[GLLUG] FLOSS Router

[Leo Francisco]

I guess we can only hope that they'll be enough open hardware such as
that banana pi that this mess won't be such a big blow. I think it
should be a specific criticism of all that choose to lock the hardware
down like that. They shouldn't be allowed to sell products with known
security vulnerabilities. That's criminal in my view.



On 28/02/16 19:23, Philip Hands wrote:
> Mike Brodbelt <mike at coruscant.org.uk> writes:
> ...
>> TP Link is generally decent, ...
> I agree, but be aware that may be about to change.
>
> New FCC/EU rules are coming in about wireless equipment being locked
> down enough to stop people doing naughty things with their
> transmissions, and as you can see from the posts with FCC in their
> subjects here:
>
>   http://ml.ninux.org/pipermail/battlemesh/2016-February/thread.html#4379
>
> TP-Link have reacted to that by making their US firmware
> un-downgradeable -- which stops one from installing third party firmware.
>
> This is not going to just be TP-Link, so is not a specific criticism of
> them.  I imagine that any manufacturers that sell cheap WiFi kit into
> the US will go a similar route.  The FCC apparently claim that they
> didn't want this result, which just goes to show how limited their
> imagination was when they set the rules.
>
> I'd imagine that it will be quite a while before kit comes pre-loaded
> with such firmware, but it's probably worth checking (for all
> manufacturers) before you buy, and also worth being wary about
> installing firmware upgrades from the manufacturer if you have any plans
> to use third party firmware.
>
> Of course, until they start trying to do a proper job, and lock the
> firmware into the chip by blowing an efuse, you should still be able to
> get your soldering iron out, and get access to the JTAG pads, but that's
> a rather higher hurdle than installing OpenWRT via the web interface.
>
> Cheers, Phil.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> GLLUG mailing list
> GLLUG at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/attachments/20160228/c4d9f25e/attachment.html>