1) The images can quite easily be uploaded in the background. Wartime journalists typically don't need huge images at highest quality settings - you can make your files pretty small (few MB or less), so they are quick to upload.
2) The power requirements for wifi aren't THAT high, but none the less, there's a simple and elegant solution - the user can take additional batteries in their pocket.
3) Jamming every wifi channel on both frequencies over an entire city is a crazy idea. No-one does this.
4) MiTM attacks... uh, what? You envisage a scenario where in the back of that toyota hilux filled with heavily armed young men there's going to be someone on their laptop, sniffing for wifi signals, trying to find out if they might belong to a journalist, somehow intercepting and modifying the images then uploading them to the original destination....? Even if that IS what you mean, there's again a trivial solution - the uploads can take place over TLS.
I'm trying hard to view your post in a positive light, but I'm finding it difficult - can you perhaps expand on your points?
It also seems that we conceptualize war zones in diverse ways. For me, when there are combatants in technicals [1] it's perhaps better not to assume good manners and wifi etiquette are prevalent social behaviors.
TLS or Transport Layer Security [2] is a protocol to secure network communications using encryption. Building encryption into the cameras is what the concerned journalists are asking for.
As an aside, calling someone else's reasoning "silly" can easily be interpreted as uncivil and not in keeping with Hacker News guidelines. I've found Paul Graham's essay How to Disagree provides a useful perspective. [3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
You misunderstand - it's nothing to do with etiquette, it's simple practicality. "Jamming" wifi over a city or town sized area simply isn't a technically feasible thing to do, which is why it doesn't ever happen. To be effective you'd need a device on every other block, more or less (urban environments need very high jamming density, mfr range claims tend to assume no obstructions). The level of organization this would require is simply astronomical, and it's nonsensical to think that somehow a government in the grip of a civil war is going to do this.
> TLS or Transport Layer Security [2] is a protocol to secure network communications using encryption. Building encryption into the cameras is what the concerned journalists are asking for.
Please try to avoid being overly patronizing - I'm perfectly well aware of what TLS is. There is a huge difference, however, between implementing a TLS-encrypted TCP request (e.g. simple file upload over HTTPS), and encrypting files locally. There's more levels of difference than I can reasonably cover in a HN post, however to pick one from the giant list: Locally encrypting files would require the user to enter a password every time they switched the camera on. Which is a usability nightmare. And they can't leave it on the whole time, as they may not get the chance to turn it off when the camera is demanded at gunpoint. I don't think I can stress enough how much professional journalists would not accept constantly having to enter and reenter a password to use their camera.
> As an aside, calling someone else's reasoning "silly" can easily be interpreted as uncivil and not in keeping with Hacker News guidelines. I've found Paul Graham's essay How to Disagree provides a useful perspective. [3]
Interpretations can vary. I apologize if I offended you, however at least by my reading of the essay, it's not covered in the guidelines. Calling an argument silly is not a personal attack, it's an observation that none of the arguments presented made any real sense.
This isn't true: you could use asymmetric crypto and encrypt the photos/video with the journalist's public key, leaving the private key at home. Encrypting to a private key does not required a shared secret. This prevents the journalist from decrypting the photos even if pressed to by authorities, assuming that "home" doesn't include the authorities' jurisdiction.
If you have access to a slow connection once per day or every few days, or a fast connection to return to you have to carry material with you for at least some time, in which you'd want it to be encrypted, and could easily use a secondary device to actually transmit it (phone, laptop). And material that is to large probably still needs walking out. If you are in a "going to visit Snowden" (or staying with any other target in hiding) scenario, you are probably travelling without a connection for their safety, otherwise you are not going to get access.
In remote locations you are limited to sat phones which are expensive, slow and probably monitored, if you even are allowed to possess one. And their security is debatable for all I know.
What I dislike about the suggestion for standard encryption features is that it becomes sort of obvious that there might be encrypted data and how to destroy it. Ways of hiding it are even more important, and obviously can't be "standard". Tricky to solve.
//EDIT: removed uncivil language
That's pretty demeaning. Wartime photographers need quality as much as others.
> Jamming every wifi channel on both frequencies over an entire city is a crazy idea
They do blanket-block the internet though (recently Turkey, again), without which wifi loses a lot of functionality.
