How software-defined radio could revolutionize wireless

The Phi hopes to do for radio what Apple I did for computing—spark innovation.

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[Voix des Airs]

What happens when people decide to intentionally be malicious?

It's hard to say for sure, but I think there's a very good chance that will not actually end up being a huge deal, at least once society adjusts. The key factor is that, of the entire range of technology crimes, or even crimes in general, it's hard to think of many where a person or item announces the problem more clearly. "Maliciousness" and "incompetence" appear to be similar here: someone sets up a device that, either by intention or just simple misconfiguration, ends up being a bad EM citizen and pumps out too much power too randomly, thus acting like a jammer and mucking things up for others. However, by definition anything operating with that kind of power is dead easy to find by anyone at all. The exact same physics that cause it to mess with other network equipment also means it's a big fat "Here I Am" sign.

The problem is that a malicious actor need not operate for very long to cause damage and can do so from a mobile platform. And aside from actual criminal types, there are also just a lot of immature idiots too (think of all the laser pointer pointed at landing plane incidents). Just Imagine all the 4chan-type geeks capable of causing real damage just for the lulz.

I think what many proponents envision as the future/solution is that most communications will be some form of spread modulation that involves something like key exchange to define the modeling functions/scheme. In this circumstance impersonation is difficult-to-impossible (due to the keys or whatever) and jamming will also be very hard as it is generally quite difficult to jam most spread schemes. I think the hope is that everything will just sort-of dynamically negotiate for somewhere spectrum-wise to operate and everything will just be able to step all over everything else (many spread systems work like that - see for example CDMA) and the system will still work fine. Whether an RF world like this will ever come to pass or is just a futurists' pipe dream I don' know.