Technology

Makes sense.

Insert meme: Throws out of the window~

Almost like it has less to do with security and more to do with securitization of economic competition.

Does it matter now? The alternatives are either Chinese companies, made in China, or filled with Chinese parts.

I'll give China credit, they've stitched everyone else right up, and we slurped it down because we're a sucker for cheap shit.

Yeah, most of those sites end up recommending the same brands over and over, which causes people to buy them and talk about them. I don't want to say, a scam, but it feels... scummy.

They never talk about other brands like Ubiquiti. Which isn't a perfect brand either, but I've never seen it compared. Or even a low end Netgate. It's always TP-Link, Asus, Netgear, Linksys, or D-Link... the same brands that have existed for the last 20 years offering crap. But Ubiquiti, Hawking, Belkin, etc. you basically never see.

I just googled it. Top 3 sites were wired.com, pcmag.com, and reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking (with a top comment pointing to cnet.com and nytime.com). And if you guessed TP-Link was recommended no.1 on all of them, you'd be right. To me, with the absolute garbage reviews on all of them, and the stupidity small sample size, it feels like TP-Link just buys the reviews because customers will read the reviews and buy their garbage. There was a mattress company that did something very similar years ago. The deck is stacked against customers.

And especially scummy, is TP-Link offers some cheaply made, highly marked up garbage that underperforms. They also are notorious for not delivering consistent updates to their routers. Maybe one or two updates, and they certainly don't care if all the features don't work. Just looked up one I bought from them before I wised up, the Archer C5400. 2 updates on a $200 router, that came highly recommended. Checked the v2, and also just 2 updates. I doubt it'll ever see another.

On top of their terrible support and pathetic hardware... they also moved to a cloud SaaS config model. They want you to sign up for an account and use TP-Link Tether. Here's something written up 3 years ago on [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/tbthjj/psa_newer_tplink_routers_send_all_your_web/}

My general suggestion for most people who want something that just works and is easy to use... the Ubiquiti Dream router isn't a bad option. It's not the best, but if you don't want to really get into how networking works, it's a good option.

I gave up on TP-Link. I will never purchase any consumer router from them again. Little to no updates, connection issues that were made worse with an update, features REMOVED with an update, settings wouldn't always stick, which results in a factory reset to get it to do anything. WPA3 just doesn't work. It even would "mysteriously" turn it's DHCP server back on, no matter how many times I turned it off, when it was in AP mode. Friend had the same model and most of the same issues.

I have had better luck with the other brands, but I feel like most of them suck or cost way more than they should.

That's not all. The US government exists to look out for the interests of wealthy americans.

Every dollar spent on a different nation is a dollar that could've been spent on them, in their eyes.

American business owners know that China is competitive because they can provide better products at cheaper prices. Americans would need to invest in making their products better or lower prices to compete with China. Both result in lower profits for owners.

This is why we will never stop seeing FUD against products that offer us a better deal than those looking to exploit us further. It's more profitable to convince useful idiots to "buy american" than it is to actually sell them products worth buying at competitive prices.

They (FCC) forced firmwares being signed so nobody can install their own on the off chance it unlocks TX power or frequencies not allowed by FCC.

It's a good idea, but there's going to be firmware at lower levels (roughly the BIOS) that could still be compromised. It's best to just not buy Chinese hardware designed and manufactured by a Chinese company with no western involvement when you can avoid it.

Apple has been slowly shifting production to India for years now, and the software is made domestically.

Which specific routers that TP-Link makes are the issue?

They are presumably talking about CovertNetwork-1658 and the reason there's no list of routers is because no one has publicly described the vulnerability that is being leveraged.

My guess is that the vulnerability is present on most of their routers. I'm basing that opinion on the fact that previous CVEs issues against TP-LINK have impacted their most popular product lines like Archer and Deco.

It's possible that this is related to CVE-2024-21833 which was open in January of 2024, update in July of 2024, then updated again in late November of 2024.