Slashdot Mirror
'Economist' Calls For Open WiFi Specs
DavidNWelton writes "An interesting and well thought-out call for Wifi manufacturers to open up their specs, at least partially, written by The Economist. 'So it is hard to see what the problem is beyond a dog-in-the-mangerish desire not to give anything away. Time to open it up, boys.'"
This guy saw something that he can consider "closed" and decided to write an article saying it should be "open" just to get people to agree with him.
Kind of like a Slashdot karma whore.
I'll have to try to read it all again.
I talk about stuff.
The ads on the page make my IE take 99% of the cpu.
**Broadcom and Atheros say that making the interface information public would be illegal, because it could allow users to change the parameters of a chip in ways that violate the rules for using unlicensed spectrum (for example, by increasing its power or changing its operating frequency). That is a worry, but it depends on rather a conservative interpretation of the law. The current rules apply to so-called "software-defined radios" (where the ability to send and receive signals is modifiable on the chip), and do not apply directly to Wi-Fi. Also, by supplying the data, manufacturers would not be held liable if a user chose to tweak the chip in unlawful ways. And in any case, if the firms are really worried, they could release most of the interface, keeping back those features that are legally sensitive.
Nor is the interface information commercially sensitive. Engineers are not asking for the computer code that drives the interfaces, merely for the means to talk to them. And having the interface information in the public domain should eventually result in more chips being sold. So it is hard to see what the problem is beyond a dog-in-the-mangerish desire not to give anything away. Time to open it up, boys.**
why would not "software-defined radios" apply directly to wifi? because it doesn't say wifi specifially? gimme a break.
would you expect that they could sell itrip with a dial and extender that you could use to boost the output to 100wats, and not get in trouble with fcc?
and of the " Engineers are not asking for the computer code that drives the interfaces, merely for the means to talk to them." bit.. you would still need that computer code that drives the interfaces for the 'interfaces' to work at all. the code the 'engineers' would like to write would need to talk through the properiaty code, or is he really suggesting that the engineers would be totally rewriting all the software - and that the things would still work as intended?
just make the damn linux drivers, or build the windows drivers so that they're easy to interact with for use in other os'ses as well..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
this don't make no sense.
either:
1. the information -is- "commercially sensitive"
2. the companies in question have some lame policies - in which case they will lose the business to the competition
3. the article isn't accurate
or
4. something else entirely (to cover my ass)
Vous pouvez pousser ce traxiod vers le haut de votre squalox.
Hmmmm you might have found a loophole in mod law. O.K., If this post gets +4 or lower than its true as +4 or lower posts are the truest and most authoritive and insightful posts on slashdow that are actually worth reading.
Christian Sandvig of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has been studying the brouhaha, believes regulators ought to enforce more openness.
That's the problem right there. He should have been studying the brouhehe as in 802.11e. For those of you not in the know BROUHAHA stands for Bandwidth Radio Optimized Universal High Availability Hotspot Access or IEEE 802.11a.
BROUHEHE, naturally, stands for Bandwidth Radio Optimized Universal Hybrid Enhanced Hotspot EQuality or IEEE 802.11e.
Sam Leffler's MadWifi is an example of coming to an agreement with a company and producing a really good driver while keeping the 'secret sauce' secret. Yet Atheros isn't given credit in this article. This doesn't seem fair to me.
Also, It claims that these wifi chipsets are not Software Defined Radios -- well from what I can see, they are indeed SDRs. So it makes sense to restrict knowledge of things that allow people to mess about too much. And of course the government needs to be able to detect your signal so they only allow a few spreading codes to be used and make sure there's no way for the user to change them.
Yes, I'd like to have the details of Atheros and other wifi SDRs but that's not practical. What IS practical is opening up everything needed for compatibility reasons.
I don't seem to suffer the same fate when blocking the offending javascript using a hosts file.
It seems that in this case
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
does the trick.
(If you prefer you can use 0.0.0.0 instead.)
It's The Economist, it won't get slashdotted, so no need to put up the text here.
