Earlier quoted context omitted.
I take the Michael Bolton attitude, why should I leave, he's the one that sucks. There are elections coming up.
are there though?
They are until they aren’t.
FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
401–410 of 452 posts
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#402This is the same thing they did to drones. It's corruption. It doesn't even make sense from an extreme isolationist point of view, because there's no path to create domestic manufacturing. I'm guessing the rest of this looks like drones, too: FCC approval is given only to American companies that bribe members of the administration, and they raise prices through the roof. The routers are still manufactured overseas an…
It's almost as if there's a global push to make Rest of World harder to reach, for everyone.
Between "age verification" - ID - laws being rolled out across many countries, rocketing transport costs, ICE at airports, incredible inflation of RAM prices, and now catastrophic restrictions on routers, none of this is making Rest of World easier to access.
Let's not forget Russia and Iran both clamped down hard on general Internet access, and Israel and some of the Gulf states have set up aggressive restrictions on live reporting.
I think we're heading to a balkanised Internet at the absolute best.
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#403This would be so much less of a pain if decent wifi pcie cards were available.
It's all a bunch of very expensive kind of dodgy Compex cards, used for industrial or prototype purposes. Be prepared to spend $300+ for a single 4x4 MIMO card. And then you want to go dual band right?
Thankfully the MediaTek offerings are somewhat available and much much much cheaper, but reports are that driver quality is just absymal.
Meanwhile the openwrt table of hardware for wifi 6 and wifi 7 is a bare trickle already, and inceasingly not consumer routers but SBC. Thanks for the FCC messing things up brutally already, back in 2015, with requirements to make sure users couldn't possibly do anything out of spec, requiring these systems to be locked down. They almost banned open source outright, but in practice it feels like the requirements are high enough that they practically did. https://toh.openwrt.org/?features=wifi_be https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/tp-li...
Frelling FCC! What dastardly deeds done against civilization! We would be so much more secure & protected, the bar would be so much higher if open source / openwrt was allowed to compete. You messed everything up already!!
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory but the difficulty in practice is that if you were to invest in local manufacturing you'd have to be sure that someone else won't be given a waver via lobbying / corruption and will then be able to completely undercut you. The current US administration lacks the credibility to give such assurances. Given existing models are exempt you're better of just delaying new models while you wait for a new admin.
I don't think it follows that a Democrat administration would reverse this.
I'm not sure the democrats could give such assurances either. If domestic manufacturing is 2x as expensive that's a lot of money that could be spent on campaign donations and still break even.
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
The easiest one I've set up was ClearOS. I was happy enough with OpnSense but when I upgraded a network card I had issues with driver compatibility because of the FreeBSD core. ClearOS being Linux it worked out of the box, and getting ClearOS set up seriously only took me like fifteen minutes. I was shocked. I love my NixOS thing, because I am part of the cult of NixOS, but it's probably something I wouldn't recommen…
Having to debug NixOS offline (that is - without the aid of Gemini CLI) sounds like a special kind of pain.
You get used to it, honestly.
I really don't think that the Nix language is nearly as bad as people say it is once you get used to it, and I've been using NixOS since before ChatGPT was released so I've gotten pretty ok with it. Plus, there are niceties like being able to use variables for things like interface names which makes it pretty nice.
Also, something kind of nice about NixOS is that once you get it working, it kind of stays working. I have my config file backed up to Sourcehut, and I'm relatively confident that the configuration file is an accurate representation of reality.
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#406The FCC is bypassing the public comment period by having the DOD classify this as a national security concern. This is blatant collaboration between agencies to expand their respective authorities into a new amalgamation that stretches far beyond their congressional authorization.
A little rich coming from the administration that supports a strict view of the major questions doctrine. They have no problem kneecapping the EPA. But the communications commission has the right to ban all drones (and not the FAA for example).
I'd say I'm shocked but I am not. Their next order forcing backdoors will be secret.
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Manufacturers have never had to care about security because no Gov agency would ever mandate secure firmware. The problem is that "secure firmware" is a relativistic statement. You ship something with no known bugs and then someone finds one. What you need is not a government mandate for infallibility, it's updates. But then vendors want to stop issuing them after 3 years, meanwhile many consumers will keep using t…
> What you need is not a government mandate for infallibility, it's updates So, we don't need an electrical code to enforce correct wiring. We just need a kind soul driving by our house to notice the company who built our house wired it up wrong. Then that kind person can inform the company of the bad wiring. And if the company agrees it's their wiring at fault, we can wait 3 months for a fix. Then the next month ano…
> So, we don't need an electrical code to enforce correct wiring.
Are you familiar with how the actual electrical code works? It's a racket. The code is quite long and most of the inspectors don't know most of it so only a small subset is ever actually checked, and that only in the places where the person doing the work is actually pulling permits and the local inspector isn't corrupt or lax in areas the local tradespeople have learned that they're lax. Then we purposely limit the supply of licensed electricians so that they're expensive enough that ordinary people can't afford one, so that handyman from Craigslist or whatever, who isn't even allowed to pull permits, is the one who ends up doing the work.
It only basically works because no one has the incentive to purposely burn down your house and then it only happens in the cases where the numerous violations turned out to actually matter, which is rare enough for people to not get too upset about it.
But the thing that makes it a racket is the making the official process expensive on purpose to milk wealthy homeowners and corporations who actually use the official process, which is the same thing that drives common people to someone who charges a price they can afford even knowing that then there no inspection.
> Then that kind person can inform the company of the bad wiring.
The point is rather that when the homeowner discovers that their microwave outlet is heating up, they can fix it themselves or hire an independent professional to do it instead of the company that built the house (which may or may not even still exist) being the only one who can feasibly cause it to not stay like that until the house is on fire.
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#408The FCC maintains a list of equipment and services (Covered List) that have been determined to “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security Recently, malicious state and non-state sponsored cyber attackers have increasingly leveraged the vulnerabilities in small and home office routers produced abroad to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes. Vulnerabilities have nothing to do with…
>Vulnerabilities have nothing to do with country of manufacture.
That depends on how you define "Vulnerability", doesn't it?
For instance, from some standpoints, the absence rather than presence of a backdoor in consumer routers could be considered a "vulnerability", no?
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, we don't need an electrical code to enforce correct wiring. For an analogy to work, its underlying elements should have a relation to the target. Your analogy is not in the same universe. For electrical work, there is a baseline of materials and practices which is known to produce acceptable results if adhered to. For software, there isn't. (Don't tell me about the Space Shuttle. Consumer software doesn't cost…
> Don't tell me about the Space Shuttle The Space Shuttle sure blew up a lot for something with that much process applied.
Not on account of its control software, which is what I was talking about.
Re: FCC updates covered list to include foreign-made consumer routers
#410Does it occurs to someone that in this time of encryption backdoor and such, this is also a good starting point to another mass surveillance system ? Mandate US manufacturers to embed remote access for the use of the government, then as you've made those routers the only ones authorized on the us soil (let's not be foolish about that approval process, it will be a smoke screen) you basically have a backdoor to every…
The U.S. has done that kind of thing before, and that's probably why it's so paranoid about having the same kind of thing done to it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...