America's crackdown on open-source Wi-Fi router firmware – THE TRUTH America's broadband watchdog is suffering a backlash over plans to control software updates to Wi-Fi routers, smartphones, and even laptops. In a proposed update [PDF] to the regulator's rules over radiofrequency equipment, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would oblige manufacturers to "specify which parties will be …
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" Following its line of thinking even further, the FCC recognizes that devices not made in the United States would be outside its influence, and so proposes a ban on any devices that don't meet its requirements (or don't have a named company within the US that is responsible for compliance). "
Seems a bit protectionist.
Think Samsung and Huawei's lawyers might have something to say about this.
I can go to RS or Farnell (is Radio Shack still going in the States?) and assemble the parts to build a radio transmitter to generate all sorts of frequencies and powers. Should I therefore be disbarred from buying components?
There is a control - if I start spraying EM where I shouldn't I'm subject to criminal proceedings in the same way as if I spray paint a set of traffic lights with an aerosol.
Legislation should encourage people not to indulge in anti-social acts. Trying to have it prevent people from having the capability so to do ends in bureaucratic meltdown at best or a police state at worst.
With no real idea of how this looks like in the field I wonder if this is a real issue or a case of this might possibly be bad in the future. I would guess that if we do some guestimates number of wifi things that run a non vendor firmware is probably somewhere in the order of 1%, then we look at that one percent and ask ourselves what kind of non standard firmware are they running? 95% is probably running a well known drop in replacement that is unlikely to cause problems. with the remaining 5 percent running whatever hacked firmware there is left, say half of those do stuff to the radio part that put them out of spec.
The gives us 0,025% of the kit spewing out stuff it should not do. this is of course a very rough estimate but if anything I feel it's probably on the high side. Now of the 0,025% of kit doing bad things how many of them will actually cause problems? Most of them will probably be quite unlikely to cause issues to anyone but the person running the dodgy firmware.
I strongly believe that this number is a lot smaller then that caused by dodgy vendor firmware that never gets updated.
"[A] deeply held philosophical view among many that there should always be the ability to modify computing equipment that you buy"
Parn me, but when did a deeply held philosophical view among many geeks (certainly not among many of the general electronics-purchasing populace, much less the entire electorate by any stretch of the imagination) become a concern for a federal agency charged with protecting public access to the airwaves? I'm looking for case law or FCC decisions.
The convenience and ability to add new features of some RF-emitting designs (and c'mon, folks, you know that even receivers emit some, if only at intermediate frequencies; that's what the standards are for) are good counterarguments to this sort of regulation, but that's a very different argument to/from one based on the geek philosophy.
One of the fundamental laws about regulators is that they should at least have some idea about the technologies that they're regulating. Whoever proposed this was basically clueless, they have no idea about what's going on in an access point.
The FCC would be better served by freeing up some more spectrum for the myriad users of radio devices. Both 2.4 and 5.2GHz aren't particularly good slices of the spectrum to start with - that's why they've been free to unlicensed users -- but as the technology has improved to make them usable the bands -- particularly 2.4GHz -- has got more crowded. The resulting data loss can be anything from a glitch in a movie to a crashed model aircraft. Marketing types have responded by upping power and spreading modulation over even more of the band but this isn't a solution. The FCC's proposals are trying to regulate the unregulatable -- what we need is more of *our* spectrum, and not just some minuscule slice at some near-light frequency which is offered because nobody will buy it.
Until the FCC start going after motorbikes, because they are well known for extremely high levels of EMI due to the unshielded spark gap transmitters aka spark plugs.
I still say that a solution to a lot of problems would be to abolish the FCC and let the market decide which bands to use and protect, result: win all round.
Same with the FDA, aka Medical Mafia (another topic entirely)
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