Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration • Hacker News Board

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#181

Post by smcl » Sun, Sep 20, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #132

smcl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you realise it or not but "PITA" is almost the perfect expression to use for networking equipment by the name of "Arris": " Jonathon Green, a British slang lexicographer who authored The Vulgar Tongue: Green's History of Slang, told me that his favorite rhyming slang word is "arris," which means ass, because it actually goes through more than one round of partially-dropped rhyming. "Arris," he said, i…

Since he's British it should be "which rhymes with "arse", glass only rhymes with ass in the north of England and beyond, and even there they'd prefer arse over ass (a turn of phrase I hope to never use or see again!) Can't get the journalists nowadays.

Ha yeah I suspect he's aware of the pronunciation differences but kept it that way for simplicity's sake.

Also I'm so sorry but "arse over ass" made me laugh and has kinda imprinted on me, so I'm gonna remember whenever I see "brigandish" in HN comments :-D

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#182

Post by shock » Sun, Sep 20, 2020, 11:41 PM UTC

encom wrote: post #170

shock wrote: post #38

I recently bought a couple of Netgear Managed Switches (for Business)⁰ and in their datasheet they list "Local-only management" as a feature. Only after they arrived we discovered that you only get limited functionality in the Local-only management mode, you have to register the switches to your Netgear Cloud account to get access to the full functionality. Reading up on it, this was achieved only after a community o…

>If I had bought them as a consumer, not as a business, I would have returned them immediately. Why would you not send them back as a business?

Consumer protection laws do not apply to businesses.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#183

Post by Pxtl » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 12:58 AM UTC

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #154

Pxtl wrote: post #53

I had a Nighthawk router of some persuasion that was so infuriatingly buggy it took years off my life. A bad router is so maddening that the curse "may your brakes work as well as your firmware" repeatedly came to mind. Never again.

Which one? My R7000 works perfectly fine, since years.

That's the exact one, actually. It would constantly go into a sort of "soft crash" mode where it would continue to run as a wifi router but with more dropped packets and the web interface was inaccessible. It was a nightmare.

I assume I just got a dud, but what a dud. It was such a gradual downward slide into being unusable that it was beyond warranty when I finally figured out it was unsalvageable.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#184

Post by duxup » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 2:57 AM UTC

thecureforzits wrote: post #163

duxup wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LG

Do you HAVE to use the app to use the machine though? Can you just not enable wifi on itand use it like a dumb washer?

The washer absolutely works without the app.

The app provides some benefits, but they're not required.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#185

Post by m463 » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 4:35 AM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #153

m463 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you no longer have to register your ios device - but it is a dark pattern. On the screen to enter your apple id, you don't have a "skip" choice, you have to say "don't have one" and I believe then you can skip setting up an apple id. You can use it like a phone at that point - you can send text messages and make calls, but I don't believe you can install any apps. That said - you must go online - turn on ce…

And apple phones home a lot. I see this sort of claim often, but reliable information about the specifics is hard to come by. Can you share any?

On a mac run little snitch. On a current ios iphone, I'm uncertain but i run an older version of ios with adblockios.

It contacts a whole slew of apple and 3rd party sites. the main one is that it contacts *.ls.apple.com all the time (location services) even with location services turned off. lots of other apple sites. third party is akamai all the time, but also sites like phicdn.net and att.net (I have an at&t iphone). I do not have any at&t app installed.

on macos catalina, you can (currently still) run little snitch and all kinds of services start contacting apple. and new ones have shown up like touristd and rapportd. Every time you try to pull up a help page. Every account you configure, apple based or not. sigh.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#186

Post by starky » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 6:16 AM UTC

molticrystal wrote: post #40

starky wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How handy, that should be plenty of logins to install Fresh Tomato on the router.

I used Tomato until around 2010 where I switched to dd-wrt, then around 2014 went with openwrt and haven't really followed Tomato in the last 10 years. I wouldn't mind going back to where I started and using Tomato again, so I was curious what major thing(s) they've done in the last 10 years and why you would chose Tomato over dd-wrt or openwrt.

I use Tomato because it seems to have the best support for the Netgear routers I've owned. Not much has changed in the way that I use it, other than the GUI has been updated. Fresh Tomato is the only fork that gets updated anymore, and it is mostly bug-fixes and updating the various Linux packages, not new features.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#187

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

distances wrote: post #112

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't legislate morals, but you can successfully legislate many consumer-hostile practices out of existence. Germany was pretty successful when it came to many dark patterns trying to trick consumers into "agreeing" to "contracts".

Dark patterns were successful, or the preventing legislation was successful?

The preventing legislation was successful.

All those "* by using this free trial you agree to pay 19.99/month for at least 24 months" scams went away basically overnight.

The key to this is not to be afraid to aggressively add new dark patterns to the list of banned practices.

An alternative would be aggressively hitting scammers who clearly rely on people missing the fine print with criminal charges for fraud/extortion (when they try to collect on the non-contracts). No idea why that wasn't done - the legal system is usually a lot more resistant to the "well, TECHNICALLY" thing than engineers think.

Germany is really good about these rules. For example, a long list of practices, including mandatory arbitration, is explicitly forbidden (or forbidden in standard contracts) in § 308-309 BGB. § 312j BGB mandates clear disclosure that and what you're about to spend money on. The whole set of § 312-someletter is basically "we found another shitty practice and we're ending it now".

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#188

Post by Sosowski » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 9:43 AM UTC

Recently I found an old TP-Link wall-plug WiFi extender which defaults to a .com domain name for configuration.

All is fine when you don't have internet access, but once you configured it, you'll find out that TP-Link lost access to the config-bound domain and now it's a website full of malware and the config keeps redirecting you there.

And they're still selling these (hopefully with updated firmware)

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#189

Post by devrand » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

dylz wrote: post #33

devrand wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not? I disabled diagnostic and analytics reporting, though it does occasionally ask me to turn it back on. Is there additional telemetry that cannot be disabled?

When they pushed the firmware, iirc the telemetry was done without notice, opted in and enabled by default, and there was no way to actually opt out until _another firmware update after the uproar_

Got it! Thank you for that context. I'm pretty sporadic about updates so I more than likely missed the gap when it was enabled by default and not available to be disabled.

Not cool to do that :(.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#190

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Mon, Sep 21, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #183

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one? My R7000 works perfectly fine, since years.

That's the exact one, actually. It would constantly go into a sort of "soft crash" mode where it would continue to run as a wifi router but with more dropped packets and the web interface was inaccessible. It was a nightmare. I assume I just got a dud, but what a dud. It was such a gradual downward slide into being unusable that it was beyond warranty when I finally figured out it was unsalvageable.

The worst kind of failure mode, hope you lit it on fire or something.