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Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

kb.netgear.com

41–50 of 197 posts

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#41
post #2

> You can login and access all features through the local browser UI 3 times without registering the switch through your netgear.com account. How generous, for a device that people buy (not rent) from them, and pay actual money for (not receive for free). And apparently Netgear didn't even feel the need to bother including any contrived excuse as to why this is being introduced. What a time to be alive.

All low end proprietary network gear is going managed by cloud. Ubiquiti on the soho side and now consumer. Open source is the only equipment you can trust to not adopt this model as it’s much more profitable than shipping a box once every five years.

I would posit that MikroTik is so far not doing this insanity, and price-wise is not far off from NetGear.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#43
I was gonna buy a new DOCSIS 3.1 netgear modem for my gigabit service. Guess I won't be doing that now. I'm tired of this type of bullshit.

It's exactly why I'm leaning really heavily towards Mikrotik for all of my networking gear at home. These types of devices are user hostile, bad for the environment, and set a precedent for a type of world we shouldn't want to live in.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#44
post #32

My new clothes washer has an app. It requires access to location, and phone settings or the app closes by design. I don't think this stuff stops without legislation.

And on top of that I guarantee they'd start sending lawyers if you hack your own device.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#45
post #13
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...

Even if they did, deciding to do it in the first place tells you something important about them. For some people, that said "do not ever trust these evil fuckers, they'll sell you out whenever they can do so without too much public backlash..." This it the tech industry version of politicians dropping bad news as 4:59pm on a Friday.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#46
post #32

My new clothes washer has an app. It requires access to location, and phone settings or the app closes by design. I don't think this stuff stops without legislation.

I don't think that one could say that is acceptable under the App store review guidelines if that was for iOS.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#47
post #32

My new clothes washer has an app. It requires access to location, and phone settings or the app closes by design. I don't think this stuff stops without legislation.

You can't legislate morals. Don't depend on the government to solve your problems, vote with your wallet.

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#48
post #2

> You can login and access all features through the local browser UI 3 times without registering the switch through your netgear.com account. How generous, for a device that people buy (not rent) from them, and pay actual money for (not receive for free). And apparently Netgear didn't even feel the need to bother including any contrived excuse as to why this is being introduced. What a time to be alive.

What is the benefit/incentive for Netgear? Why are they pulling such a move?

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#49
post #47
post #32

My new clothes washer has an app. It requires access to location, and phone settings or the app closes by design. I don't think this stuff stops without legislation.

You can't legislate morals. Don't depend on the government to solve your problems, vote with your wallet.

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".

Re: Netgear Firmware Requires Online Registration

#50
post #32

My new clothes washer has an app. It requires access to location, and phone settings or the app closes by design. I don't think this stuff stops without legislation.

Many Bluetooth actions are tied to the location permission on Android, because you can use Bluetooth to locate the user through beacons.

The downside of this is that you can' distinguish between apps that just want to use Bluetooth, and apps that are trying to get your device location through location services, and users are trained that "bluetooth app = location permission is legit".

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