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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Why does Raspberry Pi not need to conform to the new "standards" of the FCC that require locking down firmware in routers? If it has onboard wifi, and you can turn it into a router... what's the difference between someone installing OpenWRT on a raspi vs. installing OpenWRT on a TPLink?

edit: This is a legitimate question, not an opinion.

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Okay, first a bit of background on the wifi ruling. The WiFi issue is because the 5ghz WiFi band has some rather sensitive pre-existing operations, like weather radar, that are intermingled in some of the channels given for WiFi usage. There are a lot of times and places where such items aren't in use and can be used as additional wifi channels, but when there is a need, those channels need to be vacated and not considered usable for at least a half hour after receiving a signal. However, there were a lot of companies that weren't upholding their end of the bargain, so the FCC put in more stringent testing requirements, including ensuring that the radio cannot transmit where and when it's not supposed to. Because of this, most companies just took the easy way out and locked down the whole router, instead of putting the wifi chipset's control software in ROM or some other way of locking down the firmware.

Now, the Pi 3 does not talk on the 5ghz band at all, so even in Soft-AP mode, it's not capable of even coming close to violating the rules. Other desktop chipsets that can run in the 5ghz band have programming to not allow them to be APs in the 5ghz band, again steering clear of those rules. The 5ghz ruling is complicated because there's a lot of issues that tend to be glossed over in articles about it, which just muddy the waters.

The FCC was mostly concerned about DFS in that case, which only applies to the 5GHz spectrum, and is only applied by the AP in a wireless network.

Note that if you have a 5GHz wifi dongle, you'll see that the Linux regulatory framework will disallow running it in AP mode for this reason - almost all lack DFS.

My guess is that it's simply because it's specifically not sold as a router. Just like I could turn my laptop into a router, but it's my decision, the device is not sold as a router.

As far as i'm aware those are all still proposed regulations and not in effect yet.

I think TP-Link is already shipping with a firmware in lockdown

http://ml.ninux.org/pipermail/battlemesh/2016-February/00437...

But that's just because TP-Link wanted to, not because of any FCC rule (at least, that's what an earlier discussion here on HN about that router said)

Wouldn't that apply to any motherboard that has a wifi antenna on it?

Perhaps their wifi chip can not operate outside FCC limits? The flashing question comes up for devices which can be made to operate outside the frequencies and power levels allowed by the FCC.

Do you have any more info on this new "standard" from the FCC? If true, that…sucks.

I believe he or she is thinking of the FCC proposal regarding software-defined radios.

It was widely (and incorrectly) reported as requiring all routers to have locked firmware, but that's not really the case, and if the proposal were to go forward there are a variety of ways that the SDR could be locked down while allowing firmware updates in general.

It's not clear that the FCC is even going to go forward with it, though; industry pushback was quite heavy.

edit: it looks like they went forward with the guidance, after amending it to be clear they specifically weren't going after open-source firmware

TPLink has already started locking down its firmware in response to FCC:

http://ml.ninux.org/pipermail/battlemesh/2016-February/00437...

Eh, I'm skeptical that a chat customer-service flunky really has deep insight into high level regulatory-compliance decisions -- especially surrounding regulations that have only been floated as a proposal and which don't, yet, even exist (edit: the guidance seems to have moved forward, but only after amendments making it clear that the FCC specifically wasn't banning open source firmware)

TPLink has always been a shit company when it came to firmware, and routers with locked firmware predate by decades this FCC proposal. I'm not convinced there's a cause-and-effect relationship here.

Edit: Anyway, from the horse's mouth back in Nov 2015 after the comment period closed on the proposal:

"One immediate outcome of this ongoing dialogue is a step we’ve taken to clarify our guidance on rules the Commission adopted last year in the U-NII proceeding. Our original lab guidance document released pursuant to that Order asked manufacturers to explain “how [its] device is protected from ‘flashing’ and the installation of third-party firmware such as DD-WRT”. This particular question prompted a fair bit of confusion – were we mandating wholesale blocking of Open Source firmware modifications?

We were not, but we agree that the guidance we provide to manufacturers must be crystal-clear to avoid confusion. So, today we released a revision to that guidance to clarify that our instructions were narrowly-focused on modifications that would take a device out of compliance. The revised guidance now more accurately reflects our intent in both the U-NII rules as well as our current rulemaking, and we hope it serves as a guidepost for the rules as we move from proposal to adoption."

If TPLink really is locking out firmware "because of the FCC", they've simply misinterpreted things.

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