no obvious reason
Could it be related to Netgear being manufactured in Vietnam Thailand and Indonesia to avoid China tariffs and that somehow got them through an audit? I only ask if the overall unwritten goal is to avoid China.
I would love to see the US rekindle the domestic manufacture of affordable consumer/prosumer network hardware. The US can already manufacture SoCs, PWBs, and chassis hardware, we just need a business case for putting it all together. Managed well, sustained protection from international competition could provide this business case, and buffer against global shipping disruptions, while the sheer volume of CPE equipment would eventually drive down costs.
But fickle bans will never get us there.
Domestic manufacturing is not coming back because there are no guarantees whatsoever that this ban is going to last. Nobody is going to shell out hundreds of millions to setup manufacturing for such a low-margin product when it is much cheaper and risk-free to just sidestep the ban.
Mikrotik manufactures routers in Latvia, of all places. I don't think it's as hard as you make it out to be.
Mikrotik manufactures a lot of stuff in Latvia, yes. That's where they're based, and where most of their engineering happens.
Some of their stuff is also stated to be made in, at least, Lithuania, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China (in no particular order).
And I really don't have much of an idea how much of the devices are made in any of those places, but it's not hard to find an occasional clue.
For example: The Mikrotik wAP AC that is hanging on the wall in the room where I write this is was labelled as having been made in Latvia when I bought it. But the main brainbox IC inside of it, a Qualcomm QCA9556, is manufactured by TSMC. That's probably not something made in a Latvian plant.
What of the rest? The metal and plastic components of the housing? The connectors, the PCBs? The jelly-bean parts on those PCBs?
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The recent ham-fisted FCC rules make it so any foreign-made component of a new router design excludes it from sale in the US, by default.
It may be harder than you think it is to get this done.
Even the simple stuff might be hard: Do we even make LEDs in the States? I don't mean anything high-power or fancy (we definitely don't make those here), but I also can't find any evidence suggesting that we can even manufacture a lowly status LED in the US at this point.
Or, something mechanical: PCB-mount 8P8C ethernet jacks. I don't find any of those manufactured in the States, either. (Can we even muster up the effort to make those? They're mostly injection-molded plastic, which we haven't forgotten how to do stuff with. But they also use beryllium copper, which is a special kind of a spooky to work with in terms of health hazards.)
I'm not sure that Mikrotik putting together some stuff in Latvia, of all places, represents a very good example: If they were doing in Nebraska what they presently do in Latvia then their products would still be excluded by default.
Eastern Europe is very different socioeconomically than the US.
When it comes to manufacturing, Eastern Europe is the Mexico of Europe
Show me the Latvian foundry that bakes their chips.
All Xi has to do is send Him a plane.
I feel like pretending a department under this administration's thumb is actually going to act honestly is a bit absurd.
They made a donation ... somewhere. Now they're all good. None of Trump's bluster is honest, they're just graft gates.
It wasn't any different during the first administration. I worked at a company slated to be acquired by a foreign company. But the approval just never came from the feds. Then one day the acquiring foreign company CEO visited the White House and that day Trump approved it. Trump even made a little speech about jobs. Then we were all told we were going to be laid off... just like that almost all the American jobs gone. Shortly after one of Trump's companies announced a big land deal in the home country of the acquiring company. MEGA ...
The looting stage of collapse, people tend to think someone will come and save things but so long as there is more money in decline the leaders will do that instead.
> The looting stage of collapse […]
Remember folks: pillage before you burn.
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> we started hating ourselves and pitted one another against one another, whether that’s by class, race, or gender
> stop some dumb ass gas station beaver and a bunch of MAGA folks and furries
I'm not all that supportive of Buc-ees or furries and definitely not of MAGA, but good job continuing the hate and pitting against each other. Do you think hate is okay if it's not based on class, race, or gender?
I don’t hate anyone really, I’m suggesting those activities are stupid and unserious.
If you’re going to talk about the collapse of a country, the culture of that country is going to be key.
I know there is a personal responsibility / call to action in there but I think it elides both how politics work and how people work. Politics is run by cynical operatives skilled in mass manipulation and people generally believe what they’re told to believe. Encouraging people to tilt at windmills is one of the ways to undermine effective opposition. Pitting them against each other is another way. I think actual effective opposition is localism / a general devolution of power.