Computer chips for "open-spectrum" devices are a closed book
TELECOMMUNICATIONS used to be a closed game, from the copper and fibre that carried the messages, to the phones themselves. Now, openness reigns in the world of wires. Networks must interconnect with those of competitors, and users can plug in their own devices as they will. One result of this openness has been a lot of innovation.
Openness is coming to the wireless world, too. Cheap and powerful devices that use unlicensed and lightly regulated parts of the radio spectrum are proliferating. But there is a problem. Though the spectrum is open, the microprocessor chips that drive the devices which use it are not. The interface information--the technical data needed to write software that would allow those chips to be used in novel ways--is normally kept secret by manufacturers. The result could be a lot less innovation in the open wireless world than in the open wired one.
Advertisment
Take, for example, the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN), in Illinois. This group is trying to create a so-called meshed Wi-Fi network. Wi-Fi is a wireless technology that allows broadband internet communication over a range of about 50 metres. That range could, however, be extended if the devices in an area were configured to act as "platforms" that both receive and transmit signals. Messages would then hop from one platform to another until they got to their destination. That would allow such things as neighbourhood mobile-phone companies and a plethora of radio and TV stations, and all for almost no cost. But to make such goodies work, CUWiN needs to tweak the underlying capabilities of Wi-Fi chips in special ways.
When its engineers requested the interface information from the firms that furnish the chips, however, they were often rebuffed. A few companies with low-end, older technology supplied it. But Broadcom and Atheros, the two producers of the sophisticated chips that CUWiN needs if its system is to sing properly, refused. Nor is CUWiN alone in its enforced ignorance. SeattleWireless and NYCwireless, among other groups, have similar ideas, but are similarly stymied. Christian Sandvig of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has been studying the brouhaha, believes regulators ought to enforce more openness.
Broadcom and Atheros say that making the interface information public would be illegal, because it could allow users to change the parameters of a chip in ways that violate the rules for using unlicensed spectrum (for example, by increasing its power or changing its operating frequency). That is a worry, but it depends on rather a conservative interpretation of the law. The current rules apply to so-called "software-defined radios" (where the ability to send and receive signals is modifiable on the chip), and do not apply directly to Wi-Fi. Also, by supplying the data, manufacturers would not be held liable if a user chose to tweak the chip in unlawful ways. And in any case, if the firms are really worried, they could release most of the interface, keeping back those features that are legally sensitive.
Nor is the interface information commercially sensitive. Engineers are not asking for the computer code that drives the interfaces, merely for the means to talk to them. And having the interface information in the public domain should eventually result in more chips being sold. So it is hard to see what the problem is beyond a dog-in-the-mangerish desire not to give anything away. Time to open it up, boys.
That's rich coming from a magazine that doesn't publish the names of its journalists.
My company recently purchased a TopCom WiFi card here in Norway. It did not work initially with the embedded OS we are developing with, so I contacted them and was told if I wanted they would send me the specs so we could write a driver. However, we ended up going with a different card that was already supported to save time. So, get a TopCom card and code away!
I can certainly understand why the companies would not be so willing to submit to this request. This sort of request would not be handled by some $10/hr tech support weenie in Bangelor. This would need the attention of perhaps a system archetect, possibly an ASIC/HW designer- or software engineer. These people's time is very valuable and limited.
As one of the above- I would certainly not want every customer with a request to suck my valuable time away. That is what Slashdot is for.
One word, "support".
if manufactures openly release information necessary for interoperability regardless of what we (as geeks) think customers will expect support.
Manufactures already (often) take a anti-linux stance if linux drivers are produced, simple becuase they do not want to support there product via someone else implimentation of it.
If I use a freely developed driver etc I know that the manufacture should not be expected to support anything other than the hardware, we need to build this a global view that the public takes as common sense/granted
First of all - I have an Atheros chipset WiFi board down in my server that is currently doing little but sucking milliamps as the Linux drivers are unstable as sweaty nitro. I'd *LOVE* to see Atheros release proper programming specs for the chip - as an embedded software engineer I could then fix the damn drivers.
