Save WiFi
RDL2004
Posts: 2,554
So far, I've seen no mention of this here or anywhere else but Hackaday actually.
Save WiFi: Act Now To Save WiFi From The FCC
They say owners of WiFi hardware could be blocked from updating a device's firmware.
That might be bad news. No more DDWRT/OpenWRT/tomato? No more freedom of choice? Check it out for yourself.
Whether you upgrade your router's firmware or not, or don't care one way or the other, there are still serious implications.
Save WiFi: Act Now To Save WiFi From The FCC
They say owners of WiFi hardware could be blocked from updating a device's firmware.
That might be bad news. No more DDWRT/OpenWRT/tomato? No more freedom of choice? Check it out for yourself.
Whether you upgrade your router's firmware or not, or don't care one way or the other, there are still serious implications.
Comments
I saw that today also.
There is no way that will ever be enforceable, and the small percentage of people who do it will continue. Though if it passes there will probably be some pressure on Manf's to institute some form of signed-binaries to prevent the common people.
It will be broken same as it was on Tivo and DRM. At the worst, I will have my ISP put my/their router in bridging mode and toss a cheap, real router upstream of it.
There are millions upon millions of upgradeable routers available now, and they will all continue to be supported by Open, DD and Tomato anyways. No way to prevent those from being repurposed.
Genie is out of the bottle.
Heck even the 2 dollar USB wifi dongles I use get firmware loaded into them by the Linux kernel driver.
Honestly, I've never bothered much with router firmware. It's just that chipping away at my personal freedom seems to be on the increase lately. Most people want to believe that's not unimportant or that it's "just the way it is", but for some reason it bothers me.
I think I'll buy a couple of routers before the lock down starts, just to be safe. You never know when you might get the urge to play around with router firmware.
Well, Google just announced they want to become the router of choice. Lots of odd things seem to happen when Google wants things, no doubt because they have the NSA/CIA/FBI on their side.
Coincidence? Doubt it.
I was going to suggest picking up a couple, however can't see that there is any hurry. Even if they mandated it tomorrow, and forced everyone to upgrade, there would be 10's of millions of the old ones on eBay, Craigslist, and sitting in trash bins all over the country.
If they start collecting old routers, then I'd maybe start worrying.
He predicted this sort of shenanigans very early on,
My Asus wl-500gp wifi router is swapped firmware and the better for it. And I have two MR-3020 devices for OPENwrt firmware. Admittably, I could create a device that looks and acts the same as a factory device, but does something sinister (like sending duplicate info elsewhere or sending to a server pretending to be my ISP. I suspect that is already a crime -- wire fraud.). But I just never considered doing so.
Apple is having more serious problems with iPhones and iPads that have been unlocked, and then raided by people using malware from the same repositories that provided the unlocking.
The tacit message here is that ALL OPEN-SOURCE CODE is dangerous and must be done away with. Pure tyranny.
If we need anything at all, it might be government certified repositories to assure open-source code is safe to use. This effort is in the wrong direction.
There is not really a functional difference between my routers with OpenWrt, my (x86-ish) thin clients with OpenWrt and WiFi nic of my choice and a Debian box with hostapd.
1st I thought we'll get that same law via TTIP but the EU has made a similar attack at free software: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Funkregulierung-Angriff-auf-alternative-Software-2803189.html
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32014L0053
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32014L0053
Seems like the EU was faster than the US this time and maybe signing TTIP will bring this law to the US even if the local attempt to stop it succeeds for some few days...
THEY are everywhere and THEY fear your freedom!
Of course there would be a fee involved, and a purchase of the necessary liability insurance.
(Ugh... this hogwash so upsets me.)
A normal domestic WIFI router box has so called "firmware" which you can upgrade. Or you may replace it with a the OpenWRT "firmware". That is often just replacing the vendors crappy Linux installation with a better one.
But what about that actual WIFI chips in that box? They may have "firmware" of their own for whatever processor they are running.
