VARA’s developer released a new version 4.9.1 which had a logic bomb that completely breaks compatibility with all prior versions starting on 1 Jan 2027. Coincidentally this was released shortly after Xara (an open source AI-assisted reimplementation of VARA that was fully compatible with VARA over the air) was published. It was the work of a few minutes with an LLM to extract the new tables and constants from the new binary, so he failed to prevent interoperability with open source implementations but succeeded in doing significant damage to interoperability in the community as hams don’t always update components like this in a timely fashion. Poor judgement at best and bad faith at worst.
It’s definitely time for the amateur radio and emcomm communities to move on.
I have a fork of the now-pulled Xara repo. As of this writing it hasn’t been taken down yet but several other forks were so time will tell: https://github.com/anelson/xara
Mercury is promising. There’s also Data2G and I and others are working on our own modem projects as well. It’s an exciting time to be working with digital modes on amateur radio.
> VARA’s developer released a new version 4.9.1 which had a logic bomb that completely breaks compatibility with all prior versions starting on 1 Jan 2027.
Is there more coverage? That sounds downright evil.
VARA’s developer released a new version 4.9.1 which had a logic bomb that completely breaks compatibility with all prior versions starting on 1 Jan 2027. Coincidentally this was released shortly after Xara (an open source AI-assisted reimplementation of VARA that was fully compatible with VARA over the air) was published. It was the work of a few minutes with an LLM to extract the new tables and constants from the new binary, so he failed to prevent interoperability with open source implementations but succeeded in doing significant damage to interoperability in the community as hams don’t always update components like this in a timely fashion. Poor judgement at best and bad faith at worst.
It’s definitely time for the amateur radio and emcomm communities to move on.
I have a fork of the now-pulled Xara repo. As of this writing it hasn’t been taken down yet but several other forks were so time will tell: https://github.com/anelson/xara
Mercury is promising. There’s also Data2G and I and others are working on our own modem projects as well. It’s an exciting time to be working with digital modes on amateur radio.
Is there more coverage? That sounds downright evil.