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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Unbelievable that it actually calls out community firmware as a threat, and DD-WRT by name. There has to be a story behind the genesis of this rule. I mean, these ROMs have been around for well over a decade now with no ill effects I'm aware of. That's not something that the FCC is going to be inclined to spontaneously regulate if someone weren't pushing for it.

So who pushed?

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What you're seeing here is a policy that came into full flower in World War II but has been a part of radio since the beginning. It's the idea that all paths must be pursued to maintain absolute mastery of signals intelligence on communications channels used by the public. It's as full an example of imperial military doctrine as you will encounter anywhere. This unfortunately puts the military interests of the United States directly against the civil rights of United States Citizens.

Oh yeah, also. It's pretty settled case law that your first amendment rights do not apply to broadcast radio signals.

Is that the military, or is that just the fact that we only have so much radio spectrum (it's basically a public good) and everybody wants a piece of it? Have you taken a look at the U.S. Frequency Allocations map recently?

I have heard that the current system woefully misallocates bandwidth and that Full Frequency Spread Spectrum transmission would help with that. Of course the current system of government granted monopolies on spectrum allocation would have to go away. And that is a political event of low probability of occurence. At least this week.

Probably somebody who has the spectrum right above the 2.4GHz ISM band complained.

Given the overcrowding of the 2.4GHz spectrum, I suspect that people were starting to use DD-WRT to run on Channel 14, which is a no-no in North America.

That would probably be XM Sirius satellite radio (spectrum right below). They have perviously tried to have the FCC go after 2.4 GHz Wifi [1]

[1] http://www.geek.com/news/satellite-radio-worried-about-wi-fi...

Below isn't as big a deal as above.

I don't know of any WiFi chips that explicitly allow you to go below channel 1 (I know of a few that would let you go below if you twizzled the PLL directly, but generally that was very hackish) and they certainly never test there.

Whereas, nobody designs a WiFi chip that doesn't actually go to Channel 14.

I don't know if there are no ill effects! I have heard countless admissions of "I jacked up the power" and "I enabled channel 14."

If I am not mistaken these are some of the "features" of DD!

Is there evidence that people are causing actual problems by doing either of those things? I know they could be bad in theory, but if there have been no problems or only mild problems, a wait and see approach seems more appropriate than trying to get in front of it with regulation.

Does that really say DD-WRT in particular is a threat? I take it simply as saying DD-WRT is the poster child.

While I like DD-WRT, if you can flash DD-WRT you can flash anything, and arbitrary code breaks all possible chain-of-trust models.

The FCC has a long history of moving for more restricted hardware as a way of regulating the airwaves, one of its chief jobs. As a ham & commercial radio operator it drives me up the wall, but I understand why they do it.

> arbitrary code breaks all possible chain-of-trust models

No. The code I get on my router from the store is an arbitrary closed source buggy crap.

The code I load from debian, openwrt, etc. is far more trusted.

His point was that individuals could compile their own malicious code in to DDWRT source then flash it to routers.

Your point is corporate code sucks.

I hate HN's tendency to be perfectly intelligent and rational most of the time, yet become infuriatingly obtuse and cultish any time we brush near ideology.

Obviously the FCC does not care about who you trust.

The code that ships in consumer routers is really awful security-wise compared to something like OpenWRT, though, and that's not ideology - it's the commercial reality of the consumer router market. Security costs money and it's not visible to the consumers buying the routers, so the manufacturers don't bother.

I trust GPL code only.

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