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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

A government-mandated locked-down radio firmware isn't much better than a government-mandated locked-down main firmware.

The FCC should punish crimes, not impose prior restrictions on innocent people.

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The reason they're doing this is because a lot of crimes have been committed -- resulting in interference with weather radar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10137739

There have also been a lot of crimes committed over the internet. We'd better lock it down.

We are and have been.

The reasonable answer to that is to regulate wifi frequencies world wide and modify weather radars if necessary. That would solve the interference problem while keeping the firmware open.

Freedom is better.

As I understand it, this was all known when 5Ghz wifi was introduced, so it was a trade-off (see the 2013 NTIA report for details). I don't think it makes sense for them to move all existing services in the 5Ghz band to a completely new band (which might not work anyway, due to the technical requirements of doppler windshear radar). It probably also wouldn't make sense to limit wifi to a small range of the 5Ghz band. However I'm not really an expert on this, so feel free to correct me.

Oh, and you can get freedom -- it's just the radio software that's the issue. The obvious solution is to make the radio software un-flashable, and leave the router software flashable.

However in reality manufacturers will do what ever is cheapest for them under the regulation, not what allows for the most freedom

So under this rule they will simply make the entire appliance non-flashable as it will be the cheapest way to comply with the regulation.

Having government-locked software of any sort is not freedom.

Even the FSF is willing to compromise on that, as long as the locked software is hardware-locked and totally unchangeable by anything and anyone (including things like over-the-air updates), so it can be considered part of the hardware, and as long as it does not have access to main memory or can otherwise interfere with the free-software part of the system.

It's only the radio that has to be locked. Why do you need the freedom to reprogram the radio (not talking about the router)?

Why do you need the freedom to reprogram your computer?

The main reason is "because I want to".

In this case the radio is not the computer. The fair balance here is to lockdown the radio, but not the chips that run the software that uses it.

You didn't answer my question. Why do you need the freedom to reprogram your computer?

Any answer to that also justifies my desire to be free to reprogram my radio.

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