On Fri, 10/20/17, Al Kossow via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've noticed since I've gotten into this again that there is a lot of > closed-source thinking It's pretty disturbing when you think about how the amateur radio world developed and that it was given legal status in part to encourage experimentation. Personally, I wish people would wake up to the reality that any proprietary protocol is actually a violation of the prohibition against encrypted traffic. Any protocol that is not published is a shared secret (i.e. a key). The original plaintext cannot be recovered without the secret. That's pretty much the definition of symmetric encryption. Of course, some would claim that a proprietary protocol is not "encoded for the purpose of obscuring the meaning." However, I would argue that such protocols exist for the purpose of obscuring the meaning in such a way that those who have not paid the key ransom (purchase of proprietary equipment, paying licensing fees, etc) are prevented from understanding the traffic. In other words, a proprietary protocol exists precisely to obscure for the purpose of monatary gain. This same reasoning is also one of the reasons that I summarily reject any proprietary file formats, closed source software, etc. BLS wd4awy