For example, I could run OpenWRT "firmware" on my PC. In turn it would need a "firmware" binary blob to load into that USB dongle I have.
So there are at least two levels and two types of firmware in this discussion.
I don't believe the FCC is talking about things like OpenWRT on your PC or router. They are concerned with the software that is running the actual WIFI chip. Things like OpenWRT are more akin to the Android or iOS on your phone. There is no way the FCC can claim jurisdiction over Android or iOS or OpenWRT or Windows or the Debian on my PC
Note: I put quotes around "firmware" everywhere here because it is not actually firm ware. It's same old software. Actual firmware was that stuff you had to pull the EPROMS out of the machine to reprogram. It was "firm" when running in the target machine.
Still I don't like this whole idea when applied to those binary blobs I load into my WIFI chip.
This may be a ploy to create special USA only routers with national security being the excuse. Cisco has been sitting on a pile of cash and nothing new to do.
FYI, FCC is the Federal Communications Commission. It controls wired communications as well as wireless --- all of it.
Cellular phones are up to Generation 4, and it seems the FCC has had an administrative 'brain wave' similar to forcing the whole of the USA over to digital TV and away from analog ( I suspect they think this creates more jobs and eventually prosperity in the US, but we all know the gadgets are made elsewhere.)
So what does the FCC desire to do?
Eliminate Generation 2 in 2016, which is pretty much the basic cellular phone that most of us got -- like a Nokia. USA, Australia, Canada, and Singapore are all planning to shut off 2G service in the near future.
Generation 3 didn't take on well, but it and Generation 4 are what I call 'Pad phones' because they have the touchscreen and most are Android devices or iPhones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_phone_generations
I have not paid attention much. I have never owned a TV.
Luckily the world is much bigger than the USA. Those cunning Chinese, you know the people who actually make stuff, will continue to churn out stuff that mostly works.
Rick that's where I saw it as well. The comments there are <deleted!> hilarious. In fact that's where I saw the blurb regarding the BASIC Stamp. Both ones contain comments that are both right and wrong, but usually wrong. It seems literacy has gone and gotten itself spaced. I also believe Its going to take the FCC forever to make it work. Afterall they did get DTV wrong, and almost destroyed classical music in NYC.
As you mentioned literacy, I have no idea what you are talking about.
What has the BASIC Stamp got to do with this regulatory idea of the FCC?
I do hope classical music does not depend on the FCC.
What is so special about 5GHz anyway ?
Has there been some real case of a hacking affecting some spooks ?
Surely the really secure stuff is a Frequencies we do not even hear about ?
Laptops have Wifi, as do most new desk tops.
Looks like the FCC needs to disable Microsoft & Apple updates, and had better prevent ANY install of ANY executable, just in case. Failure to thinks things through.
Take a look at the Hack A Day site we referenced. And nothing regarding the two.
As for classical music here, several years ago, the only station here WQXR was forced off if its frequency because the original owner sold it out from under them, and the FCC was confused because the station predated them. Eventually and with my help, they became a Public Radio station.
I don't see how firmware lockdown would be feasible or enforceable as far as existing hardware is concerned, but manufacturers would have to make future devices comply with any new rules. Probably what's needed is a new chip set with the radio section separated from the networking controller. Surely the market for secure routers would be big enough to support that.
Rick, that was most of the discussion and illogical commentary on that site. I wonder which lobbyist got scared and which company paid him the most for sponsoring that silly idea of the Feds......
It does not even need to be that complex ( tho this could go way over the heads of the FCC)
Given most parts have a boot-loader now for the firmware, all that is needed is for the Radio-Param calls to be done thru simple checking functions located in that Boot-loader area.
Any range checking and masking is done there, and is protected from casual field updates.
There's been a proliferation of 433MHz things imported into the US, for example, and these are not licensed for USA operation. Similarly, and in deference to WIFI, manufacturers are making "broad' chips that with firmware alterations can operate in multiple markets and as such may have hardware settings that can be altered so as to violate local restrictions such as power output regulation and channel allocation.