It’s all moot anyway because AI is already smart enough to upend the economy / social order. A productivity boom without a consumption boom will kill margins across the board.
A big part of undermining opposition is to encourage your opposition to operate in ways that are ineffective. Regardless of who won the 2024 we would have gotten the war with Iran, the US has a long history of electing peace candidates and getting war. We live in a managed democracy, part of that management is ensuring the opposition are grifters, Trump was not viable for 2024 until democrats came after him legally, I am confident the decision makers there knew that going after him would make him more popular. They would rather have run against Trump a third time than against a likely more effective candidate like Ron DeSantos.
There are things people can do, I left the US for a small country where politics are so boring I don’t even know who the president is and don’t care to.
> dumb ass gas station beaver and a bunch of MAGA folks and furries
How on earth are those three things supposed to be equivalent? One is a gas station chain with an animal as part of its logo, which is uh, a normal thing? Are we against gas stations in general or animals used for branding or what?
Another is a group of people who like to dress up and/or pretend to be animals with their friends, the worst thing you can say about that is it's unusual.
The third thing is a bunch of death cultists who are scared of everything and willing to worship a dictator.
This is some hardcore false equivalence.
> because we started hating ourselves and pitted one another against one another, whether that’s by class, race, or gender
started? Were you raised in some kind of cave that prevented access to recorded human history? We've been hating each other for all sorts of reasons for quite longer than we have written records.
And it's funny, this kind of argument is usually made by people who are mad that injustices are being pointed out.
People literally started a war and fought it for 4 years, killing more americans than basically anything else we could categorize as a single event, entirely to preserve their right to hold other americans as slaves, and you think people are hating more now?
It seems a tad unlikely.
Equating some hypothetical people enjoying a buccees with the collapse of a country is, and there's really no other way to say this, profoundly ignorant.
Why countries collapse, hell, what collapse even means, could fill several dozen books, but "rule of law" is a real big part of what makes a functioning country.
It's the difference between something like an actual state and a feudal fiefdom.
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What was the home country of the acquiring company? UAE? Argentina?
MEGA is now headquartered in Hungary...who until very recently was run by someone very much aligned with the far right movement.
MEGA was founded by Kim Dotcom, who currently lives in New Zealand
"In completely unrelated news, the Trump Presidential Ballroom Fund just received a ten million dollar donation from an unspecified donor".
"Brought to you by Carl's Jr. Fuck you, I'm eating!"
Either they agreed to put the back door in their routers or someone got paid off.
Considering most have a basic VPN server built in already they sort of have a built in back door by design
Mysterious new buyer for one of Trump's crypto coins.
It seems very obvious that they are probably going to give router companies that have an okay or above reputation time to comply with the law and cheap Chinese imports where they obviously have a strong relationship with the Chinese government or any sort of questionable reputation immediate ban.
I wonder if concessions to allow US government spying were made in exchange for this approval. It seems that at least a couple of these routers allow for replacement firmware such as OpenWRT, though, so it might be OK.
But I'm incredibly suspicious.
My bigger fear is whether Netgear has one or more backdoors exploitable for use by the US government. It's firmware will have to be reverse engineered and then reviewed by AI, proof-based analysis, and security researchers.
In the long term, an absence of competition bodes poorly.
> My bigger fear is whether Netgear has one or more backdoors exploitable for use by the US government.
With Asus you can use third-party firmware (e.g., Merlin): is that possible with Netgear?
Why AI? An unproven proprietary tech is your go-to over skilled security researchers?
No, because you should assume all code will be analyzed and attacked by adversarial AIs. That’s the real world impact of Project Glasswing and the like. If attackers are using it so should the blue team. AI analysis should be a part of your security review but not the whole thing.
Maybe. We’ll see. Glasswing’s marketing talking points aside, what you describe seems like a likely future - but it’s unclear to me how soon that future is.
Updated parent comment. Ideally, looking beyond this work, and more generally, a funded AI would be used to do analysis and then to dispatch tasks to qualified humans. A network of available qualified humans would have to exist that the AI can access. Humans could then of course provide feedback to AI for the loop to continue with new tasks to humans. Think Uber but more generally for AI to tap into real-world work and expertise.
