Home Networking

It's a sophistry to geoblock China on security grounds and recommend and upvotes that advice, but then recommend Chinese hardware like TP Link Omada for the bedrock hardware for your home network. Yet I see TP Link Deco and Omada recommended on here every day, and upvoted into positive numbers too.

How could you possibly trust that geoblocking on Chinese hardware even works on their hardware? They get firmware updates from servers hosted in the USA, which in turn get firmware images from China. Obviously TP Link servers in the U.S. don't block China. So how effective is geoblocking if you went ahead and bought your hardware from a Chinese controlled company to save $100?

Same goes for Chinese security cameras. Everyone talks about using VLANs to isolate them, so their being compromised will not "spread" to the rest of your network. But if a compromised Chinese camera has the ability to crack the "root" account on Linux, Android, and IOS, and the "Administrator" account on Windows if left on the same VLAN, then why would it have any difficulty at all cracking the "admin" account on your router, rendering VLAN separation useless? What makes the router OS so much more resistant to takeover from that compromised IoT device versus other OSes?

It's the logic gymnastics that "security experts" on here must do to justify geoblocking China, but then recommending (or upvoting) TP Link Deco and Omada to save $100 that's hard to take seriously. Are they a threat or not? If so, how can you allow the recommendation of China owned company hardware to users with a straight face? Where is the precaution now?

What about smartphones? Smartphones all have GPS tracking, a camera, a microphone, and an Internet connection that's pretty much always on. They are the ultimate spying device that everyone carries voluntarily, even after experiencing events like talking about a certain product on the phone to your mother, and getting ads for that exact product as embedded ads hours later.

We might trust Alphabet and Apple not to sell our information to China and Russia directly, as they actually want to comply with Western laws. But isn't it also logical to believe that Alphabet and Apple sell personalized ad information to "reputable" buyers, who in turn sell it to a company that is degree less reputable, who in turn sells it to another company that's two degrees less reputable, and so on, until it gets to a seller that doesn't discriminate against any buyers, or are a front for the Chinese and Russian government itself?

They might not even need to buy this information through layers of middle men. TikTok has over 100 Million users in the US, mostly as an App on smartphones. TikTok is a Chinese owned company, and are very much a target for a complete banning by the U.S. government, but not quite there yet for everyone else (maybe due to foreign lobbying efforts?). Even with all these warning signs, 100 Million US users do not care or take it seriously, and film you and your family on their App behind your geoblocking firewall.

What about hostile governments using services that are completely legal in the U.S. directly? The same Intelligence agencies that recommend you geoblock Chinese inbound and outbound traffic have also warned that China and Russia use platforms like Facebook, X / Twitter, Instagram, and even Reddit as giant Propaganda and misinformation machines to influence politics and thinking in the West. Even now, these foreign influences still propagate unchecked, with only token "moderation" attempts to combat it (and how do we know we can trust these moderators?). The EU is currently threatening to de- platform X because of lax moderation efforts, right now, in real time.

So go ahead and geoblock China and the rest of the evil countries if it makes you feel better. But it's as effective as trying to keep your kid from looking at porn by blocking his MAC Address on your home network. There are so many other ways for access that you do not control that your single act of defiance is essentially meaningless in the bigger picture. Your personal information has already been packaged and sold to every available buyer, because we were all asleep at the wheel at the dawn of Social Media and smartphones, and did not control that information at all. Anyone and Everyone with an App or cookies were tracking and packaging you. Only recently have smartphone OSes begun to lock down your personal information, but it's far too little a decade too late.

The toothpaste is out of the tube.