Broadcom firmware and regulatory compliance

Posted Sep 24, 2010 21:08 UTC (Fri) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
Parent article: Broadcom firmware and regulatory compliance

> On September 21, though, Michael Büsch announced the availability of a toolchain for working with the b43 firmware.

Well, we already released a toolchain that works with b43 firmware several years ago. That is what openfwwf was based on.

The new announcement was a new version of that toolchain which also works on the recently released firmware for the new brcm80211 driver. (brcm80211 devices have some differences in the instruction set and format).

So we're currently at a point where Broadcom's latest freely distributable wireless firmware is easily modifiable by anyone. I think that harms Broadcom's argument for not releasing older firmware due to regulatory issues. Technically the new firmware is not really safer than the old one.

Broadcom firmware and regulatory compliance

Posted Sep 26, 2010 9:25 UTC (Sun) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link] (1 responses)

"So we're currently at a point where Broadcom's latest freely distributable wireless firmware is easily modifiable by anyone. I think that harms Broadcom's argument for not releasing older firmware due to regulatory issues."

Indeed. Broadcom's position on the whole regulatory thing seems to be entirely based on inconsistent paranoid fantasies, and we should be using all means at our disposal to demonstrate the idiocy of their position.

Broadcom firmware and regulatory compliance

Posted Nov 1, 2010 13:27 UTC (Mon) by dublindec (guest, #70939) [Link]

The Broadcom card in my MacBook Pro regularly has its country code set (by other people's routers) to the wrong country code. I have no way of returning it to the correct code. How does that help with compliance? It just excludes me from networks in the UK which use channels 12 and 13. Madness.