/usr/src/linux/drivers/802.11 is a different issue - the user can trivially change the card's output power and operating frequencies.
That said - folks, it ain't a-gonna happen. The FCC , DTI and other regulatory bodies around the world are very clear about this - for a product to be type certified, it must not be easily modifiable by the end user to operate out of the allocated frequency bands and power specifications.
Consider the recent Notice Of Forfeiture against the Pilot truck stops for selling amateur radio equipment that could be modified for use in the Citizen's Band frequencies by moving a jumper. Whether the jumper was set or not was unimportant - the fact that the radios could be trivially modified to operate outside their allocated frequencies was enough.
The arguement that "The card + the drivers as shipped cannot operate out of spec, so that combination can be type certified" only works when the user is not give the source for the driver! That is why the card manufacturers can ship Windows binary drivers - the user is not trivially able to change things. A driver which has source under
And I am sorry folks, but that is a spectacularly bad idea. For an example of why, just listen to the Children's Band within a hundred miles of any major city - it is one big heterodyne squeal and spatterfest because of all the morons who think "If 90% modulation is good, then 190% modulation must be BETTER!"
ESPECIALLY with a complex modulation scheme like 802.11 uses, you CANNOT safely just rail the power levels - the amplifiers have to have a certain amount of headroom in order to faithfully reproduce the signals, and if you turn the gain up too far, you will start to run the amplifiers into compression, and distort the signal - and a distorted signal will have LESS range than a properly modulated signal. And you cannot tell the signal is properly modulated without a signal analyzer - and that is about US$20K or more (I know, as I design them!)
Or consider the recent Slashdot post about the guy who could not use his WAP in his apartment, because of all the other WAPs in the building. What was the first piece of advice he received? "Turn it up, D00D!" So then what happens? Nobody can use the band.
There is a GOOD REASON that there is regulation of the RF spectrum - it IS a shared resource that we all wish to benefit from. However, all it takes is one jackass to screw it up for everybody in the area. One child peeing in the pool once is not a big problem - but if you let one kid do it, the pool turns yellow pretty damn quickly.
Now, if the card manufacturers would stop trying to do things on the cheap, and would put a microcontroller on the card to control the RF section, and would either put flash on the card to drive the micro OR release the binary of the micro for free redistribution, THEN this wouldn't be a problem, as the user-modifiable driver would not be able to make the card go out-of-spec (and this would not be a violation of the GPL as the code for the micro would not be linked against anything - it would be data that is stuffed into the card at init, possibly by a userspace program in response to a hotplug event). However, the card manufacturers would rather "save" the money (even though the incremental per-unit cost of embedding a micro into the ASIC that implements the RF modem is essentially zero).
To recap - I am ALL FOR Free Software drivers for hardware: I've bitched at ATI for the poor support for their video cards, I've bemoaned the poor Atheros WiFi drivers, I've cussed at more crap drivers that I can count! But unless you repeal the FCC's (DTI, or whatever the TLA is in the reader'
www.eFax.com are spammers
Is there any 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi LAN card (either PCI or PCMCIA, not something built into a motherboard) out there that is truely Open?
I dont mean some driver someone has figured out by reverse engineering, I mean a card where the manufacturer has released the specs and/or the driver code.
What I want to see is for someone to build a PC with all the features one would expect for a decent linux setup using only hardware components where either any driver code required to access the full features of the device is released by the company (firmware that runs from a ROM chip and/or that runs on a seperate CPU on the card doesnt need to be open for the hardware to qualify) or alternativly, enough specifications are released to enable someone to completly re-create said drivers.
It should have (in addition to the regular hardware features):
802.11 Wireless WiFi lan
CD/DVD burner
10/100 ethernet (most motherboards include this anyway these days)
Video Capture Card that has inputs for all the common standards (including the standards used for High Definition Digital cable/sattelite/free-to-air). Does anyone make a high definition capable capture card that supports that CableCard stuff? If so, that would fit perfectly here. If not, there is almost certainly a market for such a thing from those making PVR boxes.
