Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

arrl.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 119 posts

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#101

Post by zaarn »

function_seven wrote: post #86
serf wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to watch analog TV streams that were being reroadcast on the ShoutCast network years and years ago. It's a strange thing to see white-snow-static redigitized and then drop bit-rates.

> It's a strange thing to see white-snow-static redigitized and then drop bit-rates. Old-school white snow static is theoretically the most uncompressable thing, right? So some poor encoder is being told to "send this at 384kb!" and it just throws its little robot hands up and says, "fine, here's your super blocky bullshit. I'm going on break..." Or something like that?

Modern codecs detect noise, filter it out and add back artifical noise at the decoder (especially audio codecs can do this with all kinds of noise). I think back in the day, video compression would likely not have an issue as noise is high frequency and if you're compressing images, that's the first thing to go, you'd just get a blurrier image.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#102

Post by zaarn »

midev wrote: post #66
briandear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that could have affected WAAS GPS approaches for aircraft which is rather critical stuff. (WAAS approaches allow for airplanes to descend to much lower altitudes without ground visibility. Basically the GPS equivalent of the Instrument Landing System.) And Mode S has serious implications for TCAS systems (preventing air to air collisions.) Extremely bad to be messing with those frequencies. Potentially catastroph…

> Extremely bad to be messing with those frequencies. Potentially catastrophic. If someone with a hobby electronics kit can cause that much damage, the system needs to change. Hobby projects like this can help expose the serious flaws in aircraft control, making us all safer. Security by obscurity is no security at all. Security by hoping people don't do bad things is even worse.

It doesn't. Jamming TCAS or ILS systems doesn't cause crashes. At worst, a go-around and increased workload in the Tower.

But since you're disabling safety equipment or their redundancies, in practise it's rightfully treated as harshly as it is. TCAS almost never activates in practise but if your HAM radio jams it and a crash happens... You disabled that redundancy to prevent accidents.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#103

Post by zaarn »

squarefoot wrote: post #100

I don't know how big HobbyKing is, and surely agree than the RF spectrum is a fragile limited resource that we must use properly, and therefore abuses must be punished, however $3M seems a lot. That fine could destroy a business and send home a lot of people, probably none of which have any responsibility on the matter. Did the FCC at least give HobbyKing the chance to withdraw those products?

They did. Multiple times. HobbyKing went on the ol' "You have no jurisdiction" route, or tried to.

Additionally, the devices interefered with Aircraft and GPS Frequencies. If you jammed around in a less sensitive band (ie, blocked something non-vital), they might close an eye or two over it. But GPS and Airtraffic Frequencies is where any regulation agency on this planet will bring the hammer down because accidents caused by that would be quite costly in lives and money.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#104

Post by rocqua »

midev wrote: post #66
briandear wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that could have affected WAAS GPS approaches for aircraft which is rather critical stuff. (WAAS approaches allow for airplanes to descend to much lower altitudes without ground visibility. Basically the GPS equivalent of the Instrument Landing System.) And Mode S has serious implications for TCAS systems (preventing air to air collisions.) Extremely bad to be messing with those frequencies. Potentially catastroph…

> Extremely bad to be messing with those frequencies. Potentially catastrophic. If someone with a hobby electronics kit can cause that much damage, the system needs to change. Hobby projects like this can help expose the serious flaws in aircraft control, making us all safer. Security by obscurity is no security at all. Security by hoping people don't do bad things is even worse.

This system does not at all rely on security by obscurity.

This system relies on safety be reliability / availability. All of the operating parameters are public, to prevent anyone from accidentally interfering with these systems. They are not designed against adversarial attacks, and really with radio systems. It is very hard to defend against jamming attacks. Doing so successfully makes the system a lot more complicated. More importantly, doing so successfully makes the system use much more bandwidth.

Bandwidth is actually really scarce. If you start doing defensive stuff, then more and more frequencies get used, and you end up with everyone screaming over each other just to be able to add all the required error correction. That is why we decided to coordinate on frequency allocation. It prevents a tragedy of the commons. As a side effect, it also means transmit power can be lower. This allows you to operate more systems in the same area without interfering.

Now, this does leave a somewhat fragile system. Because jamming (and other attacks) are not mitigated by the system. But this is an acceptable price to pay to actually allow people to use radio communication.

Besides, jamming attacks have an interesting downside. They are somewhat easy to track down. The higher level attacks can be defeated by cryptography. There is a mid-level of smart jamming, that attacks the low level protocols with more than just power. These require significant effort to develop though. And military hardware tends to have mitigations against this sort of thing. A sufficiently sophisticated attacker could disrupt civil systems, but to what gain?

