I went ahead and bought some new internet hardware. It sucks to spend money before my gear has died of natural causes, but this might be the last real opportunity to upgrade before backdoors become the norm. If they aren’t already.
Of course they’re banning foreign routers. They want all Americans to have only routers with government backdoors. At this point, backdoor-free routers are a threat to ‘national security’.
This is why open source and open hardware is so important.
And open firmware, especially for routers.
This does essentially mean no Wi-Fi or mobile radios as they’re pretty much all binary blobs.
still doesn’t stop for supply chain attacks, but still a better alternative to whatever shit they’re going to ramrod into “US made” tech.
Every accusation of them is an admission of guilt.
So stop buying any US made hardware.
This tells me any equipment that is classified as acceptable by these requirements is immediately suspect, and should not be permitted to connect to, or communicate with, equipment you need to trust.
I’m well versed in the CALEA capabilities of DOCSIS equipment, hence my comment.
How do you have internet without a DOCSIS modem? Is this a problem of where I live that the only option requires it? Or do you just have a strong firewall between it and the rest of your network (assumably on the router)?
The CALEA functions aren’t in the modem, they’re in the CMTS, the router the modems talk to/through at the head end. I’d expect similar demarcation with other access technologies, but they’re not my area.
I see this new requirement as an attempt, at least partially, to bring CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) into CALEA scope.
My take is they’ve made the network a more hostile environment, and elevated the need and justification to build a more resilient overlay layer of encrypted and obfuscated channels.
HTTPS, QUIC, DoT/DoH and such have been piecemeal attempts which make sense over a neutral network. An actively hostile environment needs to be treated as a dumb pipe, preferably one of many diverse paths.
It’s the US. Anyone surprised?
Well no, they tend to copy a lot from China these days.
except badly.
Or don’t even try too. Wish they tried to copy infrastructure improvements or high speed rail. All we get is more money to corporations to do absolutely nothing
i have my frustration with the Chinese state appartus, but the one thing you can’t say about them is that they’re incompetent.
we can get into talks about whether or not the incompetence the modern american governance mechanisms are illusory in service of kleptocracy or not, but ultimately, the American state apparatus is following the same pattern of dynastic rise and fall you see across the nothern hemisphere for the last 16000 years.
i just hope that for FUCKING once a group will rehash the salt and iron debates and pick salt, like GODDAMMIT why always with the imperialism!?!?
Wealth. That’s why. It’s money. Simple greed. That is why iron. That is why Imperialism
First as a tragedy, then as a farce.
I’m starting to believe a lot of the bad we hear about China is at best overblown and at worst completely fucking made up.
Remember all the articles predicting their doom because they built “ghost cities” and “trains to nowhere” and now they’re all actual cities with employed populations and there is high speed rail everywhere?
Yeah since 9/11 we’ve only had liars in charge seeing how much they can milk all of us, and apparently America really does have great ties because they’re still honkin and we’re still letting em.
Anyway since we can’t tell what’s true and what’s a lie thanks to the “state dept” propaganda I’m just gonna go ahead and say that the most advanced country on earth is probably way ahead of the USA.
It‘s a dictatorship without basic human rights. If you really think ICE is bad then imagine ICE 10 times bigger and several decades older and more refined. That‘s the Chinese state for you. The US is on it‘s way there. That‘s why we criticize them.
I also don‘t see a single aspect where China is ahead of literally everyone else. They have quantity and more and more often people seem to think that means innovation. Like „Sure, university X has the most advanced robots but China is producing 20 different models on a larger scale that are almost as good!“. But they‘re not better, though. China has quality too, yes. But nothing no one else has. Really, I cannot think of a single technology where some institute on the globe isn‘t at least on par with what China is doing. Being the world factory they are often the first to have things largely available to the global market but they‘re never the first to do something.
There is a reason everyone is afraid of industrial espionage from China. It’s because they don‘t really innovate but they will mass produce your innovation before you know it.
There are also ghost cities that basically got demolished, like dozens of skyscrapers one after the other.
Two counties can be bad at the same time, not everything has to be nalck and white. China can suck also when the US sucks. China can even suck despite doing a lot of cool things.
