EU's Plan To Ban Sale of User-Moddable RF Devices Draws Widespread Condemnation (theregister.co.uk) 142
Reader simpz writes: The Register is reporting that the EU is looking to block users from tinkering the firmware/software of their RF devices. This seems to have been very under reported, with a fairly short consultation period that has now expired. It could force manufacturers to lock down phones and routers etc to stop you from installing the likes of Lineage OS or OpenWRT. The way this is written it could stop devices like laptops or Raspberry Pi's having their software changed. From the report: The controversy centres on Article 3(3)(i) of the EU Radio Equipment Directive, which was passed into law back in 2014. However, an EU working group is now about to define precisely which devices will be subject to the directive -- and academics, researchers, individual "makers" and software companies are worried that their activities and business models will be outlawed. Article 3(3)(i) states that RF gear sold in the EU must support "certain features in order to ensure that software can only be loaded into the radio equipment where the compliance of the combination of the radio equipment and software has been demonstrated." If the law is implemented in its most potentially harmful form, no third-party firmware could be installed onto something like a home router, for example.
Re:Why not (Score:4, Insightful)
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The device it inter-operates with is also required to be on an unlicensed band. It is not even legal to transmit on licensed band. Why would illegal operation be needed to inter-operate with "anything else"?
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Bandplans, broseph. (Score:2)
Why is this a problem? Because [arstechnica.com] bandplans [behindthemixer.com] change. [behindthemixer.com]
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Among other reasons, because you can't do that with a general purpose computer. A Raspberry Pi, even without it's WiFi and Bluetooth radios, can transmit just about anywhere on the radio spectrum it pleases by manipulating the GPIO pins just via software - no specialist radio hardware or software required.
Now, that's not a very powerful transmission, but regulating transmitters just en total is naive.
Every week (Score:3, Insightful)
Every week the EU plans something that draws widespread condemnation (usually because it's tyrannical). Glad I don't live there.
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If only it was just the EU, but it's the same in USA, same in Russia, same in China, same everywhere. Once again comes the time where even trivial shit is considered to be limited for regular folks, because that's just the next step. The common sense is lost and the goal post keeps on crawlin forward to ban shit from people, because "they need to be protected from themselves" and because power can't be shared.
Re:Every week (Score:4, Insightful)
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My taxes were lowered. The only ways yours weren't is if you don't pay taxes to begin with.
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Err..Yes.
It is the SAME thing. They withheld less taxes from your check, and therefore, you got MORE in each paycheck.
Lowering withholding needed to be publicized as that people did need to adjust it a bit.
But it is best at the EOY to NOT have a big refund. Why should you give the US feds an interest free loan all year when you could be using same money and saving it and earning interest on it, or investing it?
At EOY your
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"Your taxes didn't go down because news said otherwise. Regardless of what your tax return shows. News said otherwise."
Trump Derangement Syndrome at its finest.
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"some folks who pay taxes did not wind up with lower taxes, so your statement is incorrect", more like.
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The one that they came back a week and two later and said "oh, wait, now that the IRS has caught up after the shutdown, the average tax refund is slightly higher"?
Or the one that forgot that your tax refund has absolutely no impact on what your tax burden is?
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I am a tax preparer in a small "blue collar" town in the USA. And I can state for the record that Trump did indeed cut taxes for an overwhelming majority of Americans. Over 95% of our clients paid less federal income tax in 2018 than they did in 2017.
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Trump didn't lower taxes, moron
According to my tax bracket and refund, yes - my taxes was reduced by 3% in 2018
Put your misleading Trump hate down you moron.
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Not sure why this was modded down. More often then not peoples' rights have been taken away across the globe over the past 2 decades. In the 90's things were looking as though we were progressing in the right direction. Since "9-11", this has been reversed not just in the USA but all over the world.
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Receiving devices generate no interference. As a licensed amateur radio operator, why shouldn't I be able to modify equipment to work on the frequencies I'm allocated?
Or as a "tech enthusiast", why should I be able to put a better firmware on my router/access point if I so desire?
In the United States, I am. In the EU, not so much, apparently...
