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For any further questions related to this, please review our EULA, Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. As someone who was literally about to order a whole set

For any further questions related to this, please review our EULA, Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. As someone who was literally about to order a whole set of Ubiquiti gear for his business this month, having never been a customer before: no, I don't think I will. Ubiquiti, you blew it once by trying to push this out in the first place. Now you've blown it again, by thinking some token opt-out button was enough to fix the problem, instead of realising that what you're dealing with here is a major trust issue and you're fundamentally on the wrong side of it. You don't get a third shot. I need to protect the security of my business data, and I need to be confident that the professional gear we're buying isn't going to actively undermine that.

tw04 7y ago
While I totally get wanting the option to opt-out of phone home, literally every enterprise hardware vendor has phone home and expects you to have it enabled if you want proactive support. Claiming they need to dump the feature entirely is more than a bit overly dramatic. The option to disable it was absolutely the right move for them to make and it should’ve been there from the start. Everyone claiming they should not have any phone home at all hasn’t spent much time in the enterprise hardware world...
- esotericn 7y ago
  They need it to be opt-in, such that the hardware I have already bought does not begin sending data arbitrarily upon an update.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  While I totally get wanting the option to opt-out of phone home, literally every enterprise hardware vendor has phone home and expects you to have it enabled if you want proactive support. No, they don't. We work with some clients who are in a very similar area, on the development side. Anyone who thought this was a good idea would get bounced out of the room so fast their feet wouldn't touch the floor until they were in the corridor. It is absolutely not the norm to upload data from within the customer's network without their knowledge or consent.
  - syshum 7y ago
    >>It is absolutely not the norm to upload data Yea it really is, All the major Players in WiFi do it, most even need to talk to a licensing server at regular intervals (which include Telemetry data) and there is no Opt-Out (looking at you Meraki )
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      Citation very much needed. I do a lot of work in this part of the industry. If you want to even get into the conversation with some of the big financial services, healthcare providers and so on, you need to comply with their standard rules, which might have a checklist hundreds of points long, mostly non-negotiable. You're not going to get those deals with mandatory telemetry no matter who your boss plays golf with.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Read more carefully. Almost all of your enterprise vendors do this today. Some of them even give Sales Engineers real-time access to performance and utilization metrics. It’s a great way to get competitive intelligence about other companies.
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      You misunderstand. My business develops software, including software that runs on networked devices, and we have never had a client ask for phoning home like that. In fact, it has often been a requirement that the device could operate with no Internet access at all, because a lot of security-conscious customers such as those in finance or healthcare have strict rules about this.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        I did. Mea culpa
      - tw04 7y ago
        Can you name one? IBM Cisco Dell/EMC HPe-Aruba Arista All phone home. Who is this magical enterprise company that has no phone-home? This farcical: claiming there are issues with healthcare and finance is complete rubbish. They aren't phoning home patient data, they're phoning home telemetry and health status of the hardware. I can tell you with 100% certainty that both segments have literally hundreds of thousands of hardware devices phoning home to their respective manufacturers without ANY issue.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Since when does Uni-Fi have proactive support?
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    That's kind of the point, isn't it? If they get crash dumps they can fix bugs that aren't reported by the (likely very large) install base not savvy enough to realize that there's a bug they should be sending crash reports for. I have run into this at literally every job I've ever had. Make notes, gather evidence, and file bug reports is just a foreign concept to some people.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      One issue is that it's a lot of work that, in my experience, usually doesn't go anywhere. You found the problem and worked around it, gave their people what you had, but they keep asking you to try things and gather more data for 3 weeks while you're trying to get shit done.
syshum 7y ago
Please let me know what you are going to get instead.... I bet is phones home as well, and probably does not even have a opt-out at all.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Sadly this is almost certainly true. Ubiquity was really the only reasonable player in this market for people who aren't just throwing money away.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    No they weren't.
    - freddie_mercury 7y ago
      Comments like this, especially when someone in the thread has already asked for alternatives, isn't particularly useful. On the contrary, it is the coward's approach of shutting down other people position but not be willing to stake out one of your own to likewise be subject to scrutiny.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        Comments like this, especially when someone in the thread has already asked for alternatives, isn't particularly useful. On the contrary, it is the coward's approach of shutting down other people position but not be willing to stake out one of your own to likewise be subject to scrutiny. I've already outlined the many ways in which Ubiquiti was not a reasonable player on this and other posts, their deliberate GPL violations that exposed users to added vulns was covered in the initial post about their spyware. I'll take it a step further and posit that Ubiquiti has done little to nothing in good faith. Their offerings are largely thin veneers over open source software with minimal engineering effort (likely because Ubiquiti has little to no actual engineering staff). Look at the packet corruption bugs in the switches, the overheating, or the RADIUS issues that their WiFi gear has (and Ubiquiti has zero knowledge on how to debug). For fucks sakes Ubiquiti shipped their EdgeRouter lineup with an EOL'd version of Debian for ages (specifically the MIPS support had been EOL'd and Ubiquiti largely didn't build or ship security updates). EdgeOS, of course, is merely a thin HTML based wrapper on top of Vyatta (and an exceedingly buggy one for a while). I don't think there are a ton of great options (although NetBSD on the Oceteon hardware seems like a good solution) once you've restricted yourself to that price point. Lack of better options doesn't mean that Ubiquiti is good or reasonably behaved.
inferiorhuman 7y ago
As someone who was literally about to order a whole set of Ubiquiti gear for his business this month, having never been a customer before: no, I don't think I will. Here's what I don't get: Ubiquiti has always been a bit of a dumpster fire. From the wilful GPL violation that introduced security vulnerabilities to shipping a product based on an end-of-lifed version of Debian to shipping known vulnerable OSS software. Yes, I know that they've (recently) shipped a new version of "EdgeOS" that is based on a supported version of Debian. From what I can tell the love affair with Ubiquiti was more about the cost than the quality.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  Previously I had heard primarily good things about Ubiquiti on the grapevine, mostly about the performance of the WiFi equipment and the ease of use and central management via the GUI. Now that I'm looking properly in connection with a specific purchase, the picture doesn't seem to be nearly as pretty, sadly.
maccard 7y ago
This is a little ridiculous, and it sounds like anything they could have done would have lost your business (not that they lost your business - they never had it in the first case). They made a decision, and rolled back on it almost immediately.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  That's not really true. However, we do have very strong views on privacy and security, and in connection with those, on mandatory telemetry. These aren't just on a whim. They arise as a practical consequence of the types of client and data we often work with, and our formal obligations and ethics in connection with those. Ubiquiti isn't special in this respect. We don't have any Windows 10 systems either, for example. The problem here is only partly the original decision. It's actually much more concerning that they don't really seem to understand why that decision was a problem for some people or that they did anything wrong. How can anyone trust an organisation that would pull a stunt like this and then think a simple opt-out added under protest was sufficient to address the issue?
- esotericn 7y ago
  They have not at all rolled back.

