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Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

kb.netgear.com

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Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#191

Post by hinkley »

Silhouette wrote: post #180
hinkley wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how hard it is to build your own switch these days? Maybe something built around a Pi class SBC?

Building a switch is (relatively) easy. Building a switch that can offer acceptable performance in a box with enough ports on it to be useful is harder. It's not immediately obvious what advantage you'd gain by doing that anyway, since you can just buy a white box switch and run your own software on it.

There are chips out there already, aren't there? I think the Turing Pi board has a switch built into it (and an ethernet chip per slot, which is maybe not so good)

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#192

Post by robotnikman »

Sosowski wrote: post #188

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)

wow, thats kinda horrifying. I wonder how they even let that slip

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#193

Post by dylz »

devrand wrote: post #189
dylz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(.

I'd argue the continued "ask you to turn it on" just in the hopes that you might eventually do it to shut it up is also a terrible antipattern.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#194

Post by Silhouette »

hinkley wrote: post #191
Silhouette wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a switch is (relatively) easy. Building a switch that can offer acceptable performance in a box with enough ports on it to be useful is harder. It's not immediately obvious what advantage you'd gain by doing that anyway, since you can just buy a white box switch and run your own software on it.

There are chips out there already, aren't there? I think the Turing Pi board has a switch built into it (and an ethernet chip per slot, which is maybe not so good)

There are chips out there already, aren't there?

Yes, those are what you'd expect to find in the white box systems I mentioned, and most branded off-the-shelf switch products for that matter. But if that's what you need, I'm not sure what the advantage is to building your own hardware instead of buying one of the ready-made options. It seems like you'd need to have quite eccentric requirements before it was worth seriously considering designing and building a whole system of your own instead.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#195

Post by Silhouette »

m463 wrote: post #185
Silhouette wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ipho…

I wonder whether the ls.apple.com servers are connected with security features like "Find my iPhone". But then, I'm not sure exactly what Find my iPhone does if it's turned on but location services are disabled.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#196

Post by nokya »

gruez wrote: post #13
nokya wrote: post #9

Reminds me of years ago, when Microsoft started forcing players to be online when playing on xbox...which was minutes before I decided I would never need an xbox :)

didn't they backpeddle on that? https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-pulls-a-180-reverses-xbo...

They did, but that only came after a huge backlash by gamers.

In my case, I perceived this as a signal that Microsoft was interested in monetizing my data when playing video games (e.g. schedule, hours spent, progression, overall cognitive capabilities, etc.) to third parties that will use this data without my informed consent (not to be confused with the consent given to Microsoft to "share with partners").

I still find this totally unacceptable today.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#197

Post by shifto »

msh wrote: post #177
jimbob45 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who buys a router/switch/dongle once a decade and doesn’t follow the networking meta, who do you buy from?

Ubiquity and mikrotik for the personal / smb stuff.

I love Mikrotik/RouterBOARD gear but I would not recommend it to someone who hardly uses any networking equipment. The interface is far from straightforward and new users mostly get overwhelmed by the functionality they offer.
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