

HAM radio is dying more from the behavior of its geriatric old guard towards newcomers than any regulation.

The lack of ability to use encryption makes most things I'd think to do on it with packet radio fall off quickly. LoRA seems to be where more digital hobbyists end up because we can do things like build out Reticulum without violating FCC regulations.

But there's still some fun stuff to be done with HAM, as long as you don't mind anyone and everyone listening in on it.

The test is easier than ever too. None of the three levels even require learning morse code anymore. I passed Technician after a few hours of study. General doesn't take much more. Amateur Extra is the hard one, but you can do most things you'd want to with General.

https://hamstudy.org

Scale. In the same way every 10 year old Timmy is not being hauled into court for pirating a few Drake songs, but major piracy organizations seeding millions of songs are, litigation and enforcement does selectively target bad actors based on how big of an issue they are.

Boomers killed ham radio, not regulation.

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