If you're in the US and want to experiment with things, get your amateur's license and have at it... and follow the overlying rules while you're at it.
However since WiFi operates in the same range as even Microwaves, that is the (normally) unregulated and actually a throwaway portion of the spectrum, they got all bent out of shape thinking that regulations are arriving.
You may be right, however I suspect that my original comment that one of the vendors aimed their favorite lobbyist at them to do so. Probably Netgear or even D-Link, they are two companies that most people feel that the designs offered by them are impossible to setup, and that people immediately reach for instructions on how to install third party OS examples on them. And the first draft did in fact mention WiFi and even one of the lesser known releasers of such firmware.
Which is why Hack A Day's complete gang of scribes over reacted.
It might be aimed at everything else, which does include that frequency grouping.
So it seems we have one tyranny of infinite program-ability and the other tyranny of proprietary control of infinite program-ability. (I have long concluded that tyranny must come in symmetrical pairs so that some sort of imbalance might take place. Whenever I look into a tyrannical problem there seems to be a left and a right that are locked in opposition.)
It is difficult keeping up with all this and so unfulfillable.
Maybe we should all sell our souls and just become lobbyist. I am not getting any richer being wildly indignant about what law makers are making these days.
Don't the lobbyist get paid even if this never happens?
In any case, mac addresses cannot directly be traced across routers. For every router your IP packet passes through the mac address will from then on be for the last router it passed.
Of course it's possible to show up at the physical place of the nearest connection point and check your mac from there, but then the one doing it has a pretty good idea about you already..
So this must be for some other purpose.
There is a lot of it and it is not a casual read. But there I find this:
26. When the grantee adds such capabilities through software changes it would be required to demonstrate the device controls that would prevent unauthorized software modifications by filing an application for certification, as a permissive change, under the same FCC ID
That "prevent unauthorized software modifications" sounds like an intention to lock me out of devices I might own.
Government wants to be empowered to govern... for the common good.
I suppose we could lobby for 'experimental device registration'. After all, we have that with airplanes. Any fool can register, build, and fly a DIY airplane for himself. He just can't take passengers along.
I imagine I can keep a car with broken lights in my garage and no one will care. I like this "common good" idea. But what is it? That is why we have these debates. That is what politics is about.
Or I used to think that was the idea....
What does that even mean ? Seems hopelessly written.
What does that mean? It means that if the language is a bit unclear, it is up to the FCC to interpret, impliment, and enforce what they have interpretted. (I know many are going to dislike that explanation, but if you study the IRS Code, it was never created in entirety by Congress. Lawmakers can and do delegate a lot to agencies they create. It is the same with all the other Federal agencies, and growing more complex everyday. EPA, FDA, SEC, IRS, on and on..... darned alphabet soup.)
We can run in circles until the end of days, but we will pretty much discover after the fact that What you see, is what you got. If you dislike it, make an appeal through the court system. If it is no big deal or you just don't want to fight, move on.
I don't live in the USA, so either Taiwan will copy the USA or will jus do their own thing. BTW, I'd much rather save the planet, than waste my time over saving wifi. I am not even sure wifi is endangered, but I know the planet is.
What bothers me is that this is nearly as bad as the earlier issues surrounding net neutrality issues. There it was the cable TV companies who felt that the FCC was over stepping its bounds by insisting that broadband be regulated the same as any utility. There we managed to throw a heap big amount of dino eggs at the FCC and shame them into doing so via a large amount of signatures and of course bluster. So far no one is doing that.
I wonder how the Feds will implement their absurd plans. The laws on the books in this country, both federal and state and city (or town) are lousy with laws that date back to the beginning of the country, and were never stricken from the registers. Ideally the cops could ticket every one for driving without a flagman in front of them because that was the law in this country during the early part of the 20C.