In response to this post being over 10 years old: I dont care how old this post was, it downgraded the "impossible" to "highly improbable" and was the solution to a 3 month long issue. ( A 1 in a million chance of success is astronomically greater than an absolute zero chance of success.) I had an ALFA adapter AWSU036AC with the RTL88xx chipset, that was no longer working after a kernel update. No matter what I tried it simply would not work. Months went by. Wound up using a git checkout command to switch branches and got it working again. Awesome!!! Right?...WRONG!!! While the fix that was applied got the dead adapter working again, from that point forward, I could no longer use apt to update my Kali machine . It just spit out a missing key number and said it couldnt verify a signature. Thought I was going to have to do a fresh install. That would have Suckithed Muchly but, then I found this post, got the gist of the process, and was up and running again. In the end, I bought a different adapter with a better quality chipset. But this post saved invaluable data from the depths of a fresh install. !0 year old post? I dont care if it was created when Darpa first got the internet up and running. It still held its informative value. Thanks for keeping it available!!