Netgear Gets Mysterious Exemption To Trump FCC ‘Router Ban,’ Refuses To Say How
from the nice-router.-Shame-if-somethin'-was-to-happen-to-it. dept
Late last month we noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which means pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional waivers (fees, favors, whatever) to continue doing business in the States.
Netgear is the first out of the gate to announce they’ve struck a deal with the FCC, but they’re curiously refusing to say what exactly was required to get Trump FCC approval. Actual security improvements? Backdoors for domestic surveillance? Cash payouts? Nobody knows!
“Neither the FCC’s announcement nor Netgear’s announcement explain why Netgear was granted the temporary exemption. The FCC only states that the Pentagon has now made “a specific determination” that “such devices do not pose risks to U.S. national security.”
The Netgear FAQ is equally ambiguous about what the company had to do to win the Trump administration’s favor. The email I received about the approval promises that this somehow improved consumer security, but there’s zero indication anywhere as to how:
“We’re pleased to share that NETGEAR is the first retail consumer router company to receive conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a trusted consumer router company. We hope this recognition gives you added peace of mind — knowing that the network powering your home meets rigorous standards.”
As you’re probably aware by now, neither Trump nor Carr ever really do anything that’s just authentically in the public interest, even on cybersecurity. Everything is always transactional.
The vast majority of the duo’s actions to date have made the United States significantly less secure, whether it’s the firing of officials responsible for online election security, or their blanket and mindless “deregulation” of a U.S. telecom sector that was just the target of one of the worst cybersecurity incidents in U.S. history (in large part because it failed to change default router admin passwords).
The original Trump FCC “router ban” also included rhetoric claiming that foreign router manufacturers would have to provide “a detailed, time-bound plan to establish or expand manufacturing in the United States,” but there’s absolutely zero indication Netgear has done anything of the sort, either in their public statements or their required alerts sent to investors.
Great stuff! Super transparent and not at all dodgy.
If you look around the web, the vast majority of U.S. media outlets covering this “router ban” operate from the belief that this is a good faith effort to improve cybersecurity and that Trump regulators are reliable narrators, and every shred of evidence to date suggests that’s a terrible assumption for a journalist (or anyone else) to make.
Filed Under: brendan carr, donald trump, fcc, hacking, hardware, network, privacy, routers, security
Companies: netgear
Comments on “Netgear Gets Mysterious Exemption To Trump FCC ‘Router Ban,’ Refuses To Say How”
You don’t understand, you can’t see that agreement due to national security implications. That’s all, move along, nothing here to see.
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Maybe Netgear is making its routers in the same magic “Made in USA” factory that is already making the Trump phone.
Is it bribes?
I bet it’s bribes.
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Well, it doesn’t have to be bribes, give them credit, it might be backdoors.
No need to do bribes when you can just log in to anyone’s network and start mitm’ing their bank accounts.
But it’s probably both.
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Nah, it wasn’t bribes, it was large donations to Donnies Corruption “R” Us offshore accounts.
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Was merely a gratutity. Recall that the very Supreme Court is fine with that.
Wtf, Netgear are still around? How is that even possible? I can’t recall having heard a single good thing about anything Netgear branded since the mid 00s or something.
Do people actually buy shit from them still, or do they survive purely on ISPs’ captive clientele?
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Bout to not have a choice, it would seem.
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I suppose you weren’t paying attention to the “buffer-bloat” projects of the early 2010s, notably CeroWRT which used the Netgear WNDR3700v2 and WNDR3800 as its reference hardware.
Netgear use pretty much the same chips and reference designs as everyone else. (I think my TP-Link router is almost identifcal to one of the models I mentioned above.) They’re fine, readily available at retail, and not terribly overpriced. So why wouldn’t they be around? Out of curiosity, did you hear bad things, or nothing at all?
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As you noted, a great many people are using Netgear boxes because that’s what their ISPs provided. There’s a huge installed base that would cost a fortune to replace, so none of them will do that until they figure out a way to (a) use it to jack up prices and (b) use it to take away features. After all, that’s how telcos/cablecos operate.
Some of their desktop switches aren’t bad and can be found cheaply. But their router/wifi/cablemodem devices leave a lot to be desired and are full of annoying misfeatures that Netgear hasn’t fixed and won’t fix.
Re: Netgear
I do have a few wired ethernet switches from Netgear and there are two good things I can say about them: they are affordable and they work.
Things may be different for other products.
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If they’re unmanaged switches, those are difficult to fuck up.
Netgear puts the status lights right where each network cable plugs in, such that they’re difficult to cover up with tape. That’s no good for me, because I don’t want my single-room apartment lit up like a disco when I’m trying to sleep. (Some other brands have a row of lights on the opposite side, easily taped over.)
But I’ve used them in offices, and, like most switches, they’ll run trouble-free for many years. They’re probably not much modified from the reference design of whoever built the internal chips, anyway.
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I’ve got a Netgear Nighthawk R7800 in the basement right now, calmly doing its job routing our home network. Of course, I put OpenWrt on it.
Which leads into the recommendation I have for anyone buying a Netgear router: do not trust the stock firmware. Put open-source firmware on it. If any part of it has been jimmied for surveillance or anything else Netgear could have been forced to agree to, it’s most likely the firmware.
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I’m looking at getting a USB Wi-fi adapter, and the Netgear A9000 USB looks like a good contender (the Linux driver has a timeout-after-reboot bug, but a patch is pending as of a few weeks ago). It’s pretty much the MediaTek reference design anyway, and if you’re into open-source firmware, you’ve probably noticed that most routers are more-or-less white-label products as well.
Several brands made routers that are basically the 7800, and there’s nothing majorly wrong with any of them—except the stock software. (Plus the CPU may struggle with gigabit-plus speeds, and the RAM’s not sufficient to run certain networking daemons such as Tor, but that’s just a matter of being old.)
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Well, the R7800 still works just fine, and I’ve got a spare on the basement shelf if it decides to crap out on me. (Always keep spares of critical hardware on hand…)
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Sure, backups are like 5-10 dollars at thrift stores now, so I’ve got one too. Actually a previous-generation TP-Link model that’s very similar, but has fully open-source wi-fi firmware, and I think was one of the last routers to have that.
FYI, I looked up the R7800, and it appears your firmware won’t be fully open-source: ath9k routers were, but the R7800 has ath10k which requires a closed-source blob for the wi-fi chip. It’d be Atheros/Qualcomm that would need to be compromised to put a backdoor there, and even then, it’d be a somewhat limited backdoor.
That's easy
They have gone through thorough testing via Trumpcoin.
Remember that, in computer security, “trusted” means “relied upon to enforce a security policy”; in other words, a system whose failure would fuck you over.
Because netgear gave them the proper number of children to rape.
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If Trump told you oxygen was good for you you’d try to stop breathing.
We say this all the time as a joke but it’s almost literally true.
Possibly: In other news...
… The White House announces a generous donation to the Ballroom Fund from Netgear, Inc.
'Nice business you've got there, be a shame if you were to face a national ban...'
Oh I think I can guess what resulted in their exemption, and it rhymes with ‘bah bing’.
Inaugural NetGear Peace Prize to be announced next week!
(I wish I was kidding, but FFS could anyone even tell with this timeline we’re living in?)
obedient dogs
they are allowed because like cisco they work hand in hand with every nsa request. a lot of netgear hardware currently in use in “interesting places” has been rooted by the nsa. and cisco hardware is full of security holes and “pre-defined hardcoded passwords” that the nsa doesnt even need to root them because of their so bad quality. if netgear is no longer allowed the nsa will lose a lot of access to rooted devices. so netgear immediatly got a pass from the government.