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

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

#81

Post by Karunamon »

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.

Not the best way to balance all interests - then you get into a wonderful situation like we have in the mobile market where there's a closed source, proprietary, unauditable (and therefore potentially hostile) blob running in the radio that can do evil things no matter what the rest of the software is doing.

Personally I like the way that we handle people who point lasers at aircraft: find them, throw the book at them pour encourager les autres, and meanwhile don't try to ban f*cking laser pointers.

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

#82

Post by AceJohnny2 »

yellowapple wrote: post #70
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't aware, thanks for the clarification!

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

#83

Post by kw71 »

mindslight wrote: post #36
ansible wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the low brow option would be an old laptop, but that's not going to suffice for someone who wants to keep up with wireless protocols Many laptops have mini-PCIe slots for the WLAN, so you could buy a new card and stick it in. Note that if you want to run 5GHz and the laptop didn't previously support it, you might need new antennas too. The other caveat is that with some laptops the BIOS will allow only…

> some laptops the BIOS will allow only a particular WLAN card to be used Yeah, that's what I was referring to. The FUD of "unapproved changes" invalidating the FCC's approval for the antenna system leads the manufactures to create those restrictions. Since the end user making a modification well after the sale has nothing to do with the manufacturer, I call it FUD. (Of course the user isn't selling their modified de…

Manufacturers like HP and Lenovo don't only have the FCC to worry about upsetting. They have to worry about regulators in every other country, too. So they want to make sure their type approvals can't be breached.

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

#84

Post by pdabbadabba »

Alupis wrote: post #79
pdabbadabba wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The answer is pretty simple: we are desperately in need for more spectrum (at least in urban areas), licensed and unlicensed, for wireless internet traffic. And there really are no unused bands that can simply be reallocated for this purpose without dealing with the users already in the band.

Although airport RADARs sound like a poor choice of a service to share spectrum with, they have the benefit of being stationary, not very numerous, and typically located far from the urban cores where the spectrum is needed most.

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

#85

Post by aianus »

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.

> Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety?

Yes, it's more important that 299m Americans who don't live beside an airport be able to use that spectrum than some small number of passengers per year that may or may not die in a possible crash that might be caused by wifi interference.

There are so many lower-hanging fruit for safety that this is a non-issue.

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

#86

Post by CamperBob2 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #61
CamperBob2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decis…

I haven't looked into it in depth, but AFAIK weather radar works at X band, doesn't it? And it doesn't detect air movement, but water droplets, correct?

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

#87

Post by Gibbon1 »

wtallis wrote: post #11
lelandbatey wrote: post #8

Alright, after searching on this a little bit more, it seems that the FCC is not prohibiting the installation of software like OpenWRT or DD-WRT, but are instead mandating that there is software for the radios only that ensures they operate in the manner they are certified for. There is much more information in the HN comments from a previous time where this was discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959088

Given appropriately designed radio hardware, this would be a non-issue. But given the radios that are on the market right now, this could be a very bad thing in the short term for the most open products that are the only affordable platforms for further R&D of Linux-based wireless router software. Anything that would take ath9k hardware off the market before an equally-open successor is available would be more damagi…

I mess with radio's at work. The there are two issues.

Often for testing one wants to check the radio operation outside the normal band or modes of operation. In my case, sweeping the radio across a really wide and band noting where the pll fails to lock. I'm going to really twitchy if I can test the pll at frequencies outside the band. Doing things like, turn off spreading and checking carrier and tx power. I'm sure more complicated radio's than I use have similar.

The second is what is legal varies depending on where the product is sold and used. So so a mode that's legal in one country is verboten in another.

In general though, I'd rather hate for the FCC to try and force manufacturers to lock people out. Because likely it won't work well and there is a definite cost to implementing secure boot. But then again the FCC is historically extremely hostile to the idea of ordinary people mucking with wireless. So this doesn't surprise me at all.

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

#88

Post by tzs »

aianus wrote: post #85
cpncrunch wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety? Yes, it's more important that 299m Americans who don't live beside an airport be able to use that spectrum than some small number of passengers per year that may or may not die in a possible crash that might be caused by wifi interference. There are so many lower-hanging fruit for safety that this is a non-issue.

The 299m Americans who don't live near an airport will be able to continue using that spectrum after this goes into affect.

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

#89

Post by trynumber9 »

yellowapple wrote: post #68
wlesieutre wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wer…

> hyperthreaded single-core processors

I don't think Intel has marketed a single core processor since the Core 2 era. You may want to look at Windows laptops again: it's now possible to buy a 1920x1080 13.3", 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD for $600 without any bloatware. It does have a weak dual-core hyperthreaded processor, but this allows it to omit fans.

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

#90

Post by wmf »

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…

consumers have been taught that routing, NAT, etc isn't done by a PC or server, but MUST be relegated to an appliance.

Because that's far more reliable. People don't want their whole home's Internet to go down every time they reboot their computer (and buying an extra computer to do routing is a big waste of money/complexity). Not to mention households that only have laptops.

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