The real lesson here: don't forget to bribe the president of the US.

If this was actually the lesson then they'd be banning Fortinet, but it seems these concerns about security don't apply to US listed companies.

Just make them liable for the damages and then they will start caring.

This might be one of the only cases where subscription model would work well to cover the maintenance cost.

Or maybe, don't capture 50% market share in a country that's decided your country of origin is the threat of the decade.

I think a lot of companies violate that lesson and continue to make money.

But they got this far with $X in security spending, what’s the problem?

Until it hits their wallet, they will not do a thing. Now if they were more concerned about longer profits and how this could impact their image, maybe they would change but it is rare you see that nowadays.

Unfortunately people like you are hardly ever in charge of this kind of thing.

Yeah, that's not the lesson here at all. We're still in an era where you will suffer absolutely zero consequences for security lapses and breaches.

Everything that is happening with this administration is simply because it suits American foreign policy or the interests of one of the oligarchs. I mean this with absolutely no hyperbole: the pretense of there being any rule of law for the ultra-wealthy is gone. The White House is openly selling pardons, which have the added effect of cancelling out debts to the US government.

Tiktok getting banned? It had nothing to do with "national security". The government simply had less control over the content and the algorithm on Tiktok than they do on Meta and Google platforms.

Reading through this article, you have Microsoft pointing the finger at TP-Link. That's... rich. Becvause Microsoft has historically been horrible for security. It would take further investigation but I really wonder if TP-Link isn't just a convenient scapegoat.

You aren't thinking low enough for firmware.

All modern WiFi APs require closed firmware blobs that run below or parallel to OpenWRT.

You replacing the router OS with OpenWRT does nothing when the radio has full DMA access and runs its own OS on its own processor. The OpenWRT layer will have no idea what it's running/infiltrating/exfiltrating.

I say this as someone who has been running and building OpenWRT forever. It's great but it isn't a panacea.

I use their Omada stuff for my business. I own a coffee shop where I have a few devices I need online and I provide free WiFi to customers. I needed something where I could run multiple networks, segregate my own devices, support a large number of clients, automatically turn off free wifi outside of business hours, run a captive portal, reserve a minimum amount of bandwidth for my own devices and prioritize my own traffic, etc. It’s absolutely packed with features and costs less than the stuff I run at home. It was a fraction of the cost of the Meraki gear I was considering. The performance is great too.

I don’t know how much I trust TP Link, but my risk level is very low. There’s not much an attacker could do if they get on my network. None of my data is accessible on that network and everything important has MFA anyway. The most sensitive things are my POS and menu displays and they are just client devices connecting to the internet. I probably wouldn’t run this stuff in an environment where I had complex security requirements.

At some point it won't matter that you run OpenWRT on it. Obvious case in point: at a certain point it doesn't matter that you run Linux instead of Windows on your Intel PC, because it'll still be subjected to Intel ME, Intel AMT, Intel SGX and god knows what else.

TP-Link let me down twice.

I bought a cellphone from them many years ago and they never really supported it and I couldn't even buy a replacement battery.

Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory.

These events left a bad impression, but they do make affordable stuff with reasonable quality.

Hey, that's really timely for me.

I'm getting ready to set a mesh network for my older parents as well. Do you have any suggestions for hardware and software? I live a ways away from them so I need this to be pretty much faultless. I don't want to drive 4 hours for IT support.

Do any of TP-Link's mesh routers support OpenWrt? I didn't think there was overlap between the "easy to set up for my parents" and "easy to install custom firmware" subsets.

Assuming there isn't a hidden little core running a hidden little OS somewhere.

Seemingly every year there is yet another Cisco vulnerability because of hard coded passwords. One as recently as July 2025. The entire network industry seems to YOLO the code running the world.

[0] https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/Cisc...

To be fair, I think this is most countries, they just don't have as much political power as the US. The UK's Online Safety Act is a good example.

My country (Australia) tried to legislate in 2016 that no one is allowed to use encryption, and if they were required to, for other obvious reasons like for medical data, then they were required to code in a back-door for law enforcement.

An empire in every way except name.

My guess is they’ll be forced to sell their US division to whatever company gives the government the most money (sort of like the Oracle-Tiktok deal).

Presumably the software, the boards, connectors, antenna design, etc.

As a hardware founder, low quality plastic is not rocket science. On trips to China I’ve heard similar things about other companies, specifically that Foxconn makes everything it uses, including things like coolant or plastic for prototype production.

Does anyone know what their chips are doing? Do you, really?

Until we have desk side silicon fabrication/placement, with accompanying tunnelling microscope features, we simply cannot trust our silicon in any way other than through utterly peaceful means, which is to say, through systems of human trustworthiness.

Technology never allows us humans to advance sufficiently well to do without it .. unless it is evenly distributed.

Right now we are all at the mercy of the masters of silicon. This is no joke!

Because Jeff Yass asked Trump not to