At least they are trying to solve problems for their people. I’m okay with some ideas failing if they keep working at solutions.
Uh oh…
They don’t copy the part where they execute billionaires, unfortunately https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-23/china-executes-14-billionaires-in-8-years-culture-news-reports
Although, if you’re an influential billionaire you don’t get executed but get disappeared for some time, like jack ma, giving the general feeling that they want to control billionaires and not just get rid of them
With our current dotard leadership it’s surprising they haven’t banned routers completely.
Even they probably realize they need them for porn.
At least one person probably
Well, duh, they know how easy is to backdoor those things!
… Because they literally put the back doors there for themselves.
There are routers made in US?
No. Which is the point. Everything has to be approved manually with no specific criteria so they can arbitrarily make the decisions they want.
And in the trump economy, that includes paying a hefty bribe for approval
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I believe it is a little bit worse when a government does that
Yeah but I can just not use an Apple device.
What is someone supposed to do when the only routers available from coast to coast are the ones made by the companies that gave Trump his 30 pieces of silver and allowed his regime to install their NSA backdoor so they can use all the new data centers they’re astroturfing the web in support of to create profiles of Anti-MAGA households for ease of persecution?
This affects firmware too. Not just the hardware.
According to the BBC, the one exception is the newer Starlink Wi-Fi router, which the company says is manufactured in Texas.
This is exasperating.
Cisco, Juniper, and Arista are US companies. The actual manufacturing is doubtlessly somewhere in Asia though.
What happened to small government?
I live in probably one of the reddest states, and it’s always been hypocrisy. Republicans are lying out of their lower lie holes every fucking time they open their mouths.
Every single Republican politician and voter is a purely evil person.
Politician, sure. But people are easily duped, especially when they’re uneducated. That doesn’t make them evil, especially when there’s a multi-billion dollar disinformation network constantly trying to mislead them.
At what point does ignorance cross into willful ignorance? And at what point does willful ignorance become malicious? It’s a blurry line, to be sure.
It crosses into willful ignorance once they reject an empathetic articulation of the information and they become malicious at roughly the same time. Though this is less “becomes” so much as “is revealed to be” i think
When “brown people = bad” is the main reason or doing anything, that makes you evil. I don’t care how much disinformation you’re being fed, at some point you have to use common sense and logic
Very true. Thank you for helping to ground me.
And thank you both for reminding me why I like this place.
🤘
I dont know if I’d say evil but they’re definitely uninformed and ignorant.
They’ve been fed nothing but lies and propaganda and taught that the other side is evil, and if they’re religious it’s exactly the same as being in a full on cult with no bearing on reality.
Sure, some of us like myself were smart enough to realize its a massive grift . not everyone has the brainpower.
It’s always been imaginary. They think that private property is a natural right, so a government with lots of soldiers and police is small.
The founding fathers loved small government that defended their teensy little slave plantations. They passionately argued about freedom with other rich white men.
Everyone who honestly wants small government eventually realizes that none was ever necessary at all.
Making the government small enough to fit into every aspect of your life. No crevice too small.
The small government means they want the government to not stop them from doing 1 very specific state rights
And the original argument over state’s rights was about whether a slave state could coerce a non-slave state to send escaped slaves back. So, one state’s rights overriding another’s.
Small government meant, as usual, the other guys.
Their government can piss away as much money and get as big and invasive as they want.
Wait we did what? Cisco, the Food Distribution Company?
Sysco is food, Cisco, as in San Fran_cisco_, is the tech company.
San Francisco really let us down from there days of the hippies.
Now being the harbingers of Destruction and what do you call it, slavery.
No, it’s that guy from Deep Space Nine.
No, it’s that thong th-thong thong thong guy.
No, the FCC no longer allows the import of music by Sisqó.
What? No, Cisco Systems, the company that makes routers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco
So like what router should I be using that isn’t going to be spying on me? Been feeling it’s time for an upgrade my current ASUS router was a higher end model when I bought it but it is like 8 or 9 years old now
Pfsense or opensense
Sorry this article kinda lit a fire under my ass to get a new router, so I’ve been researching. Was looking into this and it feels like openWRT might be the way for me personally, the simpler and cheaper, while doing all the stuff I need it to do is more appealing to me.