That sounds dystopian as hell to me. Are security researchers willing to become interchangeable units of cognition, as devalued as uber drivers? I hope not.
But your edit makes my original comment unneeded. I was reacting to this jump to “we need ai to solve this!” when the ai is still largely unproven marketing hype from a bunch of highly leveraged ai companies with manic gambler ceos.
We’re talking about ai for security auditing. Until a week ago, ai for security auditing was virtually non-existent. But i guess if I was mainlining ai marketing in a haze of llm psychosis, a week ago might feel like 2024.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the router ban intended to affect foreign companies, not one based in San Jose, California? If so, that would explain why they get an exception.
The router ban affects routers made in foreign countries, Netgear's headquarters should be irrelevant. The author's previous article spells this out better https://www.theverge.com/tech/899906/fcc-router-ban-march-20...
I was under the impression the ping back to china security issues are what prompted this, until they were evaluated. I don't think Netgear would have a problem passing the audit.
Obviously the Trump family is being made richer or more powerful somehow. It’s obvious. Saying there is no obvious reason is as insane as believing the delay in banning TikTok wasn’t corrupt.
Why is TP Link still being sold.
Among other reasons: the recent ban was on FCC approval for new products. Existing products that had already secured FCC approval are unaffected by the new policy and can continue being sold.
In other words: it’s security theater and dubious economic protectionism, not a genuine attempt to counter a cyber threat.
Yes.
"There are already foxes in the hen house, but we'll ban new foxes from entering!"
The obvious reason is bribes.
Follow the money.
Sounds like pay to play, the usual Trumpian playbook (no pun intended)
They paid the shakedown fee.
that’s the outcome of soft fascism: a lot of pay to play.
I passed on an invitation to tender a number of years ago because there was no way to meet the minority / women quota that was tied to it. The big players use pass through front companies which isn’t feasible for me as I’m a solo operator.
The Netgear thing is more egregious but the quotas are more pervasive. I would like to be rid of both.
It’s very possible to do so. Partner with someone in the space and they take a vig.
An even better option is to partner with a veteran owned entity, which often allows you to bypass the bidding process.
Gotcha. Well, at least it's a legit program, although that doesn't help you.
In some places this stuff is so vague that using a minority business (like say SHI) is essentially a sort of tax to win discretionary purchases with governments.
What Trump is doing is outright grift; payola, racketeering.
And you think it's a good moment to complain about affirmative action?
> It is because people were upset with what the democrats were doing
This is vague and doesn't say anything. Can you be more specific?
1) Which people? 2) What were Democrats doing?
Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face does not convincingly impugn one's face.
‘The United States’ foreign router ban didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and today may not change that.`
???
No obvious reason? What if the Executive Branch is a dog chasing cars?
It’s just doing things.
If by "doing things" you mean "accumulating mysterious anonymous crypto payments" and "getting a large draw from one of your shell companies", then yes.
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> Could it be related to Netgear being manufactured in Vietnam Thailand and Indonesia to avoid China tariffs and that somehow got them through an audit? I only ask if the overall unwritten goal is to avoid China.
That goal isn't even that secret:
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-china-xi-beijing-e2472...:
> Pursuing activities antagonistic to [China] has become further paralyzed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordering staff that they need his signoff for any China-related actions, people familiar with the matter said. As a result, even senior Commerce officials at times sit by his office waiting or outside the building, watching for his car. Officials at other agencies pursued a ban on a China-linked router maker by styling it as an order that doesn’t name the company or China.
> ...
> One such office had already determined that China-founded router company TP-Link and China-linked internet-connected trucks and buses pose national security risks. Officials thought vulnerabilities in their software could provide China access to spy on U.S. communications or access sensitive infrastructure.
> Interagency reviews had reached a similar conclusion about the risk of TP-Link and supported a ban. Staff had set in motion new rule-making to restrict U.S. sales of those products before they were put on hold and office leadership dismissed, according to officials familiar with the process.
> ...
> Supporters of a ban on TP-Link in March eked out a victory. The Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on new imports of all foreign-made routers, “regardless of the nationality of the producer,” a blanket prohibition that also accomplishes sidelining Chinese routers without naming the country or TP-Link. The new rule was designed in part to minimize disruptions to Trump’s relationship with Xi, people familiar with the matter said.