EU's Plan To Ban Sale of User-Moddable RF Devices Draws Widespread Condemnation

'The Register is reporting that the EU is looking to block users from
tinkering the firmware/software of their RF devices. This seems to
have been very under reported, with a fairly short consultation period
that has now expired. It could force manufacturers to lock down phones
and routers etc to stop you from installing the likes of Lineage OS or
OpenWRT. The way this is written it could stop devices like laptops or
Raspberry Pi's having their software changed.

From the report:

The controversy centres on Article 3(3)(i) of the EU Radio Equipment
Directive, which was passed into law back in 2014. However, an EU
working group is now about to define precisely which devices will be
subject to the directive -- and academics, researchers, individual
"makers" and software companies are worried that their activities and
business models will be outlawed. Article 3(3)(i) states that RF gear
sold in the EU must support "certain features in order to ensure that
software can only be loaded into the radio equipment where the
compliance of the combination of the radio equipment and software has
been demonstrated." If the law is implemented in its most potentially
harmful form, no third-party firmware could be installed onto
something like a home router, for example.'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/11/1835239

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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