We don't stand for Chinese surveillance in this country. Our surveillance shall be domestically produced or GTFO.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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while understandable, if i was american i might actually prefer surveillance by foreign country. At least if i was part of group in danger like lqbt.
At least the foreign country wont use the data to arrest and make laws against you.
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Yeah, the worst case is they use it to influence elections. US surveillance will do that and look for "illegal" activity —for some fucked up definition of illegal.
For example, in my state you need to give your ID to sites to look at porn. Fuck that. I don't trust those sites with that kind of data, even if I trusted that they were trying to keep it private (which I don't). I use a VPN to avoid this, but I'm not really sure on the legal status of that.
Also, my political views don't really align with the current administration (or any for that matter, but especially the current one). They've already made indications they'd come after people who hold opinions like mine. I trust China won't send people after me, but I'm not sure about the US.
It's kinda like my google ethos, Google are already spying on me, I might as well use their phone and then Samsung aren't spying on me as well.
For me it will depend on what that foriegn country is, how it is governed, its cultural norms, things like that.
I don't have more trust in Chinese government than I do American.
How about some real privacy rights instead of making me choose my surveillers.
Yep, Google WiFi or Amazon Eero only. Those two definitely don’t have an incentive to log your network traffic or anything.
they want palintir to do it.
We stand atop, adjacent to, within, underneath, and around foreign surveillance. But stand for? You bet your momma there’s no room for that.
Nah. The Chinese surveillance company would still sell your data to the us
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With the exception of tick-tock
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And here I've been just avoiding TP Link garbage for over 2 decades because it's one of the shittiest brands around. I'd go with Belkin before TP Link. And Belkin also sucks.
Try mikrotik
One of the few companies that I still "fanboy" for. The functionality and value are unbeatable. You can get most of the features of a $10k Cisco router in a 80$ SoHo Mikrotik. POE in and POE out for cheap so your APs don't have dangling power adapters. It's also a Latvian company which to me is a plus over both American and Chinese options
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Well, they have had a lot of vulnerabilities. Most people won't even update the firmware let alone install OpenWRT on them.
That's more an user issue than a product issue though.
Good. TPLink makes cartoonishly insecure consumer grade equipment. A better solution is that the US establishes some minimum infosec standards for this equipment, but that would require time and thought.
Do you have any information to share about their bad security? I have a couple of their routers which seem to work quite well. Any I really at risk, and anymore than I would be with something from Linksys or Netgear?
Here are two new vulnerabilities from this month.
Here are some more exploits from 2023
Here are all the TPLink vulnerablies known publicly
Am I really at risk, and anymore than I would be with something from Linksys or Netgear?
As always, depends on your threat model. I have cheap TPLink switch in my home network because its cheap and kept behind a pfsense firewall. The TPLink switch is not allowed to talk to the internet. This is good enough for me as I don't have a threat model where something attacks the switch from inside my network.
For completeness here are Cisco's and Netgear's vulnerabilities. Infosec security is a journey, not a destination.
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wow, CNET has really gone to shit, hasn't it?
three popups, including a full screen, autoplaying video, and banner
guess that's going on my blocklist
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A possible ban on TP-Link routers -- one of the most popular router brands in the US -- is gaining momentum, as more than half a dozen federal departments and agencies back the proposal, according to a Washington Post report on Thursday
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TP-Link is excellent for cheap switching hardware which a ton of vendors overprice for the same quality. Its your OG made in China deal that works pretty well for the price.
Otherwise, you should skip it as a router and instead opt for either a better AIO, or put in the 2 minutes of extra effort to get a cheap ethernet router and a separate AP because AIOs are still overrated in 2025 for the price per quality.
Not to mention that 5 GHz channels are getting clogged these days even on the DFS channels which people shouldn't be using all the time. I know its not possible for a lot of people, but you're really better off on even bargain basement maximum cheapo Cat-5e cables.
Gb WiFi speeds and MuMIMO not gonna matter when you have CSMA/CA throwing a metric ton of RTS and CTS packets causing increasing amounts of retries as you add stations.
Probably worst scenario is if you're living in an apartment surrounded by like 50 stations within range. No amount of 802.11 magic is gonna give you a stable connection.
Spot on. Also, the popularization of wifi "smart devices" that often have a buggy or just bad network stack implementation does not help
This actually reminded me of an actual instance of this I discovered for a family member.
Their 2.4Ghz devices would just randomly drop connections at seemingly random times, and changing the router didn't fix anything.
So I fired up bettercap to take a look, and lo and behold it was a GE "smart" oven that would spam advertise its SSID with beacon frames on an interval and would block traffic because all the other devices would see a busy channel.
The funniest thing is said family member specifically decided against using the oven wifi feature because he already knew it was not going to be useful or even reliable, but he had no idea the wifi feature was left on which was causing all the packet drops.
Upon further investigation, we realized he actually did turn it off, but because the tap button was basically at elbow height, it was super easy to accidentally bump and flick back on.
Conclusion is that some GE ovens double as a crappy WiFi jammer lmao.
TP Link is the Temu of routers. For decades they have been the “cheaper router” and it shows.
Bullshit.
It depends on what you buy from them and always has been. Their Omada line is on par with Ubiquiti, some other gear is similar to other commercial grade gear.
If you buy their cheap shit, yeah,it's cheap. But they,as most manufacturers, have a broad spectrum..
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Can still put openwrt on them can't you?
Depends on CPU, not all of them supports out of box nor have upstream
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Low Level Learning has a good video in TP-Link. Even if they aren’t malicious, they have refused to fix obvious exploits for decades.
Considering they recently also complained about Mikrotik I would,well, not give to much merit on that shit.
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Totally off topic, but I was reading the article on Fennec (mobile Firefox clone) while playing music over Bluetooth to my car. I was parked waiting for someone, not driving. No streaming service, playing honest to god mp3s from my device, when out of the blue I got VPN ads over the speaker.
Fennec indicated that cnet was playing them, but there as was no video box or other audio player widget active, so it looks like they are splicing invisible audio ads in somehow?
I'm also using ublock origin on mobile plus AdAway (rooted), so that's not an easy feat.
Could anyone double check? That's the most obnoxious behavior I've experienced in recent time.
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Cursed site is auto playing a video that isnt even visible when on mobile.
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The rest of the world would be getting discounts on TP-Link gear.
Would it just ban the sale, or somehow ban my tp link devices? My tp link WiFi has been going strong for years
Get a Protectlii vault with opnSense. Not horribly expensive and very very secure.
I was planning to get the OpenWRT One. Any reasons that would be a bad idea?
Do not take what this government says at face value. Palantir has their fingers in it like crazy.
I have a couple older TPLink Wi-Fi 5 routers with OpenWRT. One is used as a router running various services like DHCP, DNS, firewall, VPN, etc., and the other is just an access point. I’ll probably eventually get a rack-mounted router and some Wi-Fi 7/8 access points, but my current setup works well enough, especially since I mostly use Ethernet for anything requiring a fast connection.
TP Link is just as bad at security as most other consumer electronics vendors:
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