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 [email protected] Urbana, IL (217) 721-9981 _______________________________________________ wsfii-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wsfii-discuss Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/wsfii-discuss
