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Comment by doggy_afuera | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with your preferences. This is network management pure and simple. This is how you implement efficient infrastructure in congested locations like stadiums, airports, and large retail (where you may have no signal at all). Whether the cellular radio or wifi radio is used has nothing to do with you; you are paying for a connection and there are some very intelligent people tasked with figuring out the best way to solve that problem. Because if they didn't, your phone wouldn't have connectivity in those locations and you'd be on here complaining that their service sucks

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Either the device serves me and follows my commands, or it's not my device anymore.

This bullshit is exactly why Stallman was right.

If I make a decision, the device should obey me and no one else.

You've got no consent whatsoever to overrule the user's decision.

> If I make a decision, the device should obey me and no one else.

There's obviously limits to this, and in fact network traffic management is commonly agreed to be one of them. You can't tell your iPhone to blast on the channel of an operator you have no contractual agreement with.

The same goes for Wi-Fi on 5 GHz: You get to use these frequencies, but by law, device manufacturers are required to implement an algorithm that gives the primary user (weather radars important to aviation safety) priority. Patching out that algorithm could actually cost lives.

Where exactly your freedom ends, and that of the general public begins, is a fascinating and important conversation: Should you be allowed to skew your 802.11 or TCP implementation's congestion management algorithms to get priority for the data you send, for example? (All it takes is changing the multiplicative decrease factor up, or the random waiting time after a collision down a bit!)

What's the boundary of where your device ends: The baseband? The 802.11 hardware radio? The kernel, running your 802.11 soft-PHY driver? Userspace? I don't think it's a purely technical question with an easy technical answer.

Personally, I'm fine with my phone coming with a default setup to trust my operator's Wi-Fi networks, but only if the device vendor can absolutely make sure that my home network will be preferred, and in any case with a clear opt-out switch.

> There's obviously limits to this, and in fact network traffic management is commonly agreed to be one of them. You can't tell your iPhone to blast on the channel of an operator you have no contractual agreement with.

Why shouldn't I?

Sure, if I do so, I'll end up with a massive fine from the BNetzA, FCC, or equivalent local authority, but that's still my problem. I agree that freedoms are limited, but you can't enforce social restrictions with technological solutions.

The device should obey me, nothing else. I'm not going to accept devices becoming ever more locked down.

And it's not like it helps, either – I can just as well take an SDR and do the very same myself without any restrictions.

> The baseband? The 802.11 hardware radio? The kernel, running your 802.11 soft-PHY driver? Userspace?

Kernel, drivers, userspace have to be 100% under control of the users. Ideally, hardware should also be entirely under control of the user.

It's already so much work to custom patch the firmware on my cameras to e.g. allow using certain file formats without requiring the storage medium to have been certified by the manufacturer.

I'm already transplanting ICs from the manufacturer's original toner cartridges for my printer to circumvent the shitty DRM brother now introduced as well.

I've already got to use custom devices to strip HDCP so I can watch movies on my PC. My secondary monitor is a really high quality one from 2004 which is still better than many today, if I was bound by some shitty limitations I'd have to turn this into e-waste.

I’m already building customized kernel drivers for some of my WiFi cards because the official ones apply US channel restrictions even outside of the US, which means I've got less spectrum available than I should have.

I want this to be reduced, not increased. I want to move into a future where I need to make less such changes and devices obey me without question.

This is bullshit apologetics. The WiFi radio is mine, not the carrier’s. This completely screws up connections to p2p WiFi stuff (odb reader, private camera network, etc).

Whatever strategy is implemented it absolutely should respect the user preference for which wifi network is preferred. How can you defend getting in the way of a user connecting to their home network when at home? Seriously, address that particular concern and maybe we can have a debate.

That’s all fine and even laudable if it works (and does not actually degrade quality more often than not), until it disrupts my ability to connect to my own network in any way (which has devices on it I can‘t reach from my mobile operator’s network).

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