In fact, if you add the price of servers, hosting, booth and travel expenses, and deduct my Google revenue and donations, APRS has probably cost me somewhere close to $100k, but that is spread out over 25 years, so not a completely outrageous hobby. But please do not present it in a way that implies there is any security or authentication on the APRS IS.Īs to charging, from my first APRS creation, javAPRS, my stuff has been free. If you choose to automatically generate the code to your paid users, great. SOmetime, if someone creates an APRS IS that is authenticated (people have been talking about various kinds of certificate systes since 2001) then by all means support it. I am opposed to anything that creates the impression there is. Importantly, in all the time since, there has been no hints of problems, no FCC investigation or NALs. Since that date, there has been absolutely no authentication on the APRS IS. For a while the APRS IS was small enough that I could actually watch and be sure there was no monkey business, but when it took off in the early 2000s I published the algorithm on the SIG. At that point there was no vestage of use to the 17 bit code. Initially Dale released the algorithm code as a pre-compiled module, but he soon was bitten by the purist bug, and decided to release the source code. Then Dale Heatherington created aprsd, and that was open source. ![]() Initially there were a handful of APRS clients, and they were all pay to play, and once you paid their code generated the APRS validation code, the user never saw it or even knew it existed. And in the days before google, that actually worked. To be authenticated on a NOS system you answered a question: "What is the standard offset in kHz for 2 meter repeaters?" Enter 600, and you had unfettered access to the system. The prior art which existed was NOS, the TCP over RF system that never became more than a fringe, but it was the only prior internet to ham system. Even in 1998 a 17 bit password was not secure. It was intended solely to meet FCC requirements for message forwarding, which required only that the user be a ham.įorgive a bit of a history lesson. It was never intended to be any kind of authentication system. I was the guy that created the APRS IS validation algorithm (because I created the APRS IS). ![]() Ultimately, I hope to use the license itself (which is actually an X.509 certificate) to securely connect to APRS-IS, but part of that process is positively identifying hams and establishing a level of trust. Once the license is installed, the passcode is automatically generated. Traditionally, you have to contact the software author to get a passcode. For example, you may notice that there is no place to enter in your passcode to connect to APRS-IS. ![]() > Part of the reason for the licensing process is so that I can ensure that people are real hams. On Feb 14, 2021, at 8:17 PM, Weston Bustraan wrote:
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