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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
---
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.
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.
> 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 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.
I’m aligned with your critique, and especially aligned with a focus on local efforts. The more local the better has generally been a good guiding principle for democracies.
> Politics is run by cynical operatives skilled in mass manipulation and people generally believe what they’re told to believe.
I agree with you in the effect - people for whatever reason just believe what they’re told to believe, but I disagree with the hint of “can’t do anything about it” that underlies your writing here. If that’s not your intent - my mistake.
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.
> Regardless of who won the 2024 we would have gotten the war with Iran
That’s because of the geopolitical and geostrategic necessity. Can’t have another North Korea and definitely can’t have one sitting on top of 20% of the world’s oil supply. Though I don’t disagree with your broader point regarding so-called “peace presidents”.
I find your perspective about managed democracy to be a bit disheartening, but if you do believe that it’s a good argument against structures such as the EU, who is probably the best example of what you’re talking about.
> 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.
Most countries someone would want to live in aren’t open to immigration unless you’re pretty well off or specialized. I’m glad it worked out for you. We are stuck in the US (and Ohio though day to day is just fine) because friends and family but it would be a breath of fresh air to not have to care. Also most countries aren’t relevant on the global stage and so there isn’t really much for them to decide, they’re for the most part passive recipients of whatever America decides and to some growing extent China or perhaps the EU. Russia as an example and starting wars sort of an outlier.
> That’s because of the geopolitical and geostrategic necessity.
Says who, clearly the US is trying to have that say but failing at it.
> Can’t have another North Korea and definitely can’t have one sitting on top of 20% of the world’s oil supply.
Turns out you can.
I have known our missile defense strategy wouldn’t last into the cheap missile / drone age for over 22 years. Before high tech I was military adjacent. The real reason the US can’t afford to lose in Iran is what that would say about Taiwan and would mean for its position as world hegemony. My main fear was that the US would start a conflict with China believing it could win and having it lose. Ironically Trumps bungling may have saved us from an even worse fate.
> Says who, clearly the US is trying to have that say but failing at it.
In what way has the US failed? People keep saying the US failed but I’m still confused as to what failure has occurred.
> Turns out you can.
Well the rest of the world could let it happen, and let other countries control maritime shipping lanes and exact tolls, but I think your statement is actually objectively false given the US bombed Iran and stopped whatever nuclear program they have, even if that turns out to be sort of temporary.
> I have known our missile defense strategy wouldn’t last into the cheap missile / drone age for over 22 years. Before high tech
The Pentagon knows this too, but you fight a war with the weapons you have while you work on new ones.
> I was military adjacent. The real reason the US can’t afford to lose in Iran is what that would say about Taiwan and would mean for its position as world hegemony. My main fear was that the US would start a conflict with China believing it could win and having it lose.
I was in the army on active duty including deploying to Iraq. The US isn’t/wasn’t going to start a war with China. Doesn’t make any sense. So no worries there.
I think you’ve actually got it backwards. The worry was that China would start a war to seize Taiwan and, frankly, Putin saved us all by failing so hard at Ukraine. The US easily bypassing or destroying any Chinese and Russian air defense assets in countries like Venezuela or Iran has given the Chinese pause too.
China has immense manufacturing capability. Probably #1 in the world. But their weakness is they have not fought a serious war or even a minor war in quite some time. The kinks you’re talking about, lessons learned, &c. Are things that the US has learned or is learning more about via conflicts in Ukraine and Iran and elsewhere. China has trained and tested but has not demonstrated any operational effectiveness when it comes to combined arms, and their equipment on paper is impressive but has yet to see meaningful action. Of course the Chinese know this too, but “how will the PLA perform” is a serious concern for the Commies.
Ahhh US army, that explains it. You know of the two main factions in US foreign policy, the primacists and the restrainers both seek conflict with China. The only difference being that the primacists wanted to win a war in Iran first to set up Israel as regional hegemony.
