Comment by karteum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karteum | Hacker News Reader

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> the only real limit is until you start interfering with other people to the point they notice and complain. it's not like the FCC has vans roving the streets looking for unlicensed TV usage like the BBC but for wifi

In the area of radio, you must be extremely careful with this mindset. Keep in mind that interference may affect important / safety-critical infrastructure (and you may not even realize). For example, I am frequency facing issues from wifi (with deactivated or nonfunctional DFS) towards a weather radar in the same band (which indeed is the primary user, and weather forecasts are critical to aeronautical and maritime safety ! This is a nightmare to troubleshoot).

If you want to tinker with radio, I would suggest to pass your HAM radio license (which will give you the minimum background with regards to radio, propagation, regulations, etc.).

Because an increasing number of people do not care anymore about any regulations, I see many administrations worldwide are increasingly pushing for locked firmwares and bootloaders (i.e. no more openwrt), more import control, etc. If you want to still be able to tinker with hardware and radio in the future, you should always ensure peaceful coexistence with others i.e. know what you are doing and work within the boundaries of regulations (be it txpower, duty-cycle, listen-before-talk, etc. Those limits are there for a good reason !).

Radio waves, air, water and DOCSIS cable modems have one thing in common: they're all shared spectrum. Whatever you do affects everyone else in the same medium - and unfortunately, there are always dumbasses who ruin the fun for everyone else.

People trying to hack their DOCSIS modems and flashing firmware from other countries disrupt everyone on the same trunk cable. People thinking they'll just beef up the PA on their crappy wifi AP to get a better signal instead of adding a second AP cause enough noise to disrupt an entire neighborhood, especially if the PA output fries (part of) the bandpass and now there's side emissions all over the place. People burning wet wood in their ovens because they can't be arsed to dry it properly or, worse, outright burning trash stink up the entire 'hood. And people taking dumps in the rivers were enough of a problem in medieval times already that warnings like "it is forbidden to crap in the river on <day> because the next day beer will be brewed" [1] were commonplace.

[1] https://www.abendblatt.de/vermischtes/journal/article1068323...

> I see many administrations worldwide are increasingly pushing for locked firmwares and bootloaders

I'm not entirely sold that it's the curious hackers of the world driving that trend as opposed to incentives like surveillance and control

That radio interference was the reason FCC almost banned alternative router firmwares ten or so years ago. The compromise that allows openwrt to exist is the radio drivers being signed binary blobs.

Folks were modifying stuff for more power, more "channels" and disabling dfs and apc. So it did not happen for no reason. And now vendors like Ubiquiti and Mikrotik have special USA models with more locked down firmwares.

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