On Thu, 2010-09-16 at 10:34 -0400, Fulko Hew wrote: > On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Jon Masters > <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > > Well, the US law of the land says that you can't listen in on > > telephone communications frequencies either. And the CFR advice and > > FCC implementation is to require that designers of radio equipment > > make it intentionally difficult to modify that equipment to listen > > in on such frequencies. > The law in Canada is/was a little different. That's nice, but most of these manufacturers seem to be US based. > The issue with WiFi isn't so much the ability to 'listen' to traffic, > its the fact that not all 'defined' frequencies that the hardware is > capable of using, ARE legally usable in all countries. I was simply pointing out that David's assertion of it not making sense to have closed source was taking the black-and-white "it's legal" vs. "it's not legal" as opposed to the complex ways of the implementation. > Now how does a device/laptop 'know' what country its current operating > in is another story. Its not as if it has a built-n GPS! :-) I believe the Windows drivers are shipped for different countries and you're supposed to say which country you're in. I suspect that's allowed as being reasonable enough of a sanity check. Yes, I see how one can then argue that makes everything else moot, because the user could just download the wrong version, etc. etc. but that applies some kind of extra logic that probably doesn't actually exist in the FCC, etc. Jon. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