Receiving devices (Score:4, Informative)
As a Licensed Radio Amateur you should know that even a Receiving device can generate spurious products if you mess with the firmware.
And no, a Router is not a receiving device.
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Sure as shootin' is a receiving device - if it didn't receive it wouldn't be routing nothin'
I do, of course, assume y'all are talking about wireless routers..
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This is what ISM is for...sort of. (Score:3)
The problem with frequency hopping is it’s hard to keep it from stepping all over someone else’s allocation.
The problem with crypto is it’s hard to tell it from jamming signals.
Why is this a bad combo? Because you’re jamming the radio gear used by lots of deep-pocketed companies at once. Someone will be able to make life unpleasant enough for the FCC to motivate them to track you down.
If you’re going to do FHSS and encryption, don’t be an idiot - keep it in an ISM band.
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The problem with frequency hopping is it’s hard to keep it from stepping all over someone else’s allocation.
No, it actually increases available spectrum. There's lots of band for free use by civilians, and the hopping takes place within that band. When the hops are on the order of a millisecond you can get a lot more overlap than you could fit into the band otherwise and it just sounds a little distorted instead of two people talking at the same time.
The problem with crypto is it’s hard to tell it from jamming signals.
No it's not. Jamming signals are much more powerful than communications traffic.
Why is this a bad combo? Because you’re jamming the radio gear used by lots of deep-pocketed companies at once. Someone will be able to make life unpleasant enough for the FCC to motivate them to track you down.
This stuff is illegal even on the civilian bands open for literal walkie-talkies.
If you’re going to do FHSS and encryption, don’t be an idiot - keep it in an ISM band.
Again, also illegal. The frequency hopping part isn't outright illegal, but the crypto part is. The FCC forbids civilians who aren't police to use any form of crypto radio which doesn't have a published key.
Re:Every week (Score:4, Interesting)
I surely hope I'm not being too paranoid but I'm guessing that the damage won't be limited to the EU countries. Anything that's sold in the EU will probably be the same version that's sold elsewhere just to avoid the hassle and potential legal problems with making two different versions and, say, one of the naughty R-Pis getting into an EU country by mistake. So, potentially, no more Raspberry Pis for anyone (well not any that are all that useful for DiYers), locked down laptops that can't run anything but the OS that came with it for fear of violating the new EU law, the list goes on. Another step down the road to banning user programmable devices and allowing only "appliances" to be sold to consumers.
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https://en.wikisource.org/wiki... [wikisource.org]
Re:Every week (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it's better to live in the US where...they've had similar laws for years now [arstechnica.com]...shit...
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As with the freakouts in the US, it doesn't mean you can't alter the device as a whole, it just means that the OS isn't supposed to mess with certain parts of the radio; eg, the radio has its own control chip that implements the restrictions, and the application processor still tells it what to do.
Compliant devices still work fine with third party OSes.
Just a giant nuthingburder.
Re:Every week (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue is weather radar. Shortly after the FCC opened up the 5 GHz band for unlicensed use, terminal doppler weather radar [wikipedia.org] was invented in response to several airliner crashes due to adverse weather conditions. Unfortunately, it relies on frequencies smack dab in the middle of the open 5 GHz band. So the FCC took the unusual step of revising their rules which opened up those frequencies
The intermediate 5 GHz channels were reclassified as DFS - dynamic frequency selection. Devices are allowed to use those frequencies, but they have to monitor for TDWR. If they detected weather radar in use, they had to switch to a different channel. A few devices actually do this and check to see if weather radar is in use. Most manufacturers just took the easy way out and blocked out channels 50-144 entirely in the firmware. That's why many 5 GHz devices only support channels 36-48 and 149-165. (This can cause the mysterious situation you might have encountered, where some devices can see your 5 GHz network while others can't. Your router supports DFS and has picked a channel between 50-144. Devices which support DFS can see the router. Devices which have blocked off channels 50-144 cannot.)
