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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau has reached a $200,000 settlement with TP-Link in regards to selling in the US routers that could operate at output levels higher that allowed by FCC rules.
At the same time, TP-Link has also agreed to work with the open-source community and Wi-Fi chipset manufacturers to enable consumers to install third-party firmware on their Wi-Fi routers.
Source: Help Net Security
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FCC Orders TP-Link to Allow Third-Party Firmware on Their Routers
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Slowly and surely the unix crept up on the Nintendo user ...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:39AM
ThinkPenguin has another take on this. [thinkpenguin.com] It looks like this may actually cause more problems than it solves.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 04 2016, @05:57AM
I'm very much in two minds about this.
On one hand, I hate to see proprietary and binary blobs become even more common in networking equipment for most of the reasons listed in the thinkpengiun article. Being able to extend devices to do mesh networking and such generally requires the ability to play with the low level firmware and radio modulation stuff.
On the other, making it easy to manipulate the radio makes it trivial to make a 2.4Ghz radio bomb. RF interference is already a huge issue (ask any ham radio op), and making it trivial to exceed FCC limits means that we are in a scenario where I could easily break wifi in a large area by just loading a custom firmware. The fact is the power settings really need to be locked on a HW basis while not preventing arbiertary RF signals. Basically, you can transmit what you want as long as you're within the FCC limits for power and such.
Still always moving
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @12:00PM
Yeah, but isn't it already trivial to create a "2.4GHz radio bomb"? Just defeat the door interlock on a microwave oven. With roughly 1kW of power, you probably don't even need to bend the frequency into the WiFi range (microwave ovens are usually a bit higher) to deafen any nearby WiFi devices.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday August 04 2016, @04:42PM
Custom firmware should let you lower the radio output as well.
Though from my limited experience with CB radios, I know nobody does.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday August 05 2016, @09:20AM
Well, lower is fine. And yeah, people using cheesed CB sets cause all sorts of fun bleedover. (Un)fortunately, CB is surronded by ham bands on both sides in the spectrum so it doesn't hugely effect most other radio operations.
Still always moving