It’s crazy how entrenched adversaries are in the USA tech ecosystem.
The government should get Apple to make Airport routers again in the US and set up a big contract.
What’s crazier is the American man (CEO) in the mirror made it happen……
And now that he has new information (I.e. the folks who helped him get more for less are taking their newfound power and using it in an adversarial manner) it is foolishness to not do something with that information.
When you find out your wife’s best friend wants to steal you from her, you don’t stay cozy with that person.
It’s called common sense.
Cook feeding China seemed necessary at the time. But things are different now. I’m sure a course correction has at least been discussed.
Why are routers still merged with wifi? decouple the two of those things and the inertia of existing hardware would stop the attack path. But no new routers completely for each new wifi standard. Instead of just switching or supplementing the new wifi into the old network and if the new items acts odd in the context of more limited functionality it would be more obvious.
EU and others with e-waste missions should have stopped this long ago.
Even if there are no existing trap doors in routers manufactured in China, getting their network products entrenched in America and ready for "upgrades" may be a part of China's offensive IT plans. And even if there are existing trap doors in routers manufactured in China, that doesn't mean the US government would reveal that they know what those trap doors are, as America could exploit these weaknesses too. What I want to know is whether the exact same products (including software) are available in BOTH China and the US. That would speak volumes.
We are either in the early stages of World War 3 (or WW4, if one calls the Cold War WW3), or in the late stages of the pre-war stage. It's akin to the time between Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and the invasion of Poland in 1939. That was a much shorter period of time, but I think it's analogous, in the sense that the writing was clearly on the wall then and it's clearly on the wall now.
The modern analog to the invasion of Poland might be when China takes Taiwan. That analogy will break down, though, when the US (acting in the analog role to the UK) decides to just let Taiwan go rather than go to war over it. But that won't mean the war is averted, only that it will take longer.
The main question is just how hot or cold will the war be. So far it's hotter than the Cold War but colder than WW2.
In any event -- yeah, we need to be very careful about Chinese equipment. The CCP is an enemy.
Uh, were you alive during the cold war? 1950s to 1980s?
Uh, yes. What’s your point?
I bolded. No, there isn’t even a cold war with China let alone it being hotter than the actual Cold War.
There is perhaps an economic war, but the USA isn’t participating, so I don’t even you could call USA-China an economic war.
The thing about a world war is that it involves multiple countries. China is in an axis with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Russia’s war against Ukraine is very hot indeed.
It's not hotter than USA troops fighting a war. It's not hotter than being under constant nuclear bombing alert. The USA isn't even in a cold war posture, and really isn't doing much. If we were, we would be racing 24x7 to develop the next generation of war technologies like during the actual Cold War.
If you think it only counts as a war if Americans are dying then I guess ww2 didn’t start until Pearl Harbor
You literally said the “Cold War” between the USA and this China-Russia-Iran axis is hotter than the cold war between the USSR and the USA.
No. There isn’t a cold war going on right now let alone it being hotter. During the Cold War, the USA went through two wars with tens of thousands of American dead, was under nuclear alert for about 8 years with nuclear armed bombers circling 24x7, ramped up the nuclear arms race to tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, had them armed sitting in their silos and ships ready to be fired, and the military-industrial complex was going 24x7 to get to the next more deadly set of weapons.
Maybe a couple times, we were lucky not to have a nuclear exchange where hundreds of millions could have died within a day and hundreds of millions of dying weeks to months later.
We are still trading partners with China. If this TP-Link company’s products are banned, the USA government would just buy routers from a different Chinese company, or a Chinese made router from an American company. This is true for billions of dollars of other product. If the USA and China were in a cold war, this wouldn’t happen.
It’s not a war, and it is barely even an economic war. The USA gov’t can barely even work up the gumption to source products they buy to be 100% American, or fund an education system to provide a working populace that can make stuff in a techno-science economy.