tw04 7y ago

While I totally get wanting the option to opt-out of phone home, literally every enterprise hardware vendor has phone home and expects you to have it enabled if you want proactive support. Claiming they need to dump the feature entirely is more than a bit overly dramatic. The option to disable it was absolutely the right move for them to make and it should’ve been there from the start. Everyone claiming they should not have any phone home at all hasn’t spent much time in the enterprise hardware world...

esotericn 7y ago
They need it to be opt-in, such that the hardware I have already bought does not begin sending data arbitrarily upon an update.
Silhouette 7y ago
While I totally get wanting the option to opt-out of phone home, literally every enterprise hardware vendor has phone home and expects you to have it enabled if you want proactive support. No, they don't. We work with some clients who are in a very similar area, on the development side. Anyone who thought this was a good idea would get bounced out of the room so fast their feet wouldn't touch the floor until they were in the corridor. It is absolutely not the norm to upload data from within the customer's network without their knowledge or consent.
- syshum 7y ago
  >>It is absolutely not the norm to upload data Yea it really is, All the major Players in WiFi do it, most even need to talk to a licensing server at regular intervals (which include Telemetry data) and there is no Opt-Out (looking at you Meraki )
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    Citation very much needed. I do a lot of work in this part of the industry. If you want to even get into the conversation with some of the big financial services, healthcare providers and so on, you need to comply with their standard rules, which might have a checklist hundreds of points long, mostly non-negotiable. You're not going to get those deals with mandatory telemetry no matter who your boss plays golf with.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Read more carefully. Almost all of your enterprise vendors do this today. Some of them even give Sales Engineers real-time access to performance and utilization metrics. It’s a great way to get competitive intelligence about other companies.
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    You misunderstand. My business develops software, including software that runs on networked devices, and we have never had a client ask for phoning home like that. In fact, it has often been a requirement that the device could operate with no Internet access at all, because a lot of security-conscious customers such as those in finance or healthcare have strict rules about this.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      I did. Mea culpa
    - tw04 7y ago
      Can you name one? IBM Cisco Dell/EMC HPe-Aruba Arista All phone home. Who is this magical enterprise company that has no phone-home? This farcical: claiming there are issues with healthcare and finance is complete rubbish. They aren't phoning home patient data, they're phoning home telemetry and health status of the hardware. I can tell you with 100% certainty that both segments have literally hundreds of thousands of hardware devices phoning home to their respective manufacturers without ANY issue.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Since when does Uni-Fi have proactive support?
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  That's kind of the point, isn't it? If they get crash dumps they can fix bugs that aren't reported by the (likely very large) install base not savvy enough to realize that there's a bug they should be sending crash reports for. I have run into this at literally every job I've ever had. Make notes, gather evidence, and file bug reports is just a foreign concept to some people.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    One issue is that it's a lot of work that, in my experience, usually doesn't go anywhere. You found the problem and worked around it, gave their people what you had, but they keep asking you to try things and gather more data for 3 weeks while you're trying to get shit done.

