5 ms·

GL.iNet is a popular brand, though I can't find a Wikipedia page for it. https://www.gl-inet.com/about-us/ https://www.gl-inet.com/about-us/ says: > GL Tech (

by neilv 2y ago

GL.iNet is a popular brand, though I can't find a Wikipedia page for it. https://www.gl-inet.com/about-us/ https://www.gl-inet.com/about-us/ says: > GL Tech (HK) Ltd: #601, 5W, Hong Kong Science Park, N.T. Hong Kong > GL Intelligence, Inc.: 10400 Eaton Place, Suite 215, Fairfax, VA 22030 I'm a little curious about this. One of the reasons that some people run OpenWrt is for improved security. In the general security space, a Shenzen company isn't the most usual choice of vendor for Western countries. Also, the company having the US subsidiary/office/unit based in Virginia, and with "intelligence" in the name, hits a somewhat odd note.

teleforce 2y ago
The existing OpenWrt One is running a version of Banana Pi, also a product by a Chinese company [1],[2],[3]. From their website, "Banana Pi open source hardware community is an open source hardware project led by Guangdong Bipai Technology, and supported by Taiwan Hon Hai Technology (Foxconn)." [1] Banana Pi OpenWrt One: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795779282.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795779282.html [2] Banana Pi website: https://www.banana-pi.org/web/index.php https://www.banana-pi.org/web/index.php [3] Banana Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi
TechDebtDevin 2y ago
GL Intelligence is just their 'American Agency', or their legal representation in the United States since they are a foreign company. Probably an American consultant firm they fund. This is required. You can't use your Hong Kong lawyers here. https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/2AFIW-XE300C4G/7058909.pdf https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/2AFIW-XE300C4G/7058909.pdf
donnachangstein 2y ago
Is it really any different than every person who insists on running pfSense for security reasons then immediately suggesting some Chinese shitbox PC off AliExpress as the ideal platform to run it on? Also, since when has having a Wikipedia page proven a company legitimate? You know most companies author their own pages anyway, that's kind of how Wikipedia works.
- unethical_ban 2y ago
  As opposed to the people who run insecure software on questionable hardware? Is everyone supposed to buy Checkpoint?
  - ElectRabbit 2y ago
    By looking at the security history of Checkpoint.. uhm.. :-)
- wtallis 2y ago
  > suggesting some Chinese shitbox PC off AliExpress as the ideal platform to run it on? How reasonable do you think it is to be this automatically suspicious of any computer coming from China? A generic low-cost barebones Intel PC certainly has plenty of space for compromised firmware to hide, but it's implausible that a Chinese intelligence agency would indiscriminately deploy an attack that made use of a compromised Intel Management Engine firmware signing key to put firmware rootkits in cheap hardware sold to individual consumers. On an embedded system like the OpenWRT Two where the entire BOM of the system will be public and the OS has full control over the raw flash memory, a purely software-based supply chain attack would be extremely difficult, and a hardware-based supply chain attack would be expensive. Do you think an intelligence agency would really bother with this for a device that is mostly going to be shipping to nerdy hobbyists? There's more to a threat model than just recognizing that an attack may be technically feasible.
  - donnachangstein 2y ago
    > How reasonable do you think it is to be this automatically suspicious of any computer coming from China? Based on their track record? Pretty fucking reasonable. I would say that most probably isn't malicious collaboration with the CCP, rather sheer incompetence. Shipping secure anything just isn't part of their culture. Read a comment on HN the other day from someone that evaluated Huawei hardware for a telco and swore it was so full of holes to be unusable. The ingrained extreme cheapness of Chinese culture doesn't help. Security is viewed as a luxury - why waste time and money on it when that could be better spent elsewhere? That said, the incompetence gives them plausible deniability when the intelligence agencies take advantage to exploit the holes for their own use.
numpad0 2y ago
I'd like an L3Harris gamer router with IBM CPU, Intel ROM/RAM, Xilinx DSP, and Analog Devices modem, all at $49, but only if there's going to be such a thing, ever...
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  L3 would make it $49k...
- cushychicken 2y ago
  This gave me a good laugh XD
userbinator 2y ago
Good luck finding hardware that isn't at least partly or completely made in China.
- donnachangstein 2y ago
  Mikrotik gets an honorable mention here. At least part or all of their product line is still manufactured in Latvia.
  - Propelloni 2y ago
    It's a part. Mikrotik says it is manufacturing in Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China.
miohtama 2y ago
Can you recommend Western companies that would be able to produce similar hardware at the same price point?
- walterbell 2y ago
