5 ms·

Foxconn is Taiwanese like Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, MSI, MediaTek, D-Link, and HTC. Both Asus and D-Link are major router makers as well. Also fun fact, nearly al

Foxconn is Taiwanese like Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, MSI, MediaTek, D-Link, and HTC. Both Asus and D-Link are major router makers as well. Also fun fact, nearly all routers use the same chips from Boardcom. The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same.

spiderPig 9y ago
Ah TIL, with their factories being in Shenzhen, I thought they were HQ’ed there. This still doesn’t rule out government strong arming though.
gonzo 9y ago
The firmware is mostly the same as well.
coding123 9y ago
It's a RoC
- philliphaydon 9y ago
  Taiwan.
- bhouston 9y ago
  Taiwan and China are quite distinct. It is not at all like Hong Kong and China. Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
wtallis 9y ago
> The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same. The firmware is the part you really have to worry about, though. But the proper solution is to simply never run the vendor's firmware on a consumer grade router, because none of them are any good at assembling and securing a Linux distribution.
- srcmap 9y ago
  Just check if they are compatible with dd-wrt or openwrt and flash it with opensource build. Much easier than flashing cell phone and the open source version normally has more features also.
  - Tepix 9y ago
    It's such a shame that when using OpenWRT everything runs as root...
    - wtallis 9y ago
      OpenWRT is still trying to support devices with 8MB of storage, so they can't go overboard and start incorporating Docker or anything like that. But some services do run as separate users: on my routers, dnsmasq and avahi aren't running as root. What other services would you like to see isolated?
      - Tepix 9y ago
        I didn't know that. Sounds like they are moving in the right direction. One important component that should not run as root is the web server.
        wtallis 9y ago
        Generally speaking, I agree that a web server shouldn't be running as root. But when the sole purpose of that web server is to provide root-level control over the system, is there really much security to be gained by running that process as a different user? That "unprivileged" process is still going to have some mechanism for causing arbitrary commands to run as root. I can imagine that you might have an unprivileged server presenting just the log-in page, then proxying to a privileged server that is started once the administrator is authenticated. But that doesn't get you much more security, and it probably does strain the resources of low-end routers. A small, auditable server may be better than a more complicated system, especially since it is trivial for more paranoid users to disable/uninstall the web server and just use SSH (which nobody seems to mind running as root).

spiderPig 9y ago

Ah TIL, with their factories being in Shenzhen, I thought they were HQ’ed there. This still doesn’t rule out government strong arming though.

gonzo 9y ago

The firmware is mostly the same as well.

coding123 9y ago

It's a RoC

philliphaydon 9y ago
Taiwan.
bhouston 9y ago
Taiwan and China are quite distinct. It is not at all like Hong Kong and China. Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

wtallis 9y ago

> The majority of differences between routers is just firmware and packaging, the guts are all the same. The firmware is the part you really have to worry about, though. But the proper solution is to simply never run the vendor's firmware on a consumer grade router, because none of them are any good at assembling and securing a Linux distribution.

srcmap 9y ago
Just check if they are compatible with dd-wrt or openwrt and flash it with opensource build. Much easier than flashing cell phone and the open source version normally has more features also.
- Tepix 9y ago
  It's such a shame that when using OpenWRT everything runs as root...
  - wtallis 9y ago
    OpenWRT is still trying to support devices with 8MB of storage, so they can't go overboard and start incorporating Docker or anything like that. But some services do run as separate users: on my routers, dnsmasq and avahi aren't running as root. What other services would you like to see isolated?
    - Tepix 9y ago
      I didn't know that. Sounds like they are moving in the right direction. One important component that should not run as root is the web server.
      - wtallis 9y ago
        Generally speaking, I agree that a web server shouldn't be running as root. But when the sole purpose of that web server is to provide root-level control over the system, is there really much security to be gained by running that process as a different user? That "unprivileged" process is still going to have some mechanism for causing arbitrary commands to run as root. I can imagine that you might have an unprivileged server presenting just the log-in page, then proxying to a privileged server that is started once the administrator is authenticated. But that doesn't get you much more security, and it probably does strain the resources of low-end routers. A small, auditable server may be better than a more complicated system, especially since it is trivial for more paranoid users to disable/uninstall the web server and just use SSH (which nobody seems to mind running as root).