[aprssig] A new player

Steve Dimse steve at dimse.com
Mon Mar 10 11:49:43 EDT 2014


> This is unfortunately far easier to suggest than to implement in the
> field. Matti has issued a fix a week ago in
> http://repo.ham.fi/websvn/wsvn/aprx?rev=566 - now it is the time for the
> users of the affected platform to get busy and update.
> 
Yes, he put out an update, but five weeks after notification of the bug during which his program continued to QRM the APRS IS, though not as severely as has happened in the last 24 hours. Also, this release is rather ho-hum, just mentioning the time jump but not why that matters. This should be pushed to users as a critical bug fix. But as I said, in his email to me he did not feel this was a significant issue and the fault was with users putting his program on laptops where he did not feel it belonged, and with me for not filtering the data in my database. He did not feel this caused any problem with the APRS IS because it was robust enough to handle the load.

Certainly getting users to upgrade is not always easy, but if it isn't made clear an upgrade is important it is less likely to be done. 

Personally I don't feel this is right now an issue that justifies blocking all aprx traffic, even if that capability existed. I do think everyone that is trying to shift the responsibility to the APRS IS is wrong. If you write a program you have a responsibility to assure the correct operation of that software. When notified of a bug that is causing problems to other users of a shared system like APRS-IS you need to jump on it, get the fix done quickly, and reach out to users to get them to update ASAP.

Steve K4HG


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