fon equipment arrives

17 years ago, mid-October | Leave a Comment

My Fon hardware arrived today. It consists of a “La Fonera +” wifi router and a “La Fontenna” antenna. I have to say I haven’t bothered to open the boxes yet at all. My biggest concerns are with the company behind the whole idea and the lack of any real security on the devices.

A number of times various representatives of fon have claimed that fon is an opensource company and that anyone can reflash the hardware with additions etc if they want. Well neither of those is true. Fon is not an opensource company, they don’t know the meaning of the words. They might use opensource, but they don’t seem to understand that there is a difference. In terms of the software side, Fon are as opensource as Tivo. They have met their obligation to allow access to the source code, which they used from openwrt , but the hardware only allows images signed by them to be flashed. Incidentally, they didn’t really make any effort to publicize that you could download the source and were indeed in breach of the GPL prior to doing so.

So, I’m sitting here with my Fon hardware wondering if I should bother. I started out doing this because I wanted to be able to roam about and have internet access wherever I could find a Fon router – thinking about the GTA02 from FIC and being able to build nice client which would connect whenever it could and tunnel over ssh just to be sure of a little bit of security and privacy.