We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
Posts must be:
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
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.
It's the US. Anyone surprised?
Well no, they tend to copy a lot from China these days.
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.
With our current dotard leadership it's surprising they haven't banned routers completely.
Even they probably realize they need them for porn.
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
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.
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.
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
Very true. Thank you for helping to ground me.
Making the government small enough to fit into every aspect of your life. No crevice too small.
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.
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'.
Every accusation of them is an admission of guilt.
So stop buying any US made hardware.
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.
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
Cisco is such a joke
They are the defacto bones of the Internet purely for their legacy. The company is so glut with inefficiency.
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.
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.
There is an element of hypocrisy in all this because American intelligence agencies were previously caught intercepting Cisco-made routers on their way to customers and updating their firmware to deploy espionage tools.
It's not hypocrisy to try to spy on others while preventing them from spying on you.