Re: [Trisquel-users] The FCC is asking for comments on a proposal to to lock down computing devices (routers, PCs, phones)

[chris]

The technical and legal folks who scrutinized this basically said the rules  
were not totally clear. For instance what counts as an SDR? Just about  
everything now is SDR. The reality is this stuff is getting integrated such  
that you'd have to lock down everything on many of the devices shipping  
today. There are OS controlled components in these SDR or partial SDR chips.  
It appears what will eventually happen (maybe with future rules) is they'll  
require manufacturers to adopt 'hardware' signature checking tech from Intel.  
Intel's apparently designed there stuff to work on non-x86 third party  
platforms and what would happen is they'd license that out. This would ensure  
that users couldn't just get $100 worth of parts and bypass the signature  
checking by flashing the chip directly. Right now it sounds like  
manufacturers may be able to simply add signature checking to the firmware so  
that its munch more difficult to flash third party firmware (and would be  
illegal).