MadWifi developers move to ath5k [LWN.net]

MadWifi developers move to ath5k

Posted Sep 21, 2007 19:19 UTC (Fri) by alan_carr (guest, #47522)
Parent article: MadWifi developers move to ath5k

One of the things that has bothered me is the whole mess with the FCC's declaration of requiring security through obscurity (closed source). I mean, someone is going to bring up this FUD where can you even ship a driver that has access to radio parameters... hopefully in the documentation somewhere they state things like parameters controller RF pieces are for the most part restricted to the user (channel selection being the exception).

I used to work for a company doing GSM basestation design, and even *code releases* that had anything to do with the radio/baseband layer had to be approved again by the regulatory agency before release. Of course, a lot of this is to generate a cash cow, but of course it pretty much guarantees compliance and interoperability.

I just wonder how Dell will ship a laptop with an open WLAN driver with the FCC as it is today. What's worse is that the FCC sets no clear boundary for dividing where controls are and what exactly they need to be. Just that they ruled the user shouldn't be able to modify these settings. I mean, somebody could reverse assemble the binary driver and make hacks technically... so where do you draw the damn line... oh well... /vent off :D

-Alan

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MadWifi developers move to ath5k

Posted Sep 22, 2007 8:16 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Anybody can make any radio break regulatory compliance. It's not difficult. Give a guy some tin foil and a soldering gun and I expect that they can find a way to f-k up somebody else's signal even if the drivers for a radio are closed source and use every anti-debugging, anti-reverse engineering trick in the book.

The trouble is that the FCC is given any authority in the first place.

MadWifi developers move to ath5k

Posted Sep 27, 2007 9:18 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Well, for a limited resource like radio spectrum it makes sense to have some controls on its use or people would just go ahead and jam other people's signals.

That said, it would be better if they handled compliance by going after offenders rather than trying to make sure all devices are incapable of transmitting non-compliant signals.

For a start, it makes those devices useless to people who have paid to use non-public spectrum.

MadWifi developers move to ath5k

Posted Sep 27, 2007 11:06 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]

Wouldn't it make more sense to regulate it by simple LAW?

It's not like everyone stabs each other, even though kitchen knifes doesn't have a "no human flesh" regulatory daemon.