[Cialug] FCC to Make DD-WRT on 5GHz Wireless Routers Illegal?

[jim kraai]

Maybe the companies sees what the auto and heavy equipment industries are
doing and recognized a chance to turn a one-time router purchase into a
long-term router subscription and asked people in the FCC to create these
rules for that purpose.


On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Matt <matt at itwannabe.com> wrote:

> Of course the FCC isn't TRYING to ban DD-WRT, OpenWRT, or other open
> source firmwares.  They just don't understand that it is a trillion times
> easier for a company to sign the whole firmware with a 4096-bit private key
> than it is to separate the chunk of code that runs the radios and only sign
> it.  It's also cheaper for the company to utilize SDRs than it is to
> develop and ASIC with the functionality of the radios baked in, and even if
> it wasn't that would prevent the company from ever upgrading the radios
> should a bug of some sort be found after production began.
>
> What will end up happening is the FCC will put out some
> poorly/loosely-worded regulation that the industry will panic about, and
> everything from the router firmware all the way down to the flashing of the
> wifi activity LED will be buried under ninety tons of DRM/encryption.
> Everyone who wants a guest network or any other neat feature from their
> next router will end up having to either buy a $350 top of the line router,
> get a new/used/refurbished enterprise (Cisco, anyone?) router, or build a
> custom router using an old PC and a WiFi card just to get that one feature
> they need.  All this while everyone else ends up having to go back to their
> crappy original firmware with a terrible feature set, clunky web interface,
> and awful network monitoring capabilities (if any at all) when they decide
> to upgrade.
>
> -- Matt (N0BOX)
>
>
> On 9/3/2015 11:21 PM, Scott Yates wrote:
>
>> Not so much maybe:
>>
>> https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20150831/07164532118/no-fcc-is-not-intentionally-trying-to-kill-third-party-wi-fi-router-firmware.shtml
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 10:19 PM, jim kraai <jimgkraai at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> What?
>>>
>>> http://hackaday.com/2015/09/02/save-wifi-act-now-to-save-wifi-from-the-fcc/
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