As someone who works for a Fortune 50 communications company I really do
not understand what the problem is. Subscriber units whatever they maybe
are just that "Subscriber Units". In the case of a mobile unit such as
a Cellular Telephone the only thing that anybody really cares about is that
one does not change its identity by cloning it. With GSM phones this is even
bent with personal identity cards that can be inserted into the device. In
the US one has the CALEA Wiretap Laws but they mainly apply on the infra-structure
side of the telecommunications network. It is just plain silly to make subscriber
units only telco provided and installed. The reasoning is that it requires too
much labor for something that can be done in an error free way by any moron off of
the street. For a mobile unit many countries require some way to tell where
it is broadcasting from but again that is done from the infrastructure side as
a subscriber unit could be modified to lie about its position and therefore it
is not even worth the effort to have it report it.
If your German telco does not understand the economics of the problem perhaps
you should consider how to replace it.
> > And even in Germany, it's only true of drivers that do everything in
> > software: most modern ISDN cards have the actual connection smarts in
> > firmware and do not need the same certification (well, they do, but not on
>
> Wrong, the development goes in the other direction, make all in software,
> because it's cheaper and the CPU's have enought power to handle it.
> Also newer external ISDN devices with serial (standard or USB) are
> quit simple and have no D-channel stack on it. Most USB ISDN TA simple map
> register access to USB frames.
> > the OS driver side: now it's a hardware certification issue). So only a
> > rather small subset of the ISDN code is actually affected by these rules,
> > and its' fairly easy to say something like "for these cards, it is illegal
> > to connect the machine to the phone line if this part of the code has been
> > changed".
> >
> Agree, and this is done so.
> > I think it's basically just one or two drivers, and a subset of the driver
> > at that.
> >
> > And quite frankly, let the people vote with their feet. Civil disobedience
> > is not always a bad thing, as shown by people like Gandhi. Bringing down
> > bad phone monopolies may not ever count as highly as getting the British
> > Empire out of India, but let people decide on their own whether they
> > should just bend over and take bad rules.
>
> But I think, that some basically rules are necessary for a worldwide
> operating net.
>
> >
> > SuSE may as a company decide that it cannot legally ship untested drivers,
> > for example. They probably don't want to open themselves up to being sued
> > by Deutche Telekom or whatever it is called. But even Germans are
> > individuals - all the folklore to the contrary notwithstanding, and should
> > be allowed to make their own informed judgement.
> >
>
> But again, how I said before too:
> Your are right, the ISDN development according kernel development gone the
> wrong way in the past and I and all other I4L developers like to change it
> now.
>
> Karsten
>
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