Why are routers still merged with wifi? decouple the two of those things and the inertia of existing hardware would stop the attack path. But no new routers completely for each new wifi standard. Instead of just switching or supplementing the new wifi into the old network and if the new items acts odd in the context of more limited functionality it would be more obvious.
EU and others with e-waste missions should have stopped this long ago.
The same could be applied to firewalls and having them instead of the built-in router firewall.
TP-Link also makes switches of course so no doubt they won't limit actions to routers.
I actually have a TP-Link switch on my networks (which are mostly Huawei mesh systems). I also have a lot of TP-Link/Tapo smart plugs and lights. Next year I will consider invisible FTTR which is coming down in price now.
As is to be expected. That's a lot of Chinese networking gear. It's all performed well for years but I'm not sniffing packets or analyzing network output. There is also a QNAP NAS in there (Taiwan).
No doubt the next routers will use AI to highlight suspicious network activity.
I don’t see any similarities at all between the WW1-WW2 interwar period and the current US-China relationship. If anything I see China and Russia rehydrating another Cold War.
I was in the military during the Cold War. A lot of people discount that period because there were not the mass casualties that the world wars generated. But the reality is that the world has never been as close to human initiated global annihilation as we were then.
Back to the technical side of things, Ubiquiti is an American company that makes networking equipment that offers products that appeal to a very wide range of users, from simple home networks to prosumer, pro, and enterprise.
After moving to Ubiquiti UniFi products I can never see myself ever going back to the bizarre looking routers with built-in WiFi access points and a small switch at Best Buy, MicroCenter, and big box stores. Ubiquiti allows for extreme modularity so you can keep your current router/gateway and switch out your WiFi access points built to newer standards or swap out your gigabit switch with a 2.5 Gbps or 10 Gbps model with PoE.
There is a learning curve if you’re not familiar with networking technology and operation, but you will never have as detailed control over your network as you get with Ubiquiti. Apple will never do anything close to what you can do with Ubiquiti. It’s not their domain.
We are either in the early stages of World War 3 (or WW4, if one calls the Cold War WW3), or in the late stages of the pre-war stage. It's akin to the time between Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and the invasion of Poland in 1939. That was a much shorter period of time, but I think it's analogous, in the sense that the writing was clearly on the wall then and it's clearly on the wall now.
The modern analog to the invasion of Poland might be when China takes Taiwan. That analogy will break down, though, when the US (acting in the analog role to the UK) decides to just let Taiwan go rather than go to war over it. But that won't mean the war is averted, only that it will take longer.
The main question is just how hot or cold will the war be. So far it's hotter than the Cold War but colder than WW2.
In any event -- yeah, we need to be very careful about Chinese equipment. The CCP is an enemy.
Uh, were you alive during the cold war? 1950s to 1980s?
Uh, yes. What’s your point?
I bolded. No, there isn’t even a cold war with China let alone it being hotter than the actual Cold War.
There is perhaps an economic war, but the USA isn’t participating, so I don’t even you could call USA-China an economic war.
The thing about a world war is that it involves multiple countries. China is in an axis with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Russia’s war against Ukraine is very hot indeed.
It's not hotter than USA troops fighting a war. It's not hotter than being under constant nuclear bombing alert. The USA isn't even in a cold war posture, and really isn't doing much. If we were, we would be racing 24x7 to develop the next generation of war technologies like during the actual Cold War.
If you think it only counts as a war if Americans are dying then I guess ww2 didn’t start until Pearl Harbor
You literally said the “Cold War” between the USA and this China-Russia-Iran axis is hotter than the cold war between the USSR and the USA.
No. There isn’t a cold war going on right now let alone it being hotter. During the Cold War, the USA went through two wars with tens of thousands of American dead, was under nuclear alert for about 8 years with nuclear armed bombers circling 24x7, ramped up the nuclear arms race to tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, had them armed sitting in their silos and ships ready to be fired, and the military-industrial complex was going 24x7 to get to the next more deadly set of weapons.