Early open source router firmwares completely ignored DFS. They would spam over the DFS frequencies, interfering with weather radar at airports if someone nearby happened to load the firmware onto their router. DD-WRT added support for DFS (it's the "weather radar" checkbox in the 5 GHz wireless settings, although it really should be checked by default).. If you install third party firmware and use the 5 GHz band, do the responsible thing and enable this functionality if you're going to enable channels 50-144. Unfortunately, some idiots didn't do this [spiceworks.com], degrading the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars invested into TDWR equipment. It was enough of a concern that the FCC began investigating the need to regulate or ban third party firmware. That's what this is all about. The government doesn't hate you running third party firmware on your router, they're just trying to protect people flying in airplanes from needlessly being killed.
This is why we can't have nice things - a few idiots ruin it for everyone else. I had lots of fun with lawn darts as a kid, but we always treated the target area as if it were a shooting range. Here's an example [fpvlab.com] of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge. Multiply that by a few dozen open source routers near the airport and it becomes a major impediment.
The cleaner solution would've been for the FCC to simply close the 5 GHz band and reserve it entirely for TDWR. But that would've made billions of dollars of wireless equipment obsolete. So the FCC tried their best to find a compromise between the needs of people who already owned 5 GHz wireless equipment, and the flying public. It's the open source firmware authors who were (initially) acting like jerks here, not the FCC.
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The thing about DFS that REALLY sucks is the stupid way it ends up getting implemented... when it's time to do the DFS check, the access point just goes dark without warning for a minute, leaving everything that was connected without connectivity in the meantime.
Why can't 802.11 have an optional extension that allows the AP to tell connected clients, "hey, I'm about to go dark for a minute to do a required DFS check... in the meantime, if you really NEED continuous connectivity, temporarily switch over to 2
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Here's an example [fpvlab.com] of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge. Multiply that by a few dozen open source routers near the airport and it becomes a major impediment.
It feels like these people are basically painting an arrow pointed at their house on their lawn. I'm not saying it isn't hard to track them down, but one would think that after this has happened a few times, by nature of this being open source someone would log a bug in the bug tracker, and now it would be a known problem and the authors would fix it either by restricting those frequencies or forcing a config option where you acknowledge understanding of the problem (as opposed "I have to know the necessar
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Good one! Right up there with "The Right to Bare Arms" or "The Right to Arm Bears".
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Every week the EU plans something that draws widespread condemnation (usually because it's tyrannical). Glad I don't live there.
Every week a slashdot user casts the *hyperbole* spell. It's not very effective. It's hilarious that you think the EU plans anything "every week" much less that it consistently draws condemnation.
Correct what now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, it's overly dramatic bullshit that has no effect on the elections, where people can prevent this crap,
That's the difference between the EU and other places - no amount of elections can "correct" what the EU chooses to do.
It's cruel dictatorship by committee, so no one person is actually responsible for the suffering the machine generates.
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How does "no amounts of elections can "correct" what the EU chooses to do" actually work? As a EU citizen I vote for who will represent my country in the EU Parliament in the upcoming EU elections and in the last national election I voted on who will represent me locally in our local government which is the same people that constitutes my country:s part of the EU Council.
That is the two decision making powers within the EU, one of which I as a EU member can vote on directly and one that I can vote on indire
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You're a citizen of the EU? How is that possible? There's no country called, "European Union". No, you are a citizen (or subject) of your own country. Your country has a representative who is on the council.
If the EU passes rules that you object to or blatantly supersede your country's laws and social mores, what is your recourse? Tell me what safeguards are built into the EU to prevent tyranny of the masses - the "masses" being the council.
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Ah, the aspergerati strikes again.
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If the EU passes rules that you object to or blatantly supersede your country's laws and social mores,
You mean if your elected representative votes to pass a law you don't like...?
Well, do the usual thing, vote for the other lizard next time.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Not the OP, but I too am a citizen of the EU. How is that possible? Good question. First you have to define what it means to be a "citizen". The key part is to be covered legally by a sovereign juridical entity, kind of like the EU which through a treaty has laws, legal frame works, judicial systems, governments, and rights that span the entire geographical area it covers.
Now a bigger question would be is Austria still a country given that it doesn't have complete and total sovereignty over it's land and l
Re: Correct what now? (Score:2)
France and Germany have less than a quarter of the voting power.
Try again.
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It's cruel dictatorship by committee,
Oh is that why I had the option to elect people who are responsible for voting on the very legislation being discussed? I'm constantly surprised. Until now I thought you Americans didn't know what socialism or communism is. Now it turns out you don't know dictatorships either and generally have no political clue at all.
Move the control closer to HW (Score:1)
as it is effectively done in phones, where the radio is controlled by a separate processor.
The radio part of a router could also be implemented in a hard-to-update chip+firmware.
Uh, that's insane. (Score:1)
Everyone can see that this is an obvious tyrannical move correct?
Destroy any modifications that can disable snooping and control apparatus
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Everyone can see that this is an obvious tyrannical move correct?
Nope, it is just clickbait that you didn't understand.
This sounds like it may just govern radion control (Score:4, Insightful)
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It sounds like it's just meant to not allow users to control the radio tranmissions
You mean the transmission amplitude? That's what the rest of your comment implies. But they want to ban people from loading any new firmware, not just from controlling amplitude.
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Except, they don't. You're presuming that Chicken Little is correct about the basic premises of the situation. He isn't.
The radio IC already has its own firmware, separate from the application controller. That is true even if you buy them on the same chip, as with many of the offerings from Nordic Semi. This is about the firmware that controls the radio itself; the part that already is a binary blob you install that allows the radio to work. It isn't about the ARM processor that runs the application firmwar
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The radio IC already has its own firmware, separate from the application controller.
There's nothing in there called an "application controller". Did you mean the CPU?
This is about the firmware that controls the radio itself;
Yes, that's the firmware I'm talking about. I know I didn't specify, but an intelligent person could have determined that from context.
It isn't about the ARM processor that runs the application firmware that you, as a consumer, think of as "the firmware."
You obviously don't know what I'm thinking of. Next time confirm before coming on like a hard-on. Since I used to hack and tweak some of the old Motorola phones, I'm quite well-acquainted with radio firmware, thanks. I used to flash different ones on the regular.
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Old phones (esp. pre-2008) were "single processor" -- they used the same CPU for BOTH the radio AND running general software. That hasn't been the case for YEARS, especially since multi-core CPUs and ARM TrustZone became the norm. For all intents and purposes, the "radio" functions now run on their own virtually-isolated CPU that "regular" software (including the OS itself) can't touch.
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Old phones (esp. pre-2008) were "single processor" -- they used the same CPU for BOTH the radio AND running general software.
Not those Motorola phones. They absolutely had a separate radio processor, which did have its own firmware. It was just technician-flashable, and the technician tools were readily available on the internets.
Re:This sounds like it may just govern radion cont (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like it's just meant to not allow users to control the radio tranmissions, similar to how in the US the radio device has to be FCC-approved, and you can't for instance boost your CB power to 50 watts. If software allows you to turn your router radio up to 11 (like DD-WRT) does, perhaps it is just that component of it they want to control?
There is a difference between "type accepted" and the sort of power I have as an amateur or professional. A Citizens band radio is a low powered unlicensed service. I an allowed to modify or build anything. But hey - if the EU says this is a great thing, the good citizens will comply.
Sounds like the Volksradio is coming back, as the EU starts to demand and enforce complete conformity, and obedience to their benevolent governance. And sure enough, they are out defending this in the threads.
So go ahead and mod me down, good compliant citizens. Differing opinions are dangerous.
Won't they ever learn? (Score:3)
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Indeed, they've learned exactly that lesson; they can control what gets sold in the local stores, and only rare people will go through the hassle to go around it.
This isn't about stopping anything, it is about controlling what the norm is.
So.... (Score:1)
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You mean DAC?
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Translation (Score:2)
As an old Radio Amateur, I can sort of get it... (Score:5, Informative)
...because if everyone can "mod" the devices to let's say "outside" their designated frequency range, we're in for real trouble on the airwaves.
