Control of the routers Control of online identity What could go wrong?
It could be worse… we could be living the alternate watchdogs legion timeline… where Albion wins.
Still need to wait for more details on what Netgear agreed on with the FCC to get the conditional approval. Otherwise it is hard to evaluate if this is a good or bad thing.
And looks like netgear is off my list of trustworthiness. Used them for 20 years. Best get looking for a new one.
So you now can be absolutely certain that Netgear is actively and openly giving fascist authoritarians what they want.
At least before you could be fairly certain it was just the secretive three letter guys that roughly knew what they were doing at least. Now it’s even the blatant dumb fucks in charge.
The cool thing is that you can make basically any combination of parts into a router if you install Linux or BSD on it. Not terribly helpful for end user consumers that will get shafted by this, but at the end of the day it’s just a small computer.
Otherwise, smuggle some “foreign routers” in from Mexico or Canada like it’s the prohibition era?
This seems awfully convenient for everyone, but the consumer.
Definitely will have no backdoor or monitoring installed as default.
It’s not clear what makes Netgear’s currently foreign-made routers safer than, say, an Amazon Eero 7 or a Google Nest WiFi Pro.
This is all evidence that it’s not really about safety. It’s a clumsy attempt to strongarm tech companies into setting up factories in the USA. It may also be an attempt to create an environment in which it’s easier to install US government backdoors on every home router.
But how hilarious it is that Google and Amazon, already bending the knee to the emperor, did not get a pass.
TrendNet is far superior and based on Torrence anyway. Netgear and Linksys are junk anyway. Get yourself an open hardware platform, or something that can run OpenWRT. Skip the corporate manufacturers who all kind of suck.
MikroTik over here.
Do they run openwrt?
I have 2 of them running openwrt, one is my main router. WiFi radio doesnt work though because of broadcom.
Not the ones with Broadcom chips.
Every netgear router I own does.
Not surprising . . . . .and this still does nothing to help domestic network device production in the US, since Netgear outsources their manufacturing to Taiwan.
Sounds like a non-tariff barrier to trade that other countries should bring up in trade negotiations.
The very same trade negotiations where all other countries have basically taken the stance that “we’ll just grin and bear it and wait for three years until he’s gone”. The EU is currently accepting 15% tariffs on their goods and mandating no tariffs in return.
Er, there’s at least 5 consumer router manufacturers that meet the new requirements. Interestingly, one of them is TP-Link.
lol, IIRC a government agency said TP-Link is not trustworthy.
Translation: they refused to allow us to inject telemetry into their firmware.
That’s what makes it interesting 🤔