We have a different read on objective reality, using the simple proxy of 'success has many fathers and failure is an orphan', not many people are taking credit for the war with Iran - so I take that as a sign of failure.
The Pentagon is many years late on drone warfare and the whole incentive structure is set up for gold plated drones with the fat margins needed to buy lobbyists. Also I see much of the US Army as a make work program / pseudo welfare system still carrying on the great traditions of McNamara's morons.
As the US declines it is in China's interest to wait and it is in the US interest to initiate the conflict while it can still potentially win. Taiwan is simply a way of getting the US to act in the ways China wants them to, there is no need for them to actually invade Taiwan to make that happen, but they do have to convincingly pretend like they will by constantly harassing them.
> not many people are taking credit for the war with Iran - so I take that as a sign of failure.
Certainly an interesting point to think about, but I don't think it passes the smell test if for nothing else but that we've done successful things in the past and partisan politics will simply define those in a negative light purely to create wedge issues or distort reality. The President and others have gone way out of their way to claim success, of course it's Donald Trump, but nonetheless there are folks claiming success.
But even so, it's sort of early. How long did it take until George Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and claimed Mission Accomplished? If anything folks are more cautious about claiming success precisely because of this backlash in the past. It's a nice heuristic but I wouldn't over-index on it, especially for anything Donald Trump does. Folks are still claiming failure over Venezuela despite that being a resounding success in all aspects.
> The Pentagon is many years late on drone warfare and the whole incentive structure is set up for gold plated drones with the fat margins needed to buy lobbyists.
Nah don't think so. I think you're just making stuff up here. Of course the Pentagon has historically worked with contractors and there's definitely some fat that needs to be trimmed, but the Pentagon has, certainly in response to the Ukraine war, though of course earlier too, been working on building lower cost drones, interceptors and other capabilities precisely because folks know this. New companies have been standing up to build cheaper, less complex missile and drone systems. It takes a little bit of time without intense pressure (a real real war) to do these things. We do tend to over-pay, but you could just argue other countries are actually under-paying. We know our stuff works, and we have demonstrated that time and time again. Maybe it's worth paying extra for that. Who wants to cut corners on fighter jets or missiles?
I similarly reject, though to a lesser extent, the claims that laymen make around China and military corruption and purges and so forth. It can be true, but it's not the determining factor in how well the organization operates and is likely to, perhaps be systematic, but not likely to have such a large effect that it matters in the long run. It's just like hypersonic missiles. Hypersonic missile this hypersonic missiles that, drones this drones that - it's just what you hear on the news and folks for some reason misunderstand that other countries, whether that's China, Iran, or the United States can and do take action to address challenges and new capabilities. The world isn't stagnate. Your general lack of knowledge or awareness of military capabilities doesn't mean they don't exist or aren't in development or being tested. Obviously countries keep these things secret to the extent possible too.
> As the US declines it is in China's interest to wait and it is in the US interest to initiate the conflict while it can still potentially win. Taiwan is simply a way of getting the US to act in the ways China wants them to, there is no need for them to actually invade Taiwan to make that happen, but they do have to convincingly pretend like they will by constantly harassing them.
The military buildup that China is doing demonstrates that you're wrong, or at least they seriously believe they need the option to invade Taiwan. You're right about what China could do here, which is wait the US out by establishing increasingly dependent and positive ties between Taiwan and China and focus on a peaceful reunification via economic and political means. The problem is that Xi Jingping's viewpoint is more in line with Vladimir Putin's in that they are old people and they want to do something grand before they die and they have massive egos, like their buddy Donald Trump. That leads to mistakes, as Putin saw with Ukraine.
To point out what should have been pretty obvious, China has to do the military build up if it wants the US to believe they will actually invade Taiwan. It’s a costly signal, and it has to be costly or it won’t be believed, sure sending a memo would have been cheaper but without also doing the work no one would believe them.
> 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.
Well I didn’t say they were equally stupid, I just said all of those cultural trends were stupid.
