This is old news, but Fon gives out free wireless routers (Finnish) to all Finns who request one before 24.12.2006. The La Fonera is “free” as in “free beer” – you don’t need to pay a single nickel or a penny for it. Nope, not even for the delivery. It comes hand-delivered to your front door and they also bring you a bouquet of flowers with it! OK, well they don’t bring you any flowers, but it is totally free (as in beer). I ordered mine just before December and got it last week.

The deal is that you have to share your WiFi connection with other registered users. That’s pretty cool, because if there are a lot of Foneros out there, then you have a good chance of using a Fon connection for free when you travel. You can use maps.fon.com to check out Foneros closest to your location. Tech.am has some “real statistics” of Foneros worldwide, claiming that Fon isn’t actually as widespread as they let you believe. Well I don’t care if there aren’t any Fon hotspots in Bangkok or Cathmandu, there are some in Helsinki and that’ll be enough for me.

The La Fonera is “free” as in “free beer for a limited time only”, but how “free” is it as in “freedom of speech”? (See “Gratis versus Libre” if you are still confused.) The La Fonera wireless router uses the open source OpenWrt firmware for embedded devices. It’s nice to know that my Fonera router is running open source software. If I want to, I can download the source code for OpenWrt, hack it, share my hacks with others, and install it in some other device. The Fonera router is therefore “sort of free” – but it’s not free for you to hack and do whatever you want with it. It’s like a piece of free software locked up in a cage. Anton Demartini writes:

“What I mean is that perhaps, leaving la fonera open, and freeing the possibility for anybody with skills to reflash it, to enhance it and, why not, to correct bugs along you, could be a great benefit also for FON business.”

I completely agree. It would be much smarter If I could just use my hardware of choice, install more features on the router and provide a better service for the Foneros that connect to my WiFi. It would be possible to create a free wireless network similar to Fon, which is open for all registered users, but gives the users more flexibility with their hardware and software.

The bottom line is, I got a free router from these guys and I get to use WiFi for free when I travel, so I should not complain. However, I do suffer from the “free all software” syndrome. I just hate to have a piece of free software on my device, which I cannot use as I like. Thankfully, there are some solutions. Jauzsi explains how to open up the device and attach a connecter to allow ssh on the device. As far as I know Stefan Datenbruch was the first to use shell code injection to free the device. The exploited weakness has been fixed by Fon, so that hack doesn’t work anymore, but it worked as inspiration for this hack, which works like a charm. Follow the hack and then just SSH to your La Fonera, enter password “admin” and behold:

Next it’s up to you what you do with your unlocked Fonera. If I come up with any hacks of my own, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Update: There’s now a third hack for firmware version 0.7.1 r1. If you’re feeling especially white and nerdy today, check out gelPlog’s instructions on how to recover a bricked Fonera.