31–40 of 121 posts
The software answer would be easy: use OpenWRT or any other *BSD based alternative, but what about the hardware? A quick search for WAN interfaces for PCs returned nothing.
TP Link is a Chinese company. I won't trust them personally. In China's current political status, it is impossible for Chinese companies to reject the autocratic government's requests for surveillance. You may endup in jail or even get killed.
This is true of the US too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intell...
Thus, I would prefer the US to China in this regard.
I remember reading in the UK government's security assessment of Huawei that one of the issues is not necessarily data being sent to bad places or backdoors in the software, it's that the engineering processes behind these devices/software are completely unable to protect against any sort of supply chain attacks. The sorts of things they highlighted were: no version control, no code review, production builds happenin…
Is this stuff not par for the course? Everything hardware/embedded in my experience is like a decade or two behind the current norms for c/c++ programming. What I never understood from that audit, was this code quality unusual? I didn't get the sense they audit European and American companies - so sure they looked at the source and said "lol your code sucks" but there was no baseline for comparison
But it sounds like you know the situation better - maybe you have better context. I've been curious to know from someone more familiar with the subject
The software answer would be easy: use OpenWRT or any other *BSD based alternative, but what about the hardware? A quick search for WAN interfaces for PCs returned nothing.
That's before installing OpenWRT! This kind of shenanigans make (once again) the case for 3rd party post market FLOSS firmware to be installed on every device I own. Sure, I spend some extra time researching which router/AP/phone/ereader/smart appliance will be compatible with OpenWRT/LineageOS/KOReader/Tasmota/ESPHome/etc., but I feel more confortable this way. I have more trust in a bunch of people doing this for o…
You could also buy an SBC with a few network ports and use that as your router.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/the-ars-guide-to-bui...
TP Link is a Chinese company. I won't trust them personally. In China's current political status, it is impossible for Chinese companies to reject the autocratic government's requests for surveillance. You may endup in jail or even get killed.
So hypothetically as a western activist at risk of govt coercion you'd trust Cisco more? Statistically, you very likely own a Chinese manufactured router while using it to tell others here not to do the same.
It would be highly interesting if there would be a website where you could type in the name of a product (e.g. sime Cisco) router and it would give you a detailed decomposition of where and by whom is parts where made. Something like (highly simplified) : - CPU design: Company X - CPU manufacturing: Company - RAM design and manufacturing: Company Z - Overall remaining logic: Cisco
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One alternative could be, instead of buying a router, getting a single board computer designed to run whichever routing software you like. Banana pi is an example that comes to my mind. You'd need to get a case, and it won't be as neat as a commercial router.
I would love to replace these "routers" with a normal computer. The thing is these computers would need special ports for either phone lines or fiber optic connections, as well as built-in modems. I've never seen a computer with this sort of hardware built into it. Even on dedicated network cards I only ever see ethernet ports, nothing compatible with whatever it is my ISP is using (SFP?). Decades ago in the dial up…
If you want a dedicated OpenWRT device Mikrotik would be my suggestion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a lost cause. The router should be treated as hostile and shouldn’t be allowed to know anything if possible. DNS over HTTPS and that SNI encryption stuff should be used.
How do you plan on blocking ad servers with DoH?
[0] Edit: An online account for the mobile application, not the web interface of the router itself.