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OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

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Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#61

Post by AnimalMuppet »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #55
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because one case can (potentially) cause the radar to miss a wind-shear threat, which is precisely what the radar is there to detect. Missing that can cause a plane crash and kill anywhere from one to a few hundred people. Given that level of potential downside (even if things would have to happen exactly wrong for it to occur), I'm not sure that "we fine them $25K and they stop" is the right trade-off. I'm not sure…

This is just a variation on the old "Turn off your Game Boys before takeoff, or the plane might crash" schtick. The proper way to fix that issue, if there ever was one, was to mandate the implementation of avionics that can't be jammed by a Part 15 device. Instead, look what happened... we got a decade of silly, groundless rules that had no useful effect and were eventually scrapped. Now it looks like it's the WiFi i…

> Gee, maybe putting weather radar right next to an unlicensed ISM band wasn't such a great idea. Maybe they're the ones who should move.

Doesn't work that way. They're trying to detect air movement. That's hard; it's not possible at just random frequencies. You can't (effectively) move the radars without changing physics. They're at the frequency they're at for a reason, not just because of random bureaucratic decisions.

(Of course, it's not that simple. Of course you can move them - at some loss of effectiveness. How much, to move them how far? I can't answer that.)

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#62

Post by cpncrunch »

Karunamon wrote: post #60
cpncrunch wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite the same as the gameboy. There have never been any instances of electronics interfering with avionics, but there have been quite a few instances of wifi interfering with weather radar. Also the weather radar was there first, and the issues were known right from the start.

If by "quite a few", you mean "20" - which is insignificant compared to the ~80K flights happening in this country every year.

20 that have been noticed and charged. One is too many. How would you like to end up flying through a thunderstorm or a microburst? Most of the cases happened in Puerto Rico, where they get thunderstorms almost every day at certain times of year. It just takes one plane to fly through a thunderstorm to give everyone a very bad day.

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#63

Post by quotemstr »

cpncrunch wrote: post #62
Karunamon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "quite a few", you mean "20" - which is insignificant compared to the ~80K flights happening in this country every year.

20 that have been noticed and charged . One is too many. How would you like to end up flying through a thunderstorm or a microburst? Most of the cases happened in Puerto Rico, where they get thunderstorms almost every day at certain times of year. It just takes one plane to fly through a thunderstorm to give everyone a very bad day.

Kill all humans. That's a surefire way to prevent any more violations. After all, "one is too many". Your comments indicate that you're not even trying to balance different public interest concerns.

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#64

Post by wyager »

cpncrunch wrote: post #54
madez wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasonable answer to that is to regulate wifi frequencies world wide and modify weather radars if necessary. That would solve the interference problem while keeping the firmware open. Freedom is better.

As I understand it, this was all known when 5Ghz wifi was introduced, so it was a trade-off (see the 2013 NTIA report for details). I don't think it makes sense for them to move all existing services in the 5Ghz band to a completely new band (which might not work anyway, due to the technical requirements of doppler windshear radar). It probably also wouldn't make sense to limit wifi to a small range of the 5Ghz band.…

Having government-locked software of any sort is not freedom.

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#65

Post by jMyles »

cpncrunch wrote: post #31
jMyles wrote: post #24

This appears to me to be a clear-cut example of prior restraint, if common sense standards of free speech are to be applied to source code.

I'm not sure that is a valid analogy. They're not trying to prevent "free speech", just stop idiots who don't know what they're doing from interfering with aircraft weather radar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10137739 edit please read the background before downvoting, and you'll see what I mean. Also, there is no loss of freedom here. As long as your radio software is separate from the router software, there…

I certainly didn't downvote you.

I do, however, disagree.

In this particular case, it seems that the method employed to "stop idiots who don't know what they're doing from interfering with aircraft weather radar" is to infringe on everyone's right both to run software without the government assessing its content and to broadcast signals regardless of their content.

