Two possible reasons:
They agreed to installation of American spyware, probably not limited to models sold in the US, or they paid their dues to Trump, and he called the FCC.
First winner of the Netgear Peace Prize to be announced shortly.
It’s obvious: the reason is money
Gonna be really funny when it’s revealed in 5 years that Netgear routers have a backdoor for the Chinese govt and the US okayed it because of the money the Trump admin got.
It’s literally the type of corruption that was claimed China would do for the last 4 decades.
I don’t think Netgear has any link to China
Just where they are manufactured
Except they don’t even bother with the table anymore.
“Corruption” is the word you were looking for.
Yes, but that would take work.
This is tech journalism. If evidence connecting something can’t be Googled in 30 seconds, it’s just an area of speculation.
This tells me Netgear probably bent the knee and kissed the ring.
and paid the bribe
paid that troll toll.
Or opened its backdoor.
“Had its backdoor opened” rather. It’s the Epstein class we’re dealing with here.
Corruption is pretty obvious these days.
It may always have been, its just more obvious than before.
Yeah this. They’re not trying to hide it anymore. Just 10 years ago corruption may have required journalistic effort to uncover, now the admin yokels shout it from the rooftops, hoping to “trigger the libs”.
Did anybody ever confirm if standalone wireless access points are subject to this weird FCC ban thing? Because, like, you can make your own router out of an old computer.
The FCC ruling prohibits the sale of new models of consumer router. It doesn’t forbid the continuing use of existing routers or, if I understand it right, the continued sale of models that were already on sale. So you can continue to use existing models as WAPs or routers. But when the tech and the security moves on the FCC wants the USA to be left behind.
I don’t think the FCC ban is really effective anyway. I was able to easily order a foreign-made router recently from the same reseller I’ve used in the past.
Also even if they did police the retailers for router sales, I doubt anybody on eBay is going to give a shit so there will be lots of routers for sale there.
The ban is on giving fcc license approval to new models, so stuff that’s out now can still sell
Spyware preinstalled. Has to be.
Well netgear has a stellar reputation for screwing up their firmware horribly so if they are involved in implementing the implant it absolutely will be noticed.
Are they better than they were 2 decades ago?
Cause last time I had a netgear router, they screwed up their hardware too… Fucker got so hot that it literally liquefied its plastic shell.
Is feature
Makes sense that it would be one of the shittiest corps :/
Who makes good consumer network gear? I feel like the two big names (NetGear and TP-Link) are both awful
Generally speaking for routers, if you can get it at Best Buy, it is of poor quality, and if you can’t, it requires more expertise to use than most people have.
The quality of the router is not the biggest problem, though. Many routers now phone home and require you to provision them through the company portal, which strongly indicates they’ve got a back door to your traffic if they want it, and if you read their ToS, they give themselves permission to use it.
I’m not suggesting they’re hacking you or doing identity theft, but they are looking over your shoulder for things they can learn about you to make money, and in the future, they could potentially make money by collecting government bounties, since they’ll know who millions of people are and where they live.
ah so don’t buy a netgear router because the US Government will be listening in/watching. got it.
Do you really think they weren’t already?
Right, do we not remember PRISM? Edward Snowden is still living in exile in Russia.
They don’t need to tap your router when they already tap the routes.
And likely have hardware backdoors anyway.
Sounds like netgear routers are now 100% confirmed to be compromised with backdoors instead of just being probable
Time to flash the old Netgear router with some open source firmware.
Yep, but unfortunately it’s not always as straight forward as it may sound. Plus, with routers becoming more difficult to acquire, it’ll only get harder and harder to pull off. But there’s OpenWRT and dd-WRT that work with a pretty decent range of routers as well as ASUS Merlin for many ASUS routers. Then, if you want to get nerdy with it and build your own router from an old computer, there’s OPNsense and pfSense. Eventually it’ll come down to these two if the ban is longterm and you want any semblance of obfuscation online…
I tried getting into the nerdy side. I have an old PC with only one NIC, but apparently it needs two in order to bridge to a WiFi AP? That makes sense, but I don’t have an old PC with two NICs. Also, my NIC doesn’t support as much bandwidth as I have supplied anyhow. Sad times.
Edit: the desktop is old enough that the mobo doesn’t have the slots I need. Effectively, I have to get a new old burner PC. It’s an old ThinkCentre with a dvd player built in.
Great, now I just need everyone else to do this, I can have the greatest most rebust setup imaginable, what am I gonna use it for? To talk to the other two people with similar setups?
I assure you there are multiple people on this thread alone that have this setup. It’s not like you somehow can’t access the public internet once you’ve got a homemade router.
And I know who you are cause I who you aren’t.
Sure boss. I’m running pfsense as we speak, so like I said, you can access the public internet just fine with a homemade router.
for no obvious reason
Surely a non-AI slop pile of money illustration could have been used instead?
This one even commits the cardinal sin of presenting itself as a transparent image but really just has a checkered background baked in.
What? Its common knowledge that Humpty Dumpty graces the front of the $0000 bill
Maybe, but I went with the first image that gave me an actual image added w so I did not have to upload it anywhere.
Alas, you have been punished by downvotes. Just gotta remember no slop for next time I suppose.
