Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnx-software.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 126 posts

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

#71

Post by cpncrunch »

quotemstr wrote: post #63
cpncrunch wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a pilot, so I understand the issue first-hand. The simple way to balance all interests is to separate the radio software from the router software. Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety? This has nothing to do with freedom, but more to do with people/companies being too cheap to separate the radio from the router software.

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

#72

Post by cpncrunch »

wyager wrote: post #64
cpncrunch wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only the radio that has to be locked. Why do you need the freedom to reprogram the radio (not talking about the router)?

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

#73

Post by cpncrunch »

jMyles wrote: post #65
cpncrunch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming that the radio and router are separate and only the radio firmware is locked down, is there any way that the NSA could snoop on the content? Or are you saying you want to have the right to reprogram the radio?

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

#74

Post by quotemstr »

cpncrunch wrote: post #73
jMyles wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming that the radio and router are separate and only the radio firmware is locked down, is there any way that the NSA could snoop on the content? Or are you saying you want to have the right to reprogram the radio?

I'd be happy [1] with locked-down radio firmware if it could talk only to the radio.

One big problem is that coprocessors in embedded systems often have full access to the memory bus, meaning there's no way to stop a trojan in the closed and locked radio firmware from reading and modifying any bit of system memory, which can include your personal data and encryption keys.

[1] Although I'd hope that it'd still be possible to buy or build a general-purpose SDR.

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

#75

Post by thrownaway2424 »

chatmasta wrote: post #22

As a skeptic I have to wonder whether Google lobbied for this prior to their OnHub release. I'm also expecting Apple to announce some sort of router on Sep 9 to go with HomeKit + AppleTV. Both parties would have a vested interest in locking down the open source router ecosystem.

Believing every crackpot conspiracy theory that pops into your mind is actually the opposite of skepticism.

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

#76

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

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…

I hadn't actually put those thoughts together - which is funny considering I've been working a lot with embedded boards lately.

So.... how could you custom-build something akin to say, the Netgear Nighthawk (Netgear R8000)? I'm thinking multiple 802.11ac antennae with all that new multi-user beamforming stuff that's been released lately. Is there open firmware that supports that / do the commodity Linux drivers support controlling and fine-tuning that kind of function?

Added: Interesting.... There's an x86 port of DD-WRT:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/X86

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

#77

Post by cpncrunch »

quotemstr wrote: post #74
cpncrunch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that the radio and router are separate and only the radio firmware is locked down, is there any way that the NSA could snoop on the content? Or are you saying you want to have the right to reprogram the radio?

I'd be happy [1] with locked-down radio firmware if it could talk only to the radio. One big problem is that coprocessors in embedded systems often have full access to the memory bus, meaning there's no way to stop a trojan in the closed and locked radio firmware from reading and modifying any bit of system memory, which can include your personal data and encryption keys. [1] Although I'd hope that it'd still be poss…

I would have thought (correct me if I'm wrong) that it would be pretty straightforward to give the radio unit its own memory, and not give it access to the system memory bus at all. However I don't know if manufacturers will want to go to the trouble of segregating the radio.

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

#78

Post by hueving »

cpncrunch wrote: post #71
quotemstr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a pilot, so I understand the issue first-hand. The simple way to balance all interests is to separate the radio software from the router software. Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety? This has nothing to do with freedom, but more to do with people/companies being too cheap to separate the radio from the router software.

False dichotomy. The pilots like yourself are more of a risk to everyone on the plane than the probability of one of these causing a crash. Was it a WiFi router than made a Malaysian airline fly over an active war zone? Was it a WiFi router that causes the air France pilots to forget how to fly and stall the Airbus into the ocean?

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

#79

Post by Alupis »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #49
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…

> And as much as I appreciate spectrum partitioning, we really need to get the major wifi chipsets completely reverse engineered so we can blow away this ambiguous spectre of "unauthorized" modifications and turn them into something normal. Randos stomping on ch12-15 isn't an actual problem - but that widespread rulebreaking coupled with the unknown of what further mods could do is scary to regulators. Destroy that u…

Curious why we have home devices run on the same band as airport radar systems and what-not.

Seems here the original regulation was the problem, not people modding their home routers.

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

#80

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN