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by adrr 3338 days ago
Putting in backdoors is sure fire way to kill US based mobile phone producers. Criminals will just use foreign produced phones and only way to counteract that is to outlaw those phones. Can't wait till they criminalize having certain firmware on your phones.
2 comments
Corrado 3337 days ago
I had a slightly different take on the issue. If you require U.S. companies to include backdoors (or whatever word the FBI comes up with) then those companies will simply move operations to another country. Silicon Valley will dry up and innovation will happen somewhere else. You can already see the seeds of such a movement; when researchers are afraid to present at a conference for fear of being arrested[0], or a company is being forced to do something it doesn't want to do[1].

These things are not conducive to a growing, free nation. Our current leadership talks about bringing jobs back to America, but this course of action is forcing companies to move elsewhere, and taking their jobs with them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...

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jjawssd 3338 days ago
It's already a violation of the law to import and sell routers with unlocked firmware
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mnw21cam 3337 days ago
Um. So, if I have a laptop, running Linux, with a built-in ethernet port, and plug in a USB ethernet adaptor, it is suddenly illegal to import it?

Crazy.

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jjawssd 3333 days ago
No
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abritinthebay 3338 days ago
Isn't that due to FCC regulations. It's not illegal if you work out how to do it yourself (hard, not always impossible).
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Larrikin 3337 days ago
Why is this illegal?
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SXX 3337 days ago
Because if you can control or modify radio firmware then it's can usually operate outside of certified range and power. Most of routers use same hardware for all markets while radio regulations are different. So limits are enforced per-country in software and it's easier for manufacturers to completely lock down devices.
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noir_lord 3337 days ago
Yup, I'm in the UK and dd-wrt allows me to push my router power output far beyond the legal spec (since the actual router can support that but is software limited).

I didn't because I'm a good neighbour and it's not a massive apartment.

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