People can do what they want, but if you’re going to have a conversation about the collapse of a country, well people who get excited about a gas station and drive an hour away to fill up on gas - yep it’s just a gas station - are part of the reason for that decline.
> tarted? Were you raised in some kind of cave that prevented access to recorded human history?
I don’t think Americans have hated each other or been this divided in quite some time. I don’t even think Americans hated each this much during the Civil War. You’re missing the context of the conversation here. Of course people have always had conflict, but the nature and intensity of that conflict can vary.
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.
> 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.
I think you’re overreacting to how many people felt during the Civil War, at least from what I’ve read or internalized over my lifetime. There really was, quite literally brother versus brother and while there was incredible disagreement and violence I think folks then still recognized one another as Americans at the base level. Today MAGA and Leftists hate each other so much they’ve lost even that. Another way to think about it is, how many veterans do you know who hate Iraq or Iraqis, or hate Afghanistan or Afghani people (Taliban aside)? Not many, right? Vietnam - we actually won the peace there. Japan? Germany? Folks get over wartime violence surprisingly quickly. But I think the way far-right fascists MAGAland and far-left communist lefty land feel about each other is genuine hatred and it's a bit different. Obviously one may disagree.
> 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.
Well they’re not hypothetical. There was one that just opened in Ohio. Hour long lines to get gas. If someone is going to suggest that the US is collapsing or throw around this late-stage capitalism nonsense, well, it’s only fair to point out examples of that collapse.
The Rule of Law is for the most part doing just fine in the US. It’ll never be perfect, we aren’t an ethnostate nor do we share a common ideology to make things easy. The only area where we really are failing these days seems to be traffic enforcement.
> while there was incredible disagreement and violence I think folks then still recognized one another as Americans at the base level. Today MAGA and Leftists hate each other so much they’ve lost even that.
Mother of absurdity. You should read what they wrote and said back then. And how much violence they enacted.
And no, slaves were not recognized as americans or even humans. The abolitionists were hated more in the south.
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.
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.
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.
You seem to be living in 2024 wrt your assertions about AI. Or maybe it is me who hasn't caught up with the AI-hate agenda of the hoi-polloi since 2024.
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.
Just because Anthropic advertised something last week does not mean that other LLMs couldn't be used for the same purpose since 2024. Any decent code-generating tool-calling agentic LLM has had the innate ability to audit code. Anthropic's model wasn't the first answer and it's not the final answer.
A toddler has the innate ability to audit code. They’re just not very good at it. I stand by my position that LLMs are an unproven tech when it comes to security auditing.
As of this moment all we have is “data” straight from marketing departments, and a handful of anecdotes.
No, a toddler does not have the ability to audit code. It takes good software security skills, which agentic coding LLMs absolutely possess. It doesn't have to be perfect. With veritable dinosaur-grade beliefs like yours, nothing would ever change in the world, at least not for the better, with extinction being the only inevitability.
Maybe. But the change you’re proposing is still to destroy any power that security researchers have to demand good wages by breaking their work into small units of labour and dispatching them uber-style. So my line of thinking may lead to stagnation, but yours leads to inequality, exploitation, and concentration of market power in the hands of a few.
Do you not see it’s better to stay the same than change things for the worse?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The funding was tied to women and minorities only, so no veteran option. Also I would have had to get certified for that specific location which involves a third party that comes in and interviews the women / minorities to make sure they have actual positions of power and were not just figureheads. They had a scale down option so they could opt for a very small purchase that would actually be smaller than the audit cost let alone the cost of passing such an audit.
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.
How do you think we got the grifting government? It is because people were upset with what the democrats were doing. Maybe if they stopped doing that they wouldn’t have lost. They’ve failed to lean and since Trump is so bad they still won’t need to learn and will continue their mistakes and keep losing.
If by "doing things" you mean "accumulating mysterious anonymous crypto payments" and "getting a large draw from one of your shell companies", then yes.
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.
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