Also thinking about going with a router that has the longe range 802.11ah HaLow 915mhz, I’ve got a big house and the wifi is bad in one area. I’ve also been dabbling in the sub ghz meshtastic and meshcore devices and I’m thinking it could be a fun thing to experiment with.
Few videos for reference Sub gHz 802.11ah Halow Wifi https://youtu.be/-soMNhNqEVc
Video that touches on why I think openWRT might be a better fit for me than pfsense or open-ended
Let me know yall’s thoughts.
The key to good WiFi is to turn the power down and put a lot of APs.
Don’t go with long range. Bury that idea.
I turned off wifi on my router and instead use multiple wifi access points connected to the router by ethernet. It’s way easier to get good coverage and speeds that way.
How did you wire that? Long cables going everywhere?
Yep. I’ve only got three APs, and one is by the modem and router, so it’s really just two long wires, and one of those is to my office, which is also where my main desktop PC is, so I needed that wire anyway. The other one was annoying, and I had to drill a couple holes for it as well as exploit a laundry chute, but all that was ten years ago, and having pretty complete wifi coverage since then has been worth it.
The one weak spot is the kitchen, where there’s coverage, but it tends to be a bit slow. I just decided to upgrade my bedroom AP to Wifi 6 (from AC), though, and I might try switching the old unit over to mesh mode and mounting it to cover the kitchen. Mesh involves two wifi links so it’s a bit slower, but the connection strength will probably make up for that. It’s worth the experiment, at least.
Opnsense is great, I run it on a N100 mini pc I got from AliExpress for a couple hundred NZD. Doesn’t break a sweat up to 8gbit
There is an exemption for products that the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security have granted “Conditional Approval” after finding these devices do not pose such unacceptable risks. Router makers can apply to the FCC to get on the approved list.
Wow, what an insane coincidence it’s exactly those two departments and no one else. Golly, I wonder why. (Edit: To clarify, if you’re going to do this stupid, posturing bullshit, I “get” the DoD because of the NSA, and DHS has CISA. Just really no one else? Seems like consolidating more control.)
I mean… supply chain hardening has been a concern for most of the three letter agencies (and governments around the world) for years. There are very serious concerns over how basically every NIC comes out of a factory in China and what the implications of that are.
If DoD actually do have a list of vetted and hardened products, that WOULD be a very good baseline for if you care about security at all. Less so from the US government, but that can then be compared against similar lists from other countries.
And considering that basically every TLA has the same concerns, if those orgs are willing to spend their budget? DoE and the like ain’t gonna complain.
If DoD actually do have a list of vetted and hardened products, that WOULD be a very good baseline for if you care about security at all.
Only if there’s independent verification that they are actually hardened and not backdoored. Certain US TLAs have been known to lie about these matters-- consider NSA’s attempts to slip backdoors into some crypto standards a few years ago.
I do care about cybersecurity, but I’m well past a point with the Trump administration where it’s possible to take even the few good-sounding things coming out of it at face value. I don’t believe for a second Trump or anyone in his cabinet values cybersecurity over: jingoistic “Made in America” posturing to his audience, enforcing a monopoly on spying on US citizens, giving as much power as possible to the two departments he’s most heavily and illegally abusing, and using this as more “trade war” bullshit where multinational corporations can personally bribe him to get whitelisted.
I might celebrate this if we had a POTUS who hadn’t demonstrated over and over for a decade that everything they do is a ploy to turn the US into a kleptofascist hellscape.
I agree with you; your concerns are rational. I don’t think you or I share them with the Trump administration.
Any word on what the fee for that application will be?
Isnt tp link or Deco a US company?
TP-Link is Chinese.
Welp, so much for OpenWRT on cheap devices designed for routing (even though flashing the firmware to install it probably got rid of any backdoors anyway); now we’ll have to resort to OPNSense on overkill PC hardware.
Came here to say… US (and everyone else) would be way more secure if it mandated routers use OpenWRT and funded a few red/blue security engineers to work on it full time
almost like its not about security