Before the non-radio amateur crowd thinks I'm on the "powers that be" side here, then I've got to tell you where I come from on this. I've been building and modifying radio transmission equipment pretty much all my life as an hobby, and a wet dream of mine as a kid, was to freely be able to build any kind of transmitter and receiver I wanted to, regardless of laws and regulations, but that's not very practical in the real world, the only way to do this legally (and even know what you're actually doing) is to become an electrical engineer with a degree in RF technology, or become an licensed radio amateur, why is that you might ask, you might even ask what the relevancy here is, well, it's not simple to explain - but I'll try my darnedest to explain it:
Imagine you have a piece of equipment that CAN go outside its designated range, and you mod it so you can transmit on a broader range, say - increasing the bandwidth so you can get more throughput and cover more frequency "ground" so to speak.
This can and will create all kinds of hell for existing communication devices, maybe even those used for emergency, alarm systems, medical equipment and much more.
The reason there's an requirement for a technical license to even be able to operate in certain bands (especially with modified devices, modified by you and other experimenters) is that through that technical knowledge you'll gain by becoming a licensed radio amateur, you'll learn how to deal with making filters to prohibit spurious emissions to leak through your own equipment, you'll also learn respect for design and how to avoid making serious mistakes on the airwaves, whether this is digital or simply as in the olden days "analog" with speech / Morse-code (which is very similar to digital transmissions, except, very slow and ..old), you'll respect the band-plans already put aside for experimental use (which you're free to use, under respect for the rules, as long as you actually know what you're doing).
Now, imagine you modified a transmitter to cover so much of the bands that you interfere with medical equipment in a nearby band (frequency), now we have a real problem on our hands that can actually cause lives to be in danger, even if you don't notice anything yourself. You'll be creating all kinds of confusion for those using this equipment, and eventually get caught by your country's FCC team who constantly monitor all frequencies for unauthorized traffic, interference etc. It's hard to explain this to laymen who doesn't know the technology behind this, it's no joke - there are entire careers made out of understanding RF spurious / parasitic emissions, especially those designed in SOHO devices that has to meet the strictest FCC rules in order to be released to the market. Even small modifications can create equipment to misbehave, and you'll have equipment that no longer meets the criteria for acceptable spurious emissions into our wide spectrum of band-plans.
Radio amateurs have for the longest time, been the pioneers of such technology, and there's a reason we're allowed to do experiments like this, because we're qualified to do so (not everyone of course, some I've met, sadly - doesn't even understand the basics, but - at least they had to go through a long course learning about the basics, so they'll at least keep within the legal boundaries of what they CAN and CAN NOT do on the air).
Now - modify the software of your routers ALL you want, this isn't the issue, the issue is when you start modifying your hardware (especially the RF part) to go beyond what it was designed to do, even if you're good at coding - doesn't qualify you to be a RF technician that fully understands this, and this can be a dangerous combo).
RF interference is a real thing, and it's dangerous - only proper knowledge can remedy this, and there must be certain requirements met to ha
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Good comment.
You'd better hope there is an exception for amateurs, otherwise that hobby will pretty much be dead.
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It's all a big "what if".
The reality is there's very little motive for wide-spread abuse. People just don't do it.
The few that do operate outside the allow frequency, well there are already laws to deal with that.
Look at the downside though: suddenly vast amounts of citizen/civic-born innovation are hindered.
It's the RF equivalent of "think of the children".
Re:As an old Radio Amateur, I can sort of get it.. (Score:4, Informative)
Of course you know that as a licensed amateur radio operator in the United States, one has frequency privileges near and inside the 2.4 GHz ISM band. You can quite legally modify a home router for Amateur Radio use.
As long as you aren't in a country where that wasn't suddenly rendered illegal, that is.
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Of course you know that as a licensed amateur radio operator in the United States, one has frequency privileges near and inside the 2.4 GHz ISM band. You can quite legally modify a home router for Amateur Radio use.
As long as you aren't in a country where that wasn't suddenly rendered illegal, that is.
You still have power limits with this equipment. Since spurious emissions are typically a constant fraction of (and sometimes grow more than proportionally with) actual power output, you may well end up causing interferences with your equipment that the original configuration did not.