  In the absence of PC Engines (RIP) Swiss design made in Taiwan, there is the South Korean ODROID from https://hardkernel.com https://hardkernel.com. Compulab in Israel has some customizable IoT boards, https://www.compulab.com/products/sbcs/sbc-iot-imx8-nxp-i-mx8m-mini-internet-of-things-single-board-computer/ https://www.compulab.com/products/sbcs/sbc-iot-imx8-nxp-i-mx... QNAP in Taiwan has QHora routers, but much higher price points.
  - cycomanic 2y ago
    The irony here is that it's the US who has been proven to break into allied networks and infrastructure and done both political and industrial espionage against their allies.
    - walterbell 2y ago
      If global manufacturers would get with the program and ship blob-free hardware with mainline Linux support, owners could pick their desired firmware and software poison. Until then, we have Cambrian hardware innovation, old kernels and mystery firmware from Shenzen, which can be compromised by a broad spectrum of hostile actors.
    - greggsy 2y ago
      I hope it isn't a surprise that every country with sufficient resources and motives will do it to everyone else.
- squarefoot 2y ago
  Mikrotik sells also bare boards. They come with their RouterOS platform (Linux based, closed) but some can run OpenWRT. Also Olimex has really interesting and open products, but they're not primarily aimed at networking. https://mikrotik.com/products/group/routerboard https://mikrotik.com/products/group/routerboard https://www.olimex.com/ https://www.olimex.com/
walterbell 2y ago
> hits a somewhat odd note Thanks be to karmic disclaiming transparency.
3np 2y ago
I'm less concerned with their jurisdiction and company profile than their absent software/firmware maintenance. I have a bunch of their different models and in practice most of them are unusable today (based on ancient upstream with missing important updates; their sources are a huge mess with scarce and out-of-date docs so have fun resolving that yourself; device dtb/driver require unavailable patches; IIRC their stock vendor firmware phones out and they seem to be pushing towards a centrally managed cloud platform I wouldnt trust) It really is a shame as on paper and out-of-box-right-after launch their devices seem great but after spending too many days failing to get working builds for in particular the Mudi/E750 while realizing that stock firmware is unsafe in untrusted networks, I've given up on them until I see some drastic change in maintenance culture. The collaboration with OpenWrt might make the "Two" an exception, I guess, if the OpenWrt people are involved and demanding enough.
- simoncion 2y ago
  You should be aware of how much collaboration the OpenWRT folks have with -say- Ubiquiti Networks. [0] And yet, OpenWRT runs fine on the UAP-AC-LITE and -LR. I'd wager there's nearly zero collaboration between the overwhelming majority of the hardware manufacturers that create hardware that OpenWRT runs on and the OpenWRT folks. Your concern is entirely unwarranted and -if I might be a little uncharitable- seems to come from a position of ignorance (whether actual or feigned, I cannot tell). [0] Less than zero.
  - 3np 2y ago
    What does that have to do with anything? I'm speaking about experience of deploying existing gl.inet devices, marketed as "fully open source" with OpenWrt being front-and-center in marketing, as well as being promoted on the OpenWrt wiki. That someone from the community has made OpenWrt run fine on Ubiquiti gear has nothing to do with my comment and is not indicative of anything (if anything perhaps supporting the notion that glinet should be able to do better). > Your concern is entirely unwarranted and -if I might be a little uncharitable- seems to come from a position of ignorance (whether actual or feigned, I cannot tell). Yeah, that's quite uncharitable. Did you read the last line of the comment you replied to? Speaking of ignorance... How many new embedded devices have you personally ported OpenWrt (or any Linux dist for that matter) to? How many glinet devices do you have experience deploying self-compiled builds to? How much time have you spent digging through their sources and patches?
Havoc 2y ago
You’re not making those specs for 250 bucks without shenzen being involved
- moffkalast 2y ago
  This is honestly a fantastic deal for both sides, we get cheap hardware, they get working software. We're both terrible at doing the other bit and all governments are gonna have backdoors regardless.
phantomathkg 2y ago
The address you mentioned is Hong Kong not ShenZhen.
martinsnow 2y ago
I don't understand this comment. All electronics assembling happens in Shenzhen. Be it Apple, Cisco or Microsoft. If anything this is par for the course. What I personally would have liked to see was an EU based entity overseeing and taking responsibility for the project since neither US nor China really should be trusted with privacy these days.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by neilv 2y ago

teleforce 2y ago

The existing OpenWrt One is running a version of Banana Pi, also a product by a Chinese company [1],[2],[3]. From their website, "Banana Pi open source hardware community is an open source hardware project led by Guangdong Bipai Technology, and supported by Taiwan Hon Hai Technology (Foxconn)." [1] Banana Pi OpenWrt One: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795779282.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007795779282.html [2] Banana Pi website: https://www.banana-pi.org/web/index.php https://www.banana-pi.org/web/index.php [3] Banana Pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Pi

