5 ms·
Ah yes, lets add all the problems of vulnerable basebands to wifi routers too. No issues there. Edit: And the possibility for purposeful maliciousness on the
by codys 11y ago
Ah yes, lets add all the problems of vulnerable basebands to wifi routers too. No issues there.
Edit: And the possibility for purposeful maliciousness on the part of the baseband manuf. And after all, all a closed system like a baseband does is increase the cost of replacing it. It might be out of reach of you and me, but is it out of reach of everyone?
- derefr 11y agoThere's a reason it's called a "compromise." The FCC has a completely orthogonal set of things it cares about, none of which are software freedom. If you don't give them something like a baseband firmware, the alternative is that the entire router is the baseband firmware.
- sliverstorm 11y agoIt's always funny when people object to a compromise on the grounds that they don't get everything they want.
- Dylan16807 11y agoLook, you don't have to give me 20 dollars, we can compromise, how about you give me 15 and keep 5. There's nothing odd about rejecting a compromise when there's no validity to the demands.
- codys 11y agoImmediately assuming we must give something up is a poor way to proceed. If we had made that assumption in the past, the clipper chip[1] would have been a "success". After all, the NSA doesn't care about software freedom either. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
- wtallis 11y agoAll current-generation WiFi chipsets already have the problem of proprietary firmware running on the radio's processor, separate from the SoC CPU.
- codys 11y agoI suppose I just disagree with the sentiment that "something is pretty bad already, so we should allow regulation to make it worse". I don't think that is a good idea. Right now, not all control is given to the WiFi firmware (where it exists), but I don't expect the situation with regards to WiFi firmware and open source will improve at all with the FCC adding more requirements.
- wtallis 11y agoThe point is that regulation won't make it worse. Even without regulation they're already putting more into the closed firmware than either of us is comfortable with, and putting frequency and power limits into ROM or the closed firmware isn't taking away any meaningful freedom.
- im3w1l 11y agoThe biggest concern with the base band is when it can be used to infect or steal data from the rest of the system. Maybe concerns could be eased if communication between baseband and rest of the system were set up so as to make that impossible.