[CUWiN-Dev] Re: CUWIN on Meraki Mini

[David Young]

On Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 01:53:29PM -0500, Bob Keyes wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, David Young wrote:
> > These days, I am solely interested in comprehensive documentation on new
> > WLAN chips, such as Realtek and ADMtek used to provide me.  These days,
> > it seems that no WLAN maker is willing to play ball.
> 
> Indeed, and it's frustrating. I think the problem is that instead of
> having an on-board controller to handle communications and communicate
> with the host, all computation is offloaded to the host in order to save a
> few pennies.

I have just read this same complaint on another mailing list.  I don't
understand it.  Wireless NICs offload scarcely more work to the host
than an ethernet adapter does, and I think that the division of labor
between host and NIC is intelligently made.  Compared with ethernet,
for a WLAN the host has to do a little more bookkeeping, and it has to
generate and interpret a greater variety of layer-2 packets, but that
does not amount to much computation at all.

> Doing so means that there is no longer any protection to keep
> a user with full documentation to run the device in an illegal way, such
> as on channels which they are not able to use legally, or to change
> spreading codes of DSSS so that the NSA can't listen.

I see what you're saying, but there has been slim protection against
a determined person operating his WLAN illegally since the Intersil
Prism II.

Keeping the documentation secret has not protected against running the
devices in an illegal way.  By any rational analysis, the documentation
ought to be open so that developers need not take a stab in the dark
in order to program the power envelope or the frequency synthesizer for
compliance with regulations.

> It is not that the
> manufacturers care per se, but rather they are afraid of losing the FCC
> certification they need in order to sell their equipment in the US. I
> mention this in light of US laws, but other countries probably have
> similar, if not more restrictive, laws.

To the best of my knowledge, the FCC has never spoken in favor of WLAN
documentation secrecy.  I don't think that it bothers them.  They have
bigger fish to fry.  If a million WLAN widgets ship that will, unbeknownst
to users, tune themselves to a weather radar channel and never vacate it,
then that device should not have been certified, and the FCC screwed up.
If some programmer tunes his certified WLAN to a radar channel through
painstaking, deliberate action, and then produces harmful interference,
then the certifications process is not necessarily broken, but they may
need to enforce the law against some programmer.

There is a lot of dysfunction in the WLAN industry, and I believe that
their reticence with documentation is mainly an expression of that.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933 ext 24