Originally Posted by RMerlin
If you can think of any simple and reliable way to only enforce it for US owners then I'm open to suggestions...
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Originally Posted by Trebuin
This is me being in the gov't and being a bit bureaucratic:
For asus to cover itself, start a country select screen for initial setup. To show that they're fully trying, after the router has a connection to the internet, do an ip location check to determine the country. That covers everything that ASUS can be held responsible for. Granted, this can be worked around, but not easily. Should the gov't want to enforce further on ASUS, that would be like the gov't going in and creating a website blacklist or even a whitelist for service providers to follow.
If ASUS is doing their job, the gov't will go out and fine those who are violating the regulations individually. Face it...that is more income for the gov't than going after ASUS.
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Originally Posted by RMerlin
Unfortunately, the FCC already requested that manufacturers take steps to ensure that end-user cannot change this themselves, and they even ask manufacturers to document the exact procedures they are using to ensure that this is the case. So leaving it up to the end-user wouldn't comply with the FCC's requirements. The FCC leaves no real wiggling room there.
Take a look at the FCC forms, especially that second PDF:
https://apps.fcc.gov/oetc...age.cfm?id=39498&switch=P
They aren't just "suggesting", they are "requiring" things out of manufacturers here. And the FCC wording is scaring me enough to fear that we might someday be facing manufacturers being forced to completely lock down the firmwares, preventing any third party firmwares from being flashed into devices.
That's why I am being *VERY* careful there, despite what some of you might think. I'm not going to help killing third-party firmware projects.
And locking down third party firmwares isn't that far-fetched. Most embedded device manufacturers are already doing so, through the use of encryption and signing keys. The WDTV for instance (since that's one case I'm quite familiar with) requires that the Linux kernel be signed with a private key, making it impossible for any third party to flash a modified Linux kernel.
So if the FCC decides that router manufacturers aren't doing enough, and starts requiring device lockdowns against third party firmwares, it will be game over for all of us. You won't just be missing a few extra mw or a few extra channels, you will be missing *everything* that can be obtained through Asuswrt-merlin, OpenWRT, Tomato, DD-WRT...