[Cialug] FCC to Make DD-WRT on 5GHz Wireless Routers Illegal?

[Matt]

Of course the FCC isn't TRYING to ban DD-WRT, OpenWRT, or other open 
source firmwares.  They just don't understand that it is a trillion 
times easier for a company to sign the whole firmware with a 4096-bit 
private key than it is to separate the chunk of code that runs the 
radios and only sign it.  It's also cheaper for the company to utilize 
SDRs than it is to develop and ASIC with the functionality of the radios 
baked in, and even if it wasn't that would prevent the company from ever 
upgrading the radios should a bug of some sort be found after production 
began.

What will end up happening is the FCC will put out some 
poorly/loosely-worded regulation that the industry will panic about, and 
everything from the router firmware all the way down to the flashing of 
the wifi activity LED will be buried under ninety tons of 
DRM/encryption.  Everyone who wants a guest network or any other neat 
feature from their next router will end up having to either buy a $350 
top of the line router, get a new/used/refurbished enterprise (Cisco, 
anyone?) router, or build a custom router using an old PC and a WiFi 
card just to get that one feature they need.  All this while everyone 
else ends up having to go back to their crappy original firmware with a 
terrible feature set, clunky web interface, and awful network monitoring 
capabilities (if any at all) when they decide to upgrade.

-- Matt (N0BOX)

On 9/3/2015 11:21 PM, Scott Yates wrote:
> Not so much maybe:
> https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20150831/07164532118/no-fcc-is-not-intentionally-trying-to-kill-third-party-wi-fi-router-firmware.shtml
>
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 10:19 PM, jim kraai <jimgkraai at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What?
>> http://hackaday.com/2015/09/02/save-wifi-act-now-to-save-wifi-from-the-fcc/
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