syshum 7y ago

Please let me know what you are going to get instead.... I bet is phones home as well, and probably does not even have a opt-out at all.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Sadly this is almost certainly true. Ubiquity was really the only reasonable player in this market for people who aren't just throwing money away.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  No they weren't.
  - freddie_mercury 7y ago
    Comments like this, especially when someone in the thread has already asked for alternatives, isn't particularly useful. On the contrary, it is the coward's approach of shutting down other people position but not be willing to stake out one of your own to likewise be subject to scrutiny.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Comments like this, especially when someone in the thread has already asked for alternatives, isn't particularly useful. On the contrary, it is the coward's approach of shutting down other people position but not be willing to stake out one of your own to likewise be subject to scrutiny. I've already outlined the many ways in which Ubiquiti was not a reasonable player on this and other posts, their deliberate GPL violations that exposed users to added vulns was covered in the initial post about their spyware. I'll take it a step further and posit that Ubiquiti has done little to nothing in good faith. Their offerings are largely thin veneers over open source software with minimal engineering effort (likely because Ubiquiti has little to no actual engineering staff). Look at the packet corruption bugs in the switches, the overheating, or the RADIUS issues that their WiFi gear has (and Ubiquiti has zero knowledge on how to debug). For fucks sakes Ubiquiti shipped their EdgeRouter lineup with an EOL'd version of Debian for ages (specifically the MIPS support had been EOL'd and Ubiquiti largely didn't build or ship security updates). EdgeOS, of course, is merely a thin HTML based wrapper on top of Vyatta (and an exceedingly buggy one for a while). I don't think there are a ton of great options (although NetBSD on the Oceteon hardware seems like a good solution) once you've restricted yourself to that price point. Lack of better options doesn't mean that Ubiquiti is good or reasonably behaved.

inferiorhuman 7y ago

As someone who was literally about to order a whole set of Ubiquiti gear for his business this month, having never been a customer before: no, I don't think I will. Here's what I don't get: Ubiquiti has always been a bit of a dumpster fire. From the wilful GPL violation that introduced security vulnerabilities to shipping a product based on an end-of-lifed version of Debian to shipping known vulnerable OSS software. Yes, I know that they've (recently) shipped a new version of "EdgeOS" that is based on a supported version of Debian. From what I can tell the love affair with Ubiquiti was more about the cost than the quality.

Silhouette 7y ago
Previously I had heard primarily good things about Ubiquiti on the grapevine, mostly about the performance of the WiFi equipment and the ease of use and central management via the GUI. Now that I'm looking properly in connection with a specific purchase, the picture doesn't seem to be nearly as pretty, sadly.

maccard 7y ago

This is a little ridiculous, and it sounds like anything they could have done would have lost your business (not that they lost your business - they never had it in the first case). They made a decision, and rolled back on it almost immediately.

Silhouette 7y ago
That's not really true. However, we do have very strong views on privacy and security, and in connection with those, on mandatory telemetry. These aren't just on a whim. They arise as a practical consequence of the types of client and data we often work with, and our formal obligations and ethics in connection with those. Ubiquiti isn't special in this respect. We don't have any Windows 10 systems either, for example. The problem here is only partly the original decision. It's actually much more concerning that they don't really seem to understand why that decision was a problem for some people or that they did anything wrong. How can anyone trust an organisation that would pull a stunt like this and then think a simple opt-out added under protest was sufficient to address the issue?
esotericn 7y ago
They have not at all rolled back.