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#66

Post by wyager »

cpncrunch wrote: post #32
wyager wrote: post #10

A government-mandated locked-down radio firmware isn't much better than a government-mandated locked-down main firmware. The FCC should punish crimes, not impose prior restrictions on innocent people.

The reason they're doing this is because a lot of crimes have been committed -- resulting in interference with weather radar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10137739

There have also been a lot of crimes committed over the internet. We'd better lock it down.

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#67

Post by stephengillie »

mindslight wrote: post #12

Better off just building your own router. The high brow option is an embedded motherboard and minipcie wifi card. If the hardware is powerful enough to MASQ gigabit, it won't be obsolete for a decade. And you can upgrade wireless standards with a new card. The only reason there's such an upgrade cycle for consumer routers is that they're built shoddily and with the slowest CPU possible. And as much as I appreciate sp…

> The only reason there's such an upgrade cycle for consumer routers is that they're built shoddily and with the slowest CPU possible.

A lot of this is that consumers have been taught that routing, NAT, etc isn't done by a general purpose computing device like a PC or server, but that those tasks MUST be relegated to an appliance.

But compute is compute, and antennas are antennas. And the word "appliance" has long held a secret meaning of "a Linux server on your Windows (or local area) network."

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#68

Post by yellowapple »

wlesieutre wrote: post #47
mindslight wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their firmware is the feature they're selling you. The hardware is generic and without their wonderful firmware, they'd be competing solely on price. This is what the skinjobs think, at least. BTW, openvpn performance sucks eggs on the processors used in consumer routers.

Feels like the same problem that a lot of Android handsets have had. "Look! We added value by making the product worse!"

And the same problem that Windows PCs have had for two decades now. The hardware is effectively equivalent; it's now a matter of trying to "add" value with shitware.

This is especially true of Windows laptops nowadays; you're pretty much relegated to 1366x768 screens, shitty dual-core or hyperthreaded single-core processors, maybe 4GB of RAM, and Intel graphics at best. Anything better is still at the prices they were 5 years ago. You'd think that old technology would get cheaper as time goes on, but it seems like the only innovation these OEMs are going for is "how do we make customers pay for progressively shittier hardware and software?".

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#69

Post by narrowrail »

stephengillie wrote: post #67
mindslight wrote: post #12

Better off just building your own router. The high brow option is an embedded motherboard and minipcie wifi card. If the hardware is powerful enough to MASQ gigabit, it won't be obsolete for a decade. And you can upgrade wireless standards with a new card. The only reason there's such an upgrade cycle for consumer routers is that they're built shoddily and with the slowest CPU possible. And as much as I appreciate sp…

> The only reason there's such an upgrade cycle for consumer routers is that they're built shoddily and with the slowest CPU possible. A lot of this is that consumers have been taught that routing, NAT, etc isn't done by a general purpose computing device like a PC or server, but that those tasks MUST be relegated to an appliance. But compute is compute, and antennas are antennas. And the word "appliance" has long he…

My router runs dd-wrt and cost me 50$. It uses iptables for a firewall and only burns 12W max. That's hard to beat going the custom route.

Re: OpenWRT vs. FCC – Forced Firmware Lockdown? [video]

#70

Post by yellowapple »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #40
atmosx wrote: post #18

I recently bought an ADSL modem/router TP-Link 8970 (or something). The thing is awesome, except for that fact that it doesn't support OpenVPN... Supports PPTP or IPSec. Now if only, I could install OpenWRT on it. Since OpenWRT makes ROUNDS around every custom software I've seen on low-end ADSL modem/routers makes me wonder why on earth companies don't just ship OpenWRT and get over with it?

Many Buffalo routers ship with DD-WRT, a fork of OpenWRT: http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/dd-wrt-1

It wasn't a fork of OpenWRT per se. Rather, OpenWRT and DD-WRT are siblings, both having descended from the stock firmware on the Linksys WRT54G. They share some code nowadays, but that's a convergence rather than a divergence.
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