Such a system (even just a list of bits to buy to pull it off would be nice) or systems (e.g. one for PVR use with the video capture card and one for use as a desktop without the extra bits) would be a great thing IMO.
Related to this, a list of companies and/or products that support open operating systems in various ways.
Each product would have one of these designations:
Totally closed, doesnt run on linux at all
Runs on linux only though closed binary driver (e.g. nvidia gfx stuff)
Reverse Engineered open driver exists for the hardware.
official company written open driver exists (the companies and hardware with this designation would be the ones that open-source people could then patronise)
The Economist should give its contents away for free on the web.
It is hard to see what the problem is beyond a dog-in-the-mangerish desire not to give anything away. Time to open it up, boys.
The next pasture is always greener
When the manufacturers refuse to open up the specs for their hardware, then there's an implicit understanding that they will at least supply working (closed) drivers of their own.
So I may not be able to get the device to work under Linux, or some other OS that wasn't listed on the box, but at least I'll be able to run it under Windows, as advertised.
Unfortunately, the driver for my particular card (Netgear WG511) is one of the worst pieces of crap that I've ever had the mispleasure of having to use.
By way of example, when run under Win 2K, it doesn't "remember" the settings, such as WEP keys, unless you're running as Admin. Netgear's advice has to be seen to be believed - they have a web page that tells you that you need to run with Administrator privileges to avoid the issue, and ON THE SAME PAGE, tells you how dangerous it is to run with admin privileges...
This same piece of crap utility loads itself into the system tray at startup, and continues to soak up processor time for no readily apparent reason - - you can kill it, and the wireless link continues to function.
This same utility also regularly sends packets out to numerical addresses on the web. Spyware, who knows?
In summary, if the manufacturers can't or won't supply working drivers, then the whole product they're selling is essentially fraudulent - they're promising something that they're not delivering.
So I believe that they should be FORCED to open the drivers.
That's why I think the entire "open" movement should start to go into hardware big time. Develop and sell open hardware in competition with the closed source guys. Next big thing maybe, it's a logical extension of FOSS. Yes, much harder, but we've seen some improvements in tech that are making design and manufacture easier in a lot of ways, printable circuits, etc.
Yes, I know chip fab is still very expensive, etc. Baby steps is what I mean right now.
You need to become better at reverse engineering, either by looking at the circuit, or looking at the object code of the drivers that are available, that's all.
That means that the OSS drivers as shipped must have the correct information to transmit as the FCC demands.
If YOU change it, that is another matter, but not the fault of the manufacturer.
Also, Atheros seems to think they're in a bubble as far as mfg's go, as other manufacturers such as Senao, turn conventional Prism2.5 cards into what Atheros avoids in the the first place, output adjustable cards. So far, the FCC hasnt ordered them to stop doing what they did to Prism chips, or the cards to be recalled - Atheros just has something to hide. This card is what I paid for, why should you prevent me from cranking it up to its maximum capability?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Can I reprogram an Atheros chip to do Bluetooth? What about GSM?
For all those bashing the economist...
Its a really great magazine, and what they said should be taken with some serious thought..
In the end, they just want to increase innovation and what they are asking is a logical step in the right direction.
WiFi was designed for small networks. instead of trying to "tweak" it to do something it was not intended to do (i.e. increase tx output power), just wait for WiMax, which has a broadcast range in kilometers.
Vote for Pedro
Well, there are cards that are not Software Radio's yet have been "reverse-engineered" to operate "out of spec". Take the hermes chipset from Orinoco/Lucent/Agere/Proxim for example. It's trivial to add all the ability to use all 14 channels onto cards - soon it will be possible to change power rx/tx values too. Dig it : http://www.andrewhakman.dhs.org/orinoco/ http://geocities.com/lincomatic/software.html/
http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
The chipset firmware is binary, but that doesn't count w.r.t. GPL licensing.