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#105

Post by netr0ute »

fencepost wrote: post #72
R0b0t1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't feel great about this. It should be up to the end user to not break the law.

My initial thought was also that it sounded excessive, until I got to the parts about interfering with assorted Air Traffic Control frequencies, only 1 of the 7 possible selectable bands being legal for use, broadcasting (in reserved bands!) at higher power than allowed for the device type, selling 65 other noncompliant products, claiming that the constitution protected them from having to respond and refusing to agr…

> until I got to the parts about interfering with assorted Air Traffic Control frequencies

I'm ok with this.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#106

Post by ziml77 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91
salawat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but it's sort of like selling a laser pointer with a user-accessible switch that would make it a powerful directed energy weapon. ...I see no problem with this. In fact, I'll take 5.

Sure. Can you afford to pay damages after you inadvertently blind yourself, and everyone else in a hundred meter radius around you, with diffuse reflections off whatever you point the laser at?

That's a selfish framing, though for that poster it's probably a good choice. However the thing that they really should worry about is harming others in the first place. If I was blinded by them, money would be great to get but no amount is going to make up for the fact that I'm blind.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#107

Post by Syonyk »

kortilla wrote: post #74
Syonyk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks more when your unlabeled, poorly packed batteries catch fire and take down cargo planes. It sucks even more when they take down passenger airlines, because a lot of mail is shipped in the bellies of passenger flights - and if it's not labeled as prohibited for air transport, you have no idea how it gets from A to B. Different carriers have different regulations, and you can legally ship small lithium cells (…

> It sucks even more when they take down passenger airlines They haven’t ever been known to “take down” a.k.a crash a passenger airline: https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/resources/lithium_batteries/media...

The South Africa 295 crash was, at least possibly, a cargo fire from lithium batteries - though they never did figure out exactly what caused it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Airways_Flight_2...

My point there is mostly that USPS mail and such is carried on passenger flights, and I have a very real problem with unlabeled scrap grade lithium cells being carried without proper markings on anything with passengers, which is exactly what Hobby King's behaviors lead to. That stuff, if it goes by air at all (I'd argue it probably shouldn't), should go by cargo aircraft only.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#108

Post by wrycoder »

squarefoot wrote: post #100

I don't know how big HobbyKing is, and surely agree than the RF spectrum is a fragile limited resource that we must use properly, and therefore abuses must be punished, however $3M seems a lot. That fine could destroy a business and send home a lot of people, probably none of which have any responsibility on the matter. Did the FCC at least give HobbyKing the chance to withdraw those products?

Some people are surprised to learn that, when it comes to unauthorized emissions, you don't mess with the FCC. They will hammer you.

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#109

Post by MertsA »

quercusa wrote: post #49
Syonyk wrote: post #2

This appears to be "video streaming" style transmitters, not an ADS-B out sort of location transmitter or anything. And it seems that HobbyKing just... hoped nothing would happen. > As spelled out in ARRL’s 2017 complaint, the ARRL Laboratory had documented that the operating frequencies of these drone TV transmitters near the 1.3 GHz amateur band were dip-switch selectable for frequencies internationally assigned fo…

I suspect this bit didn't endear them to the FCC either: HobbyKing had told the FCC that it had no notice of the Commission’s authorization requirements; that the Fifth Amendment relieved HobbyKing of its duty to respond; that the forfeiture amount was inappropriate because its parent company, Indubitably, Inc., lacked the ability to pay to the Forfeiture Order; and that the Commission was time-barred from taking act…

It's like I'm reading "Sovereign Citizen: Corporate Edition". Why did someone honestly think there was even the slightest chance of that response helping their situation? "We weren't importing, we were travelling!"

Re: FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters

#110

Post by kayfox »

squarefoot wrote: post #100

I don't know how big HobbyKing is, and surely agree than the RF spectrum is a fragile limited resource that we must use properly, and therefore abuses must be punished, however $3M seems a lot. That fine could destroy a business and send home a lot of people, probably none of which have any responsibility on the matter. Did the FCC at least give HobbyKing the chance to withdraw those products?

The FCC doesn't hand out big fines to companies that go "oops, my bad, heres how I am fixing it" they hand out big fines to companies that refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem and refuse to correct it. HobbyKing refused to acknowledge the issue, the FCC's jurisdiction, or make any attempt to resolve this issue, so they get a big fine.

The FCC probably doesn't expect this fine to be paid, instead its part of an effort to block the importation of this stuff into the US.

Post reply on HN