Contributing to the effort

[tom at ceisystems.com]

Hello again,
	In fact, this is not true.  If you read the FCC guidelines
and/or meeting minutes, you will see that if you, a customer, manage to
circumvent the manufacturer's limitations, they may be held liable.  It
comes down to this...a vendor must make a reasonable effort to prevent
you from, say, cranking the output to 6 Watts.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: insecure [mailto:insecure at mail.od.ua] 
> Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 3:31 PM
> To: Thomas Cameron; hostap at shmoo.com
> Subject: Re: Contributing to the effort
> 
> 
> On Friday 12 September 2003 17:23, tom at ceisystems.com wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > 	I would really like to contribute some help to the 
> effort of getting 
> > better support for the Atheros WiFi cards under Linux.  I 
> am currently 
> > looking to make things more like the other network drivers 
> WRT the way 
> > memory is used, buffers are allocated, etc.  My hope is 
> that this will 
> > speed things up to the point where they are on par with the 
> figures we 
> > _should_ be seeing.
> > 	Additionally, I am looking to expand the encryption 
> functions. As I 
> > understand it now, the only form of encryption the MadWiFi driver 
> > supports is "WEP".  This simply is not good enough for my 
> purposes.  I 
> > am very interested in getting the AES encryption working, 
> but have hit 
> > a few roadblocks.  I understand that we are not allowed (without 
> > getting a new FCC license) to modify the software on the 
> card itself 
> > (the .o file in the source)...but I would like to know if 
> there's some 
> > documentation regarding how to communicate with this file.  Any 
> > suggestions?
> 
> Offtopic, but.
> 
> Scrap 'FCC forbids open source' tale.
> FCC does not forbid you to program hardware.
> 
> FCC forbids hardware verdor of making hardware which can be 
> tricked into non-FCC compliant operation. Providing 
> binary-only .o module is not sufficient because it is 
> hackable just like all those warez hacks and keygens for 
> ordinary windoze executables.
> 
> Truely FCC compliant device would refuse to load firmware
> which is not digitally signed by manufacturer.
> Or alternatively, hardware might be made so it is physically 
> impossible to exceed FCC mandated power levels etc, no matter 
> what firmware you load in it.
> 
> IMHO Atheros just use that FCC argument to divert
> 'why is it not open source?!' yells elsewhere.
> --
> vda
>