How TELCOs Are Bullying Researchers, an Italian Story.

Those of you following my blog from the beginning, know that I was actively involved in the router hacking scene, mostly during the period in which I wrote the very first implementations of both Telecom Alice ( and this ) and Fastweb routers WPA key calculators and unlockers after the great reversing job performed by another italian group.
Those scripts allowed anyone to unlock hidden services in their routers ( as for the Alice scripts ) and to compute default WPA keys having just basic informations such as mac addresses, etc, demonstrating how broken the end-user security policies were.

Despite the fact I received in the past more than one intimidatory email from representatives of those two companies, I’ve never wrote or talked about that … I was smarter enough to understand that this kind of legal bullshit is better to be ignored, unless you have done something truly illegal.

Today I’ve received a private message from a friend of mine ( I’m not going to write his name ), he asked me to spread the word about something very familiar to me.
The italian message can be found here, here’s (my) English translation, as usual I apologize for crappy English:

Just out of the blue.

There's no other definition for what happened today to our community of http://ilpuntotecnicoeadsl.com/.
It's been years since we develop and port alternative firmwares on home routers from ADB,
Dial-Face Industries, Sercomm, Dlink and others.
All of these routers are **sold** from TELCOs with **strong restrictions** about the freedom of
configuration, restrictions that we seek to circumvent installing alternative firmwares that
we design in a **totally legal** way.

This morning the administrators of our community received an email from a Vodafone Omnitel legal
representative telling them that our forum board contains topics about their new Vodafone Station 2
that are violating their software license and thus are illegal.

They're accusing us of having illegally reverse engineered their software, which is not true at all,
and they're asking us to remove those posts.
Just for the record, those posts are just a bunch of Wireshark dumps of a PPPoE connection between
the Vodafone Station and the optical fiber media converter.

Those "gentlemen" forgot about one thing, THEIR software clearly violates the GPL license, being
based upon the Linux kernel and GNU applications, since they're not releasing sources of their own
customizations, as the license itself requires.

I ask you to share this message, trying to catch the "medias interest", in the name of digital
freedom, against the excessive power those huge companies have.

Thank you,   
A Forum user.

I have nothing to add, this is quite self explanatory … if you’re against this kind of “corporate cyberbullying”, please spread the word as I did.