61–70 of 452 posts
What is a router? Really, do they have a definition?
Yeah conceivably you could use this to ban any network device that is capable of routing between interfaces, so lots of switches with new firmware could do it, often terribly, as well as PCs with multiple interfaces. But its probably going to involve intention.
If you actually read the notice, it exempts models that have been approved. So this just seems to require approvals by DOH or DHS ,": Routers^ produced in a foreign country, except routers which have been granted a Conditional Approval by DoW or DHS." I take this to mean it is just adding security approvals for this type of thing to DOw and DHS. It is not a ban of all future models. It's just saying explicitly that i…
Why shouldn’t people have a reaction to a policy that mandates a new approval process on a large class of consumer products?
The FCC maintains a list of equipment and services (Covered List) that have been determined to “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security Recently, malicious state and non-state sponsored cyber attackers have increasingly leveraged the vulnerabilities in small and home office routers produced abroad to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes. Vulnerabilities have nothing to do with…
> Vulnerabilities have nothing to do with country of manufacture. They have always been due to manufacturers' crap security practices. Sorry but this is merely a convenient excuse. Source: I have hard evidence of a Chinese IoT device where crap security practices were later leveraged by the same company to inject exploit code. It's called plausible deniability and it's foolish to tell me it's a coincidence. You're no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Vulnerabilities have nothing to do with country of manufacture. They have always been due to manufacturers' crap security practices. Sorry but this is merely a convenient excuse. Source: I have hard evidence of a Chinese IoT device where crap security practices were later leveraged by the same company to inject exploit code. It's called plausible deniability and it's foolish to tell me it's a coincidence. You're no…
What was the company, and what did they inject?
Personally, I don't make the distinction between foreign and domestically produced routers in America. In fact, I trust foreign produced routers more because the likelihood that they can act upon their surveillance is significantly lower than the current American regime's oppressive and malicious tactics. Therefore, open source routers provides enough transparency to effectively eliminate spyware threats from all angles while being compliant.
I'm especially excited about the Banana Pi because of the transparency and potential of modular upgrades. Whenever there's a network issue, I have to consider whether the manufacturer (American or not) is doing something nefarious. With a Pi based router, I have much more peace of mind with network debugging issues.
What the fuck?! I did not sign up to live in some third world shithole where I can't get first-world networking equipment. I do not want some piece of shit closed-source proprietary netgear ameritrash. FUCK! Give me back my god damn chinese routers! Chinese citizens have more computing freedom than American citizens at this point. What the fuck happened to the land of the free?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you saying that other manufacturers don't do this?
If US manufacturers (or manufacturers in allied countries) do this, legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable. Not so with China. (That is not to say that the FCC change will move the needle on the underlying issue of router security; as some of the ancestor comments have said, lax security practices are common industry-wide, irrespective of country of development/manufacture.)
Oh, sweet summer child. Disclaiming these possible avenues of liability is the main goal of clickwrap "terms of service".
The FCC maintains a list of equipment and services (Covered List) that have been determined to “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security Recently, malicious state and non-state sponsored cyber attackers have increasingly leveraged the vulnerabilities in small and home office routers produced abroad to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes. Vulnerabilities have nothing to do with…
The problem is that "secure firmware" is a relativistic statement. You ship something with no known bugs and then someone finds one.
What you need is not a government mandate for infallibility, it's updates. But then vendors want to stop issuing them after 3 years, meanwhile many consumers will keep using the device for 15. And "require longer support" doesn't fix it because many of the vendors will go out of business.
What you need is the ability for consumers to replace the firmware.
That solves the problem in three ways. First, when the company goes out of business you can still put a supported third party firmware on the device. Second, you can do that immediately, because the open source firmwares have a better security record than the OEMs to begin with. And third, then the device is running a widely used open source firmware instead of a custom device-specific proprietary black box, which makes it easier for the government or anyone else who is so inclined to find vulnerabilities and patch them.