Reply to his email and tell him the article gets a lot of things wrong,
quotes people who haven't fully understood the issue, and makes or implies
false claims about the campaign. Let him know that he should contact the josh
at the FSF if he wants the full scoop. Or get on the mailing list.
The author gets a lot of things wrong. He NEVER talked to the Save Wifi
project or the people who are actively investigating this issue which
includes software developers like Adrian Luis (who *actually* worked on some
of the impacted device chipsets), manufacturers, multiple Qualcomm employees
current and ex, the FSF, the EFF, lawyers involved in prior FCC regulations,
OpenWRT developers, LibreCMC developers, mesh networking groups, and others.
The people the author interviewed for the story were inappropriate, wrong,
and did little more than make good sound bytes for the story backing up the
impression being presented that it was a non-issue.
Is it a proposal? Yes. That entirely misses the point though. You don't wait
until its passed to fight it. It becomes an near-impossible fight to win at
that point. If you don't want to fight the proposed rules fine. But what do
you have to say about the rules which have already in place now? Should we
ignore those too and pretend it isn't an issue? Pretending this is a
non-issue or outright ignoring it won't result in a solution to the problem.
The FCC's stated 'position' is irrelevant if the rules for manufacturers are
resulting in the locking down of devices. What the FCC is doing is 'double
talk'. Within the same quote the FCC has indicated that they both don't care
if there is third party firmware loaded, but then goes on to state as long as
it complies with the rules, which ultimately is why you can't load the third
party firmware. The way the rules are manufacturers will institute digital
locks and are *already* doing so. In the very quotes within that article form
one of the technical people quoted they admit to there being a problem still
AND nobody ever said there were *only* proposed rules that are a problem.
It's a much bigger issue.
