Excerpt:
EU decides firmware lockdown
Mostly unnoticed the EU commission decided on a new bill which is supposed to forbid the replacement of the operating system (firmware) on devices with radio transmitters (for instance wifi routers): http://www.heise.de/netze/meldung/Funkregulierung-Angriff-auf-alternative-Software-2803189.html The US regulation agency FCC is currently discussing on a similar law. With this motion innovation in this area would be immensly thwarted. Initiatives like Freifunk but also commercial providers like DD-WRT (www.dd-wrt.com) or Hotsplots (www.hotsplots.de) would be unable to install their own firmware on wifi devices. Even laptops and PCs with wifi would be affected if they were running Linux.
Firmware Security 