

Anonymous' New Walkie Talkies Use Radio Waves to Access the Internet - neverminder
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/anonymous-new-walkie-talkies-use-radio-waves-to-access-the-internet

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lutusp
> The hacktivist group Anonymous is working on a new communication tool to
> circumvent censorship and set information free, and it’s going low-tech this
> time. The project is called Airchat, and it will use radio waves instead of
> wifi, broadband, or phone lines to communicate data and messages between
> computers. It’s basically pirate radio for ones and zeros.

I wish people who write these things would reveal the history behind the
methods. This technology was pioneered by ham radio operators decades ago,
pre-Internet, using what's now called "packet radio". In fact, I used my own
prototype packet scheme to stay in touch with home while sailing around the
world -- two ham radio transceivers, separated by as much as 10,000 miles of
empty water, exchanging packets.

More here: [http://arachnoid.com/sailbook](http://arachnoid.com/sailbook)

> In its current incarnation, the project uses Fldigi software to communicate
> data—it’s the software commonly used to broadcast amateur radio stations
> from a computer.

Okay, one oblique mention of ham radio.

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jlgaddis
Indeed. Before I clicked over to the article, I had a gut feeling...

The first time I ever connected to "the Internet" was over a packet radio link
from my home, in a very rural area, through a digipeater at a (relatively)
nearby ham radio club and then to the nearest university. I had "borrowed" a
login and was able to telnet into one of their UNIX servers and send/receive
mail, use archie, gopher, etc.

Of course, I don't really miss that 1200 baud extremely high latency
connection but the convers servers were really cool.