And at least in my country amateur radio transmissions have to be of trivial matter, not the transfer of important files from point A to point B. I live in a small European country, which most likely did not come up with this r
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Thankyou for an extremely good response - anyone messing about with RF for educational purposes is great, but, as you consider, interference is a real concern and some way to introduce that person to bandplans, licensing, and all the regulated stuff that makes it slightly less fun, but still worthwhile would be good.
Unfortunately I suspect short of a 'want to mess with this and learn stuff? become a ham!' labels on everything, it will be an uphill struggle!!
I remember radio theory in high school (early 90's
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I don't think the objection is to the lockdown of the radio devices themselves. The worry is when these laws come into effect, the manufacturer's response is to lock down everything, including non RF related components. TP-Link responded in this fashion to the FCC passing similar regulation, and Linksys did so as well for all but their flagship WRT series. I think it was resolved a while ago and I think the FCC decided to play ball and clarify the the ruling was only to be in regards to emitting equipment o
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"EU Bad - Anglo good" rhetoric (Score:1)
This was a post by TheRegister .CO.UK which right now, with the UK parliament voting tomorrow on Brexit, should be taken as another anti-EU flame.
The EU has occasionally, over the decades, come up with some really dumb shit but so far only the EU has done anything to protect citizens privacy rights online.
The way this is written it could stop devices like laptops or Raspberry Pi's having their software changed.
No, it isn't.
Its intention is to lock down the frequency and power output of any radio transmission within the parameters that the device passed RF EU approval for.
But spin it a certain way and you can ups
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You mean they increased the barrier for entry to protect established tech companies and sold it to dimwits as protecting privacy?
There's a long road from product development to certification.
Re:"EU Bad - Anglo good" rhetoric (Score:4, Informative)
El Reg has never shown a pro or EU bias in its entire existence.
It tends not to show any biases at all, if you ignore the more recent occasional anti-male article from its San Francisco office.
Basically they hate everybody and operate with all of the cynicism you'd expected and desire from anybody in journalism or IT.
Seems reasonable. (Score:1)
The FCC did something recently in the US as well and there was drama over it. If you read into it carefully it made sense. They want to ensure the RADIO part is as the device was sold as. If radio and Firmware are separate (like Android and co) no problems. If there is no separation ... well you will need to demonstrate you still pass EMI .
the radiowaves are sparse. You cannot impose on your neighbour a fingerprint which causes them outage or even more serious mess with pacemakers or medical band.
Now if a p
It's not like they haven't tried that before. (Score:3)
Weather Radar? (Score:2)
Did this originate with the morons who developed Doppler weather radar? The ones that were too f*king stupid to get their own dedicated frequency for an important life safety service and used the 5 GHz ISM band instead? So WiFi screws with it?
ISM has been a garbage band for decades, what with police radar, door openers, radio controlled toys, etc.
Over my dead router... (Score:2)
Over the years I've exclusively used opensource projects such as "Tomato" to run on my routers because not only are they extremely stable but they're also extremely useful too often having more features than you normally need. And in the case of Tomato firmware (and it's sucessors) often a much nicer interface to boot too. I specifically won't buy any router that isn't supported. My last major router which handles all the traffic in my household is a monster dual 1Ghz ARM Netgear R 7000 router which I ho
Non-compliant gear... (Score:3)
People are making a fuss out of nothing..
Since day one, if you wanted to use radio equipment it had to be Compliant.
And if you modified it, it was no longer Compliant.
So if you want to modify compliant equipment, it is up to you to have it re-certified.
Unless you are a licensed Radio Amateur. Then you can self-certify the continuing Compliance of your Ham gear.
US freedom vs EU laws (Score:2, Insightful)
That person in the USA gets smarter and can even educate people with their results.
Innovation spreads all over the US and more people build and share results.
In the EU laws stop science and nobody smart gets to have the freedom to experiment.
The EU educates people about laws.
People buy a product in the EU and are told how it will be used under EU laws.
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You've got some pretty weird ideas about Europe and some fanciful ideas about your own country.
Silicon valley continues to import smart people from Europe on H1Bs in their thousands because the US makes education the privilege of the wealthy instead of streaming and funding the education of intelligent kids like the EU does.
Who's smarter? Not the USA from where I'm standing.
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