> You envisage a scenario where in the back of that toyota hilux
No, no. The scenario is of local state actors sitting in their aircon office, monitoring network traffic in a certain hotspot; if they identify a stream of compromising media, they censor it by corrupting the stream. Yes, TLS fixes that; but if you have that sort of crypto features, you can make sure the images are encrypted on storage media in the first place.
I'm not sure why you find this to be demeaning. The cameras used by journalists (canon 1dx ii/nikon d5) have dramatically lower resolution than cameras used by, for example, landscape photographers. This is for a number of very good reasons, but one of these is because there's no demand for anything else. 20Mp is more than enough - indeed many don't even shoot at this, but opt for smaller images for faster processing and upload.
You don't need huge images for news (print or online) - in both cases the final image is small, and the DPI/resolution is low. The idea that huge image sizes somehow equate to image quality is much of the time a marketing idea - all you need is enough resolution for your output format. If that's a newspaper (online or offline), small JPEGs are fine. If your output format is a gallery image, or a building-sized advert, then yes, you want 50MP+ RAW images - but guess what? They aren't shooting for that.
Yes, maybe heavily compressed 720p would be acceptable for some war journalism, but that's still going to be impossible to live stream reliably from almost anywhere in the world. And unless you're getting something spectacular, no mainstream TV station will want to use your crappy footage.
Also remember that what you're replacing here is the transfer of pre-edited footage, of which there is likely to be a huge amount. You refer to files of "a few MB or less" elsewhere, which suggests you haven't really thought about what's required here.
Edit: I don't mean to suggest this could never work, I mean satellite have been a thing for years. But at this point local storage is still vastly more practical for almost everybody.
Edit2: Also I agree with brudgers that you came across as gratuitously uncivil.
News networks often run cell phone videos sent in by eye witnesses/viewers/etc (or even video via sat phone), so the bar for quality probably isn't that high.
If you get a good angle of the Trump assassination you can record it on whatever device you want and people will want it. If you're recording interviews with civilians while nobody's being bombed or shot at, they'll want reasonably professional looking footage.
On the other hand if the footage is coming from an actual war zone such as Aleppo or the future smoking ruins of Atlanta then news organizations will take whatever they can get. Absent a perfect reliable solution for moving such data around in dreadful conditions everyone is just gonna have to compromise - half a loaf is better than no bread.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of war photo journalism is stills. This may change in the future, but in general video journalism in war is handled very differently, has different operating parameters (for example tends to be conducted further back from the front lines, involves way more people, etc), and doesn't typically use SLRs at all.
> Also remember that what you're replacing here is the transfer of pre-edited footage, of which there is likely to be a huge amount. You refer to files of "a few MB or less" elsewhere, which suggests you haven't really thought about what's required here.
For some reason you appear to be shifting from photo journalism in warzones and other hostile and hazardous situations to videos taken in London... I'm not sure how this is related to the previous posts in the thread, and trying to completely shift the discussion then claiming that I haven't thought about what's required seems somewhat disingenuous at best.
> For some reason you appear to be shifting from photo journalism in warzones and other hostile and hazardous situations to videos taken in London
My point was that the measures you suggest for worst case scenarios do not even make sense in best case scenarios (London being a highly developed first world capital city).
The article is not "about video". The article mentions both, and if you read the original letter[0], you'll find it does too.
> My point was that the measures you suggest for worst case scenarios do not even make sense in best case scenarios (London being a highly developed first world capital city).
Making sense for London is irrelevant. Read the actual letter[0] - it talks about, and only about "...the most dangerous parts of the world", and protecting against "authoritarian governments or criminals". Obviously, if that's not what you're doing, then different solutions might be better.
0: https://freedom.press/news/over-150-filmmakers-and-photojour...
My point about was that video journalism is likely to generate huge quantities of data, which is inconvenient to transfer even in relatively favourable circumstances, let alone adverse ones. Perhaps we can agree that comms infrastructure is going to be no better in most war zones than in London.
In addition, pushing over WiFi requires power to broadcast a radio signal. That power comes at the price of less shooting time. It also broadcasts the photographer's location and is susceptible to jamming.
Even without jamming the images are vulnerable to manipulation via Man in the Middle attacks. Of course the solution is to encrypt the image transmission...and that necessary step is what people close to the problem are asking for.