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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2756 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 22, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Can anyone speculate why the FCC has banned foreign-made routers?

You can take the stated reason at face value; it's not like it's false. But it's a bit hypocritical if you consider that it is quite certain the US has either intentional backdoors and/or undisclosed vulnerabilities to achieve surveillance on its domestic networking equipment, but they aren't wrong to be suspicious of chinese made routers.

And on its own, this measure is not gonna achieve much as the horse is already out of the barn when it comes to consumer network security. What normies even keep their router updated? When people keep their 10 year old router that's never been updated, has tens of known exploited vulnerabilities and is configured with a WAN facing admin panel, who even cares where it was built?

Sadly, the realistic solution is to incentivise people to let their ISP take charge, which as someone who prefers personal responsability, I hate. Subsidize ISP sold/loaned equipment, enable auto-updates. I'd even make it so that the router has a hardware switch enabled VPN to let the ISP in to the LAN-facing management if they need to do some work (I'd make a hardware switch so that clueless customers can be reasonably certain when it's on or off). Convenient but security nightmare networking options need to start being disabled by default and users should not be encouraged to enable them ever (I'm looking at you UPnP). I'd probably ask or heavily incentivise ISPs to have all of their customer facing techs to have a security certification. If you had all of this taken care of, then banning hardware backdoored (by state adversaries as opposed to domestic intelligence agencies) might have an effect.

Heck, Cisco has a major vulnerability approximately every five minutes, and I don't doubt that USGOV is aware of most of them and doesn't disclose under NOBUS.

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