Why take that chance, for some slightly cheaper routers?
I have respect for human creativity, and the limits of public servants. Its not easy to keep constant vigilance against all possible backdoors. Easier to restrict core infra devices from openly hostile areas.
Why take the chance that the food you buy from the grocer may be contaminated? I have respect for human creativity, and the limits of farmers. It's not easy to keep constant vigilance against all sources of contamination. Easier to restrict food to only what you produce yourself.
Glibness aside, there's clearly a continuum to the concept of 'we live in a society', and to how far the monkey brain's tribe extends. But the argument against routers is clearly arising from a biased set of priors, whether fairly or unfairly.
Because it's a strategic issue. The internet is critical infrastructure. While TP-Link might not have contracts with ISPs and datacenters, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think what damage you could have with 30% of the home / small business routers under your control.
This could range from plausible deniability stuff (like the examples in the article), to targeted investigations / attacks (Bob who works at the Gov Accounting office for Miliary Spending), all the way to a 100-million unit botnet turning to provide a few days of distraction ("Bad hackers compromised our OTA system. Sorry!") on while a certain island is being eminant-domained.
Your food example is not the same. You can't trojan-horse an apple pie, or target an individual customer from the supplier-side (yet). If you decided to poison them, that's pulling the pin from the grenade right now.
> Why take the chance that the food you buy from the grocer may be contaminated?
Food doesn’t have the incentives here, and because the FDA is involved with food production they regularly discovers issues and issues recalls etc. Even better manufactures can no longer influence food after it enters a distribution center limiting their ability to hide issues.
Now suppose you deploy a home router with automatic updates, that’s not necessarily malicious but means the device can be under the manufacturer’s control whenever they wish. Saying we haven’t discovered malicious activity is therefore meaningless here.
Because I don't think the chance of getting a compromised router is any greater than any other router. Chance probably higher there's a US government backdoor in other routers.
>Really? That's the most pressing humanitarian issue they could come up with?
I can't help but feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. Nowhere in that video did it claim that the Burning Man test run was a pressing humanitarian issue.
Its clear this is just to raise awareness/funds in support of the longer-term goal. The "no pressure" field-test aspect of it probably doesn't hurt either.
The 3D statues are perfect analogs for possible delivery services. Many companies in the healthcare sector have begun looking at 3D printing for building pills and prevent counterfeit medicine which is also a huge issue worldwide.
I have respect for human creativity, and the limits of public servants. Its not easy to keep constant vigilance against all possible backdoors. Easier to restrict core infra devices from openly hostile areas.