Actually, It's FCC regulations that forced IBM to Whitelist their Wireless
Cards.
I have a possible solution, but it involves using non-free utility once and
then you can remove it once the job is done. (well, I only know of non-free
utils for this, there might be free ones that I'm not aware of)
Anyway, it involves hacking your Bios, my friend bought a Thinkpad T420s for
his networking class and his networking card and it didn't work with certain
protocols with GNU/Linux. so he bought the best wireless card he could find
and it didn't work because of the whitelist, so he hacked his bios and now he
uses whatever he wants. However flashing a modified bios could brick your
laptop and the method I know of involves using non-free software, but if I
was sure it would work, I would recommend it because your bios isn't free
anyway and I would like to know if anybody here actually uses coreboot.
Out of convenience and and paranoia that the process could eff up your laptop
because something went wrong, I recommend the USB adapter.
