The rumormongers at ThinkSecret are reporting that Apple’s next rev of its Airport hardware will support 802.11g, a wireless standard that runs at 54Mbs over 2.4GHz (the same frequency as 802.11b, or “WiFi,” the frontrunning, 10Mbs wireless standard). 802.11a is a more mature standard, but it runs at a different frequency, 5GHz, which means that in order for hardware to be compatible with both the popular-but-slow 802.11b and the faster 802.11a, it would be necessary to include two different radios, one tuned to 2.4GHz and the other to 5GHz.
Software-defined radio, like the GNU Radio project, would make these considerations obsolete. Software-defined radio “tunes” and demodulates radio signals with software, using off-the-shelf, low-cost computer parts. A functional, high-frequency SDR will turn your PC into an 802.11* card, a cellphone, an FM/AM/digital TV/analog TV receiver, and every other radio you can think of, all at the same time. Hell, it will tune every single radio and TV station simultaneously.
But there’s a catch. The Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) has drafted a would-be mandatory digital TV standard for “protecting” Hollywood movies from being captured and rebroadcast over the Internet. One of the many rotten characteristics of this proposal is that is requires every digital TV device to be “tamper resistant,” so that “end users” (i.e., me and you) can’t modify our lawfully acquired property to circumvent the copy-prevention that keeps us from using it to the fullest.
But GNU Radio is Free Software — aka open source — and it is designed to be modified by end-users. Free Software projects improve when end-users modify the code to extend its functionality and patch its bugs. And so the BPDG would make GNU Radio illegal.
The worst part of it is, no computer or IT company has come out in public opposition to the BPDG mandate. As Louisiana’s Representative Billy Tauzin prepares to enact the BPDG mandate into law, he’s able to proceed with ease because none of the IT giants — Apple, MSFT, IBM, Intel, HP, Gateway — have come forward. Yet.
A lot of IT employees and execs read this blog. If you’re a decision-maker at a major IT company that believes that outlawing open source is bad for your business, contact me. If you beleive that turning the design-specs of general-purpose computers over to Hollywood (another piece of the BPDG proposal) would be bad for your business, contact me. We need one — just one — major IT company to speak up for its own interests in public, and we can defeat the BPDG.
But we can’t do it alone.