Someone correct me, but, isn't a journalist supposed to have independent corroborating source/evidence no matter how solid one sole source is? Is that basically where he missed the "mark"?
Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
81–90 of 238 posts
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#82Yeah, at this point I'm taking Krebs off of any alert or recommendation lists. Appreciate the Mea Culpa, but it's not like he's been making stellar decisions before this problem.
It also doesn't read as an apology, but an acknowledgment that he was given bad info from a source.
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#83Ok no security breach. Can I set up a new ubiquity device without registering with them at all now? Been told that you can delete the cloud registration after the set up, but that’s still unacceptable.
yes. You do not need any cloud login at this point.
They saw the light :)
I have an older device (first in 5 Ghz I think) and I was beginning to think I should upgrade it to .
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#84It's great that he retracted his story but the way he did it isn't so great. In particular he's removed his older incorrect stories and replaced them with a redirect to the retraction. Thankfully the Wayback Machine has archives https://web.archive.org/web/20220223015405/https://krebsonse... https://web.archive.org/web/20220711220855/https://krebsonse...
Speaking from experience with these things (although in my case, the articles we were forced to remove were absolutely and completely 100% accurate -- but the company that acquired us wanted to settle all outstanding lawsuits and ended up caving so that the transaction could close), this might have been terms of the settlement or whatever it was he came to with Ubiquiti.
In our case, because our articles were in fact, factual, we were able to re-iterate and even quote, as part of the legal filings, aspects of the original reporting as part of a story that was in response to the removals themselves, but the content at those original URLs was replaced with a notice that the articles had been removed because of litigation with our former parent company.
The fact that he didn't (or hasn't) scrubbed the stories themselves from the Internet Archive is a good sign (I think we had to remove our stories from the Internet Archive, though I do know that individuals did make archives other ways).
I'm pretty opposed to suing journalists for the act of doing journalism and even though I'm a big fan of Ubiquiti products, I still don't love this sort of tactic. That said, it does seem clear that these stories were not correct and at the very least, flawed because of the single-source who was not a reliable narrator (and admitted to lying to the press), so in an ideal world, these stories would have been retracted anyway.
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what more do you want from the guy? He's a guy who writes about hacks. He got "hacked". At the very least I am curious to know more of the story.
If you can call it that. Seems more like a convenient excuse.
He was duped by a con man. Everyone is susceptible to SE, even smart guys like Brian. A case can be made that it is the most difficult challenge/vector in cyber security.
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#86There was a lot of discussion from ex-Ubnt employees in a January 2021 thread※ related to outsourcing and incompetent management. From what I've read, they still show ads for their products in newer Unifi Controller web interfaces and don't have a way of disabling tracking. But now that the Krebs retraction has occurred, my brain doesn't know how bad/incompetent Ubiquiti is these days. Is there an updated-for-2022 so…
It's solidified incredibly over the last year. It no longer requires centralized login, no longer shows ads (or you can opt out of them. I don't see it one way or another). More importantly, the network infrastructure has gotten much much better. I haven't had any stability issues other then testing our new early adopter firmware, and the first versions of policy based load balancing have landed.
> It no longer requires centralized login
Thanks for the update. I have a couple of UAP-AC-Lites and an EdgeRouter PoE, but the recent "cloudiness" began to set my teeth on edge, and I've been loath to upgrade my controller.
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
>but what more do you want from the guy? By the time the December story was published, it seems that Krebs knew full well that his source was the person implicated in the crime to begin with. I would like to understand why he thought it was responsible to press forward while obfuscating this fact, and how he will handle similar situations moving forward. His thought process there will help inform me as to whether or…
many of Krebs's sources are criminals, often dropping their competitors info in Brian's lap as a way to get ahead. Brian's a willing and witting participant in this behaviour, even encourages it, because it gives him more stories.
Yeah, this reflects my views too. He's using the veneer or pretext of journalism and reporting the truth in order for him to cover sloppy sourcing.
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#88Reads like a lawyer wrote this for him, and is still way too late. It was pretty clear early on that his source was a bad actor.
Even if he actually wrote this post himself, it feels like its a result of the ubnt defamation suit against him.
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#89Ubiquiti is so worried about suing Krebs meanwhile their brand reputation has turned to mud due to the quality of their products, both from my own experience and the general consensus I've heard online. If this incident had never occurred I still would have stopped recommending and using their equipment.
The problem from my end though is, who really competes with them? No one else offers the same level of control at the same (or even close) price point.
Nobody competes with them as 'Apple for networking', but MikroTik is if anything a bit cheaper and better on the actual specs etc. - just without the snazzy UI and easy GUI (highly-G) config.
There's probably a lot of people who'd love Ubiquiti gear ('gadget nerds', Linus Tech Tips viewers, gamers, etc.) to whom I wouldn't recommend MikroTik, but to anyone who's.. idk, heard of iptables, I would.
All the gamer-marketed WAP/routers with a million antennae are somewhat competitors in the former category too I suppose.
Re: Final thoughts on Ubiquiti
#90It's great that he retracted his story but the way he did it isn't so great. In particular he's removed his older incorrect stories and replaced them with a redirect to the retraction. Thankfully the Wayback Machine has archives https://web.archive.org/web/20220223015405/https://krebsonse... https://web.archive.org/web/20220711220855/https://krebsonse...
What would have been a better way to handle it? From personal experience, I've overlooked header/footer retractions on material before and referenced things only to have the retraction point out to me later.
Complete removal of the article isn't ideal, and it's less error prone.
I appreciate that the old articles aren't 404'd, they redirect to the retraction so any other sites linking continue to work.