Maybe a couple times, we were lucky not to have a nuclear exchange where hundreds of millions could have died within a day and hundreds of millions of dying weeks to months later.
We are still trading partners with China. If this TP-Link company’s products are banned, the USA government would just buy routers from a different Chinese company, or a Chinese made router from an American company. This is true for billions of dollars of other product. If the USA and China were in a cold war, this wouldn’t happen.
It’s not a war, and it is barely even an economic war. The USA gov’t can barely even work up the gumption to source products they buy to be 100% American, or fund an education system to provide a working populace that can make stuff in a techno-science economy.
I would say you literally don't know what the word literal means. It means "representing the exact words of the literal text." I never said the Cold War was only between the USA and the USSR. You made that up. The Cold War was a 'world war' that involved many actors and many conflicts. Three of the biggest 'hot' conflicts were Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. The major power (US and USSR) losses in those three conflicts *combined* are smaller than Russia's losses in Ukraine.
In addition to the Ukraine war, there's also a proxy war going on between Iran and Israel, which Israel appears to be winning. There's also the imminent threat of China invading or (more likely) blockading Taiwan.
Your eyes are as sealed shut as many Americans in 1938. You are in for a rude awakening.
The biggest leaks government threats in the world for Apple (and to the citizens of the world) in no particular order towards their hacking activities,, the United States, Russia, the EU, China, and Israel. None of these agents are going to go away. They will tirelessly seek back-doors, front-doors, side-doors and every other means they can.
TPLink and other vendors likely have backdoors into your router already. If they don't, they just need to push out a firmware update and your router is probably configured to install it. At that point they can do anything with your network traffic. In the event of hostilities, they may just brick all of our our network devices.
BTW, at least the first Airport models were actually made by Lucent. I don't know if Apple made the later models. I had them and they were nice,
TPLink and other vendors likely have backdoors into your router already. If they don't, they just need to push out a firmware update and your router is probably configured to install it. At that point they can do anything with your network traffic. In the event of hostilities, they may just brick all of our our network devices.
BTW, at least the first Airport models were actually made by Lucent. I don't know if Apple made the later models. I had them and they were nice,
In the case of hostilities, communications will be the first to be impacted and no one would go to the trouble of updating firmware on routers with kill switches.
Ocean fibre optic cables would be severed, ICT infrastructure would be another target as routers that can't connect to anything are useless. Satellite communications would also be taken out.
Whether anyone would take a move that merits that kind of need is a different question as all sides in any conflict are likely to be equally affected.
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decouple the two of those things and the inertia of existing hardware would stop the attack path. But no new routers completely for each new wifi standard. Instead of just switching or supplementing the new wifi into the old network and if the new items acts odd in the context of more limited functionality it would be more obvious.
TP-Link also makes switches of course so no doubt they won't limit actions to routers.
I actually have a TP-Link switch on my networks (which are mostly Huawei mesh systems). I also have a lot of TP-Link/Tapo smart plugs and lights. Next year I will consider invisible FTTR which is coming down in price now.
As is to be expected. That's a lot of Chinese networking gear. It's all performed well for years but I'm not sniffing packets or analyzing network output. There is also a QNAP NAS in there (Taiwan).
No doubt the next routers will use AI to highlight suspicious network activity.
In addition to the Ukraine war, there's also a proxy war going on between Iran and Israel, which Israel appears to be winning. There's also the imminent threat of China invading or (more likely) blockading Taiwan.
Your eyes are as sealed shut as many Americans in 1938. You are in for a rude awakening.
Good Luck…
BTW, at least the first Airport models were actually made by Lucent. I don't know if Apple made the later models. I had them and they were nice,
Ocean fibre optic cables would be severed, ICT infrastructure would be another target as routers that can't connect to anything are useless. Satellite communications would also be taken out.
Whether anyone would take a move that merits that kind of need is a different question as all sides in any conflict are likely to be equally affected.