You own a Cisco/Linksys home router? You're going to boil at this news!

[GreyGeek]

Ah, this grasshopper has been enlightened.

(It's amazing how, after four years of retirement, technology and lingo have drifted away from me. Now, all I know, and need to know, is Google, Kubuntu and this forum!)

By the way, just a few minutes ago I completed burning DD-WRT e2500.bin onto my Linksys E2500 wireless router. After reading all of that stuff on the DD-WRT.COM web pages I was apprehensive. Then I found this page, http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_E2500, which said "disregard all that stuff you've read in the router database and comments and follow these instructions".

I did, and they worked perfectly!

There was one small moment of confusion in step 6, where it says "Wait 10 minutes until WLAN light turns on."
When I flashed, the progress bar went to about 40% (took about 30-45 seconds) and then the DD-WRT admin web page appeared, and the light was on. I waited the additional 8 minutes anyway and then continued the steps.

I have to say that the DD-WRT GUI interface is MUCH more extensive and better done than the trash Cisco presented. DD-WRT gives me the ability to control the transmitting power. I set it to half the legal power, about 125 mw.

UPDATE: It's a day later and I am tickled pink! I now get FOUR bars in my bedroom (Ok, Steve, I hear you thinking! ) and my wife and I watched an Amazon movie without a single spinning balls interruption. (Down, Steve!)

The DD-WRT make that Cisco E2500 into an entirely different and very pleasant router.

[woodsmoke]

I agree with GG completely on it being a "government wiretap thing".

After all, the Obama administration ADDED to the FICA thing that "economic harm" would be considered "terrorism". The "assumption" being that a guy in a cave in Pakistan was doing it, but due to the "neutrality" of the language, it will most certainly be used to pummel whatever private industry is not in favour of whatever administration at the time, the assumption being, of course, that it will be Obama and the Democrats, or with another Dem president.

And.....note this line from the very end of the article on Adekeye:

All the US had to do was let Adekeye into the country, Justice McKinnon said, but instead astoundingly misled Canada into launching expensive legal proceedings.

Please place in parallel this observation from Charles Krauthammer, about the executive privilege filed by Obama about what can ONLY be termed, "interoffice communication".... the same kind of "interoffice communication" that the libs/dems went BALLISTIC over about Valarie Plame.

All they have to do is unseal the requested e-mails and documents for a judge to determine if they are pertinent. If they are, they are, if they are not, they are not. And if they are NOT then the judge dismisses the whole thing and nobody knows what was in the documents.

However, .....

Krauthammer has a very good knack at being both precise but also..... leaving the intriguing sentence hanging...

woodsmoke

[vw72]

Seems like Cisco relented: http://www.datamation.com/networks/c...uter-fans.html and their cloud method is optional.

[GreyGeek]

Seems like Cisco relented: http://www.datamation.com/networks/c...uter-fans.html and their cloud method is optional.

I doubt that they rolled back the "update" that was burned into the routers. I imagine that they considered the "upgrade" an opportunity to take advantage of it. Now, all they have to do is to CONTINUE to roll out updates SILENTLY. Ditto for other manufacturers who are visited by the government. Unfortunately, most people do not know how to burn firmware or are afraid they'll brick their devices if they try. So, these silent upgrades will continue. But, the folks the Feds are trying to spy on, if it is not Joe and Sally Sixpack, are the very people who have technical ability to burn firmware and replace "updates". The guys who make bombs and the electronic devices that set them off. (My use of the word "bombs" has probably triggered Echelon to mark this post.) Putting on my tinfoil hat, I can see the Feds pushing for laws, or expanding the plain text meaning of existing ones, making it illegal for anyone but the manufacturer to burn firmware.

Consider what the EFF wrote:

By forcing broadband Internet and interconnected voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to become wiretap-friendly the FCC ignored CALEA's plain language and threatened privacy security and innovation.


Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994 to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap digital telephone networks. CALEA forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make wiretapping easier. It expressly did not regulate data traveling over the Internet.


But now federal law enforcement agencies want to change that. On March 10 2004 the Department of Justice (DOJ) the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) filed a joint petition with the FCC. The petition requested that CALEA's reach be expanded to cover communications that travel over the Internet. Thus Broadband providers would be required to rebuild their networks to make it easier for law enforcement to tap Internet "phone calls" that use VOIP applications such as Vonage as well as online "conversations" using various kinds of instant messaging (IM) programs like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

Michael Chertoff, the 2nd Secretary of Homeland Security the admin of Bush. He started his own consulting firm, the "Chertoff Group". He's making millions destroying freedom in this country in the name of "security". His euphemistically named website, safegov.org is his mouth piece. That link has a piece which states:

CALEA requires covered service providers to enable, sometimes with financial assistance from the government, four basic technical capabilities:
(1) isolation of the targeted communication’s content;
(2) isolation of “call identifying information”;
(3) timely transfer of all such information to law enforcement; and
(4) the ability to conduction these lawful interceptions without alerting the target or invading the privacy of others.

Translating CALEA’s requirements to the “cloud” is proving a significant challenge to our government. In part, this is because the law was originally intended to enable lawful interception of the then-principal means of communications, the telephone. As other means of communication rapidly developed, the Federal Communications Commission, over strong objections from privacy advocates, expanded CALEA’s reach to cover ISPs and VOIP providers.
...
... it appears that the Administration is interested in expanding CALEA in a way that would:
(1) clearly compel social networking services and “cloud storage” providers like Amazon, Google, Apple, and DropBox, to deploy, before receiving a specific government collection request, technology enabling real-time, or near-real time, interception of communications; and
(2) prevent communications and storage providers from creating and advertising practical immunity from interception, such as by enabling customers to use encryption for which the provider has no key.

The EFF quote was from 8 years ago. The SaveGove.org quote was from about 8 weeks ago. The Cisco update would have gone unnoticed except that Cisco tried to get greedy. How many other device makers just silently rolled out updates with back doors? The Feds have come a long way in their attempts to infringe what should not have been infringable, the Bill of Rights. They want the providers of Internet services to take it upon THEMSELVES to deploy back doors (i.e. wire taps) BEFORE the government requests any info!

How can the government or the Internet service providers force users to use weak encryption tools, or require users to give them their passwords to strong ones? 5th Amendment anyone? Would the Feds outlaw TrueCrypt, GnuPG, pgp or other FOSS encryption tools because the source code is freely available and back doors would be easily detected? What other FOSS software would they push to outlaw, especially if proprietary software houses greased the political wheels?

[SteveRiley]

Michael_Chertoff... making millions destroying freedom in this country in the name of "security".

Do remember that this very same person invokes belief in his colon when making important national security decisions.

Just think about what colons are full of. That's what his advice is worth, too.

[vw72]

GreyGeek, according the the link I posted, they responded to the back lash by giving the user a choice for the onboard configuration or their cloud configuration. In addition, although not readilly apparant, even without the new "choice," the router could still be set to use the onboard configuration.

If it really was a secret government thing, they could have pushed it out with a backdoor but not upset the user base.