One case that does seem to have the potential to be precedent setting in the US seems to be Air Canada's litigation against Seats.aero, who is also continuing to scrape Air Canada's award inventory data despite Air Canada loginwalling for award search a year after it filed this lawsuit. [1][2]
>Well, federal court so national precedent against creating accounts to scrape registration only content.
I'm not familiar with US Civil Law. Is a precedent established when a consent agreement/settlement is put into place in the US, as is the case in this article?
You're right that most amateur radio regulations are self-policed by other amateur radio operators, and true enforcement is probably rarer than folks like to imagine.
But depending on the environment (and noting that this project is specifically targeted towards communities seeking last-resort communication), there's definitely still risk, even if there isn't a spectrum authority with any real policing powers.
For example (and I say this speculatively), if you're broadcasting encrypted radio traffic in a conflict zone, it could be hard to differentiate between civilian traffic and military traffic happening on civilian bands, so you might be wrongly targeted by a drone strike.
If you already have a target on your back, radio laws can still be arbitrarily applied upon oneself, as in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was once detained on the pretense of illegally importing handheld radios. [1]
My initial thought is that this is a cool way to try and get more resilient communications technology in the hands of those who need it most in the Global South, and it's awesome it was successfully used for a Pan Pan.
This reminds me of WinLink (an analogue to email on amateur radio), which I've heard is used by some Mariners. [1]
I'm aware that HERMES is essentially a SDR bundle/communication terminal (for a lack of a better term for a Raspberry Pi, a screen and an SDR), so it's not really re-discovering a well known amateur radio concept, but the hardware setup sounds a bit brittle on first glance, for what is essentially an emergency/critical communication application.
I set this up a few months ago based on asciimoo's comments on HN, and barely used it at first, but I realized not too long ago that it could be a pretty useful research tool for one of my hobbies (award travel), that revolves around being in the know around various concepts and quirks.
I scraped and imported posts from the blogs I regularly reference for award travel, then hooked it up to OpenCode/Codex as an MCP server and used that corpus for research on those topics. So I can ask things like "has anyone ever mentioned running into this problem before?" [1]
If you have a hobby or working situation that requires you to regularly reference a core set of websites or reference materials, Hister provides almost all the tools out of the box to start a search engine against it. The default datasets they promote include the Python Stlib, MDN and RFC corpus, as an example. [2]
Thank you so much for building this! It's a really awesome piece of work and I'm grateful for your work. I'd love to sponsor you on Github in the near future.
The only thing that I think would be interesting to see is native support for crawling via a sitemap.xml instead of recursively. I worked around this by implementing a basic scraper that fetched pages exclusively from the sitemap.xml to add into Hister.
I think you're already aware of this, but I also experienced some data loss during the import because I was running a concurrent reindex. I clocked it pretty quickly so I didn't think too much of it. [1]
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.838...
[2]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67896748/air-canada-v-l...
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