First, thank you for posting this. I am not criticizing anyone on this list but this article has a certain familiar smell to it. I call stories like this and others Chicken Little stories. Remember Chicken Little who got bonked on the noggin with a falling nut or acorn and ran through the streets screaming that the sky is falling. Remember the modem tax scare of years ago and other similar conspiracy stories that basically said that the party is over and now terrible things are about to happen. This story sounds like a Chicken Little event for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the article only says that the FCC is considering a proposal to lock down all the stuff we use to communicate with. Probably some yo-yo in an expensive suit working for a large business interest had a team of lawyers write up a proposal and submit it to the FCC. When this happens and the submission passes the physical rules such as number of copies and the physical format of the document, it has to be heard/read even if it is a stupid idea. That's how America works. If you run a huge company or work for 1 and have deep pockets, they listen to you longer than they might listen to the average Joe or Jane but eventually, the FCC must put the proposal out for public comment. They are looking for thoughtful discussion so emails in all caps with half the words misspelled and maybe a period at the end of the last sentence are not given much weight. So what is a SDR? It's a computer program that runs on a DSP or Digital Signal Processor. A digital signal processor is similar to the CPU's in your computer except it is usually built for speed so that it can process video, audio and images as fast as possible. The CPU in your computer could be a SDR if you fed it the right program. It might not run as fast as a dedicated DSP chip set, but it could do all the math and spit out numbers just like the dedicated DSP's do, just not as efficiently. What will probably happen is that after a lot of discussion, the FCC may decide to do nothing because there is no way to enforce any kind of lock-down without interfering with legitimate design interests. I doubt that GNU Linux or any other operating system will be crippled simply because the howl and cries of "foul!" would be ever present. There have been previous odious proposals before the FCC or other agencies that were backed by business interests with lots of dough and still fell flat. Several years ago, the recording industry spent lots of money trying to foist some technology on to us that would thwart copying of audio. It was sophisticated for it's day and placed notches in the audio spectrum at around 4 KHZ. A copyright-compliant audio recorder would have detected these notches and refused to record or maybe would have produced a mangled recording that was unusable. There were double-blind scientific tests in which subjects listened to music that sometimes had been doctored with the copy-prevention technology and other times was okay and had not been de-horned, so to speak. The whole plan was scrapped when the test subjects could hear an audible reduction in sound quality on the doctored recordings. I doubt that much bad is going to happen here but you never know. Again, thanks for posting the article and links. Just remember to make your comments intelligent and not a rant. They really can't do much with a rant unless you have a good idea, anyway. Nobody here is ranting except possibly me, but if you do want to perticipate, be nice and logical. Martin WB5AGZ Ron Canazzi <[log in to unmask]> writes: > Hi Group, > > Here is the link so it works without the equal signs prevalent on this > list. > http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2015/august/fcc_proposes_ban_on_sdr_radios_and_more.htm#.VeN4mJcnqzL > > Here is the text of the full article on it's originating website. > https://libreplanet.org/