[wsfii-discuss] America's crackdown on open-source Wi-Fi router firmware – THE TRUTH and how to get involved

Sun Sep 6 22:49:45 UTC 2015

On Sun, Sep 06, 2015 at 09:09:55PM +0530, Ramnarayan.K wrote:
> People who are going to break the law for a larger purpose aren't going to
> be put off by a firmware hack but people who have legitimate reason to use
> open source firm (and the customization it offers) are going to watching
> their backs all the time.

Ram,

I agree strongly with what you're saying.

Traditionally, the FCC rules governing Part 15 devices have tried to
prevent casual or inadvertent misuse of the airwaves, not to protect
against persons intending to abuse the airwaves.  This was part of the
argument I made circa 2004, when some 802.11 makers (notably
Atheros) claimed that the software-defined radio (SDR) rules prevented
them from distributing source code and chipset documentation, when in
fact they were not certifying under SDR rules, and the SDR rules were a
net *relaxation* of certification rules designed to help the nascent SDR
industry.

BTW, Atheros came around, eventually.  I think this has a lot to do with
Luis Rodriguez (formerly?) of Qualcomm-Atheros taking a lead on the
issue.

I think writers of open-source software do have a responsibility not
to disseminate crummy drivers and firmware.  (It bugs me to see people
writing magic values to magic device registers.  Maybe there is less of
that going on than there was several years ago.  I always tried to write
transparent and correct drivers.) The 802.11 makers should provide more
documentation, not less, in order to support good practices.

The watchword is innovation: the FCC is concerned with supporting that.
As advocates for rules that are friendly to open source, we should make
sure that we have an impressive set of innovations to point to, always!

It seems (haven't read the docket, yet---sorry!) that the FCC is
concerned that the latest multi-band devices can tune essentially any
frequency, even frequencies far outside any board for which the operator
is licensed, and generate interference there.  The danger is that
systems for communications, early-warning, weather, and navigation could
be disrupted.  This is a legitimate thing to worry about and to protect
against, of course.  But the risk of a solitary tinkerer, even one who
has access to open source code distribution networks, causing mayhem
doesn't even rate compared to the threat posed by aggressive nations or
international criminal organizations who wouldn't blink at the prospect
of reverse-engineering a Wi-Fi device.  The cost of stopping the
solitary tinkerer is the cost to innovation, of course.

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung at pobox.com    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981