Lately I’ve been losing myself in thought a bit as I usually do when faced with new situations or learn something specific about the world, generally thinking on what would the rational approach be that is the least aggressive/most voluntary, and so I’ve been pondering these two questions for a while now, unsure of what the general ancap consensus would be for them.

Hijacking of signals

Nowadays most TV, communications, and obviously the internet, tends to work on digital signals, while most radios still work on analog signals. Regardless, hijacking both types of signal are possible and rather normal; think the Max Headroom incident, when an analog TV signal was hijacked, for instance, or think the dozens upon dozens of pirate radio stations broadcasting on reserved wavebands.

This brings up a question: can wavebands, connection lines, and fundamentally signals be owned? When you broadcast on your radio, or send an HTTP request through the internet, you’re sending non-tangible signals which cannot be realistically controlled and which, even if they have one particular destination, can be intercepted by third parties. However, anyone can broadcast a radio program, or an analog TV signal, or send an HTTP request, and for analog signals, this can obviously cause huge conflicts since two people can use the same signal in the same geographical area, thus leading to the strongest signal winning over the weakest one, which can lead to someone bullying competition off the broadcasting market through sheer force, monopolizing signals only because they have the better equipment.

Similarly, for digital signals, someone with the know-how can, particularly if said signals are sent through unencrypted protocols (unencrypted VoIP, HTTP, etc.), intercept them and get access to sensitive information, such as a credit card number or information that can lead to stock/currency market manipulation.

The final question ends up being: is the interception of an analog or digital signal a violation of the NAP? or do they not count as private/personal property?

Noisy neighbors

I live on a street that connects the two most visited parts of my city, so in this area there are lots of nightclubs, bars and other establishments which usually attract large crowds and put on loud music until dawn on weekends. This, obviously, is an annoyance for those who live here, since it makes it harder to concentrate or sleep. Now, being noisy is not a violation of the NAP, since no harm is being dealt to anyone or their property (at least if the decibels are not excessive), however, if you’ve got a neighbor who puts on loud music every single day for hours while you’re trying to sleep or work, this can really become detrimental to your wellbeing and, by extension, your finances and livelihood.

One could argue that there are practical solutions: ask the noisy neighbor(s) to stop, buy noise insulation materials for your home, wear earplugs, or maybe just boycott your neighbor along others who are also bothered by it. Obviously, in modern society, you’d usually just file a complaint to the police, and they’d probably get fined, but this is technically an attack on a person’s liberties nevertheless. While the practical solutions I mentioned could work, being practical doesn’t make them convenient, after all, your neighbor’s might not stop, boycotting is unlikely to help (after all, if they run a nightclub, people go there because of the loud music and atmosphere, not in spite of it), and other solutions require you to spend money that you may or may not have, to fix a problem that you did not cause.

So, on this topic, the question is: what’s the most coherent way to deal with such an annoyance which abides to the NAP?

Those are the two questions I had. I’d love to hear this get debated.