TechDebtDevin 2y ago

GL Intelligence is just their 'American Agency', or their legal representation in the United States since they are a foreign company. Probably an American consultant firm they fund. This is required. You can't use your Hong Kong lawyers here. https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/2AFIW-XE300C4G/7058909.pdf https://fcc.report/FCC-ID/2AFIW-XE300C4G/7058909.pdf

donnachangstein 2y ago

Is it really any different than every person who insists on running pfSense for security reasons then immediately suggesting some Chinese shitbox PC off AliExpress as the ideal platform to run it on? Also, since when has having a Wikipedia page proven a company legitimate? You know most companies author their own pages anyway, that's kind of how Wikipedia works.

unethical_ban 2y ago
As opposed to the people who run insecure software on questionable hardware? Is everyone supposed to buy Checkpoint?
- ElectRabbit 2y ago
  By looking at the security history of Checkpoint.. uhm.. :-)
wtallis 2y ago
> suggesting some Chinese shitbox PC off AliExpress as the ideal platform to run it on? How reasonable do you think it is to be this automatically suspicious of any computer coming from China? A generic low-cost barebones Intel PC certainly has plenty of space for compromised firmware to hide, but it's implausible that a Chinese intelligence agency would indiscriminately deploy an attack that made use of a compromised Intel Management Engine firmware signing key to put firmware rootkits in cheap hardware sold to individual consumers. On an embedded system like the OpenWRT Two where the entire BOM of the system will be public and the OS has full control over the raw flash memory, a purely software-based supply chain attack would be extremely difficult, and a hardware-based supply chain attack would be expensive. Do you think an intelligence agency would really bother with this for a device that is mostly going to be shipping to nerdy hobbyists? There's more to a threat model than just recognizing that an attack may be technically feasible.
- donnachangstein 2y ago
  > How reasonable do you think it is to be this automatically suspicious of any computer coming from China? Based on their track record? Pretty fucking reasonable. I would say that most probably isn't malicious collaboration with the CCP, rather sheer incompetence. Shipping secure anything just isn't part of their culture. Read a comment on HN the other day from someone that evaluated Huawei hardware for a telco and swore it was so full of holes to be unusable. The ingrained extreme cheapness of Chinese culture doesn't help. Security is viewed as a luxury - why waste time and money on it when that could be better spent elsewhere? That said, the incompetence gives them plausible deniability when the intelligence agencies take advantage to exploit the holes for their own use.

numpad0 2y ago

I'd like an L3Harris gamer router with IBM CPU, Intel ROM/RAM, Xilinx DSP, and Analog Devices modem, all at $49, but only if there's going to be such a thing, ever...

throwaway48476 2y ago
L3 would make it $49k...
cushychicken 2y ago
This gave me a good laugh XD

userbinator 2y ago

Good luck finding hardware that isn't at least partly or completely made in China.

donnachangstein 2y ago
Mikrotik gets an honorable mention here. At least part or all of their product line is still manufactured in Latvia.
- Propelloni 2y ago
  It's a part. Mikrotik says it is manufacturing in Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China.

miohtama 2y ago

Can you recommend Western companies that would be able to produce similar hardware at the same price point?

walterbell 2y ago
In the absence of PC Engines (RIP) Swiss design made in Taiwan, there is the South Korean ODROID from https://hardkernel.com https://hardkernel.com. Compulab in Israel has some customizable IoT boards, https://www.compulab.com/products/sbcs/sbc-iot-imx8-nxp-i-mx8m-mini-internet-of-things-single-board-computer/ https://www.compulab.com/products/sbcs/sbc-iot-imx8-nxp-i-mx... QNAP in Taiwan has QHora routers, but much higher price points.
- cycomanic 2y ago
  The irony here is that it's the US who has been proven to break into allied networks and infrastructure and done both political and industrial espionage against their allies.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    If global manufacturers would get with the program and ship blob-free hardware with mainline Linux support, owners could pick their desired firmware and software poison. Until then, we have Cambrian hardware innovation, old kernels and mystery firmware from Shenzen, which can be compromised by a broad spectrum of hostile actors.
  - greggsy 2y ago
    I hope it isn't a surprise that every country with sufficient resources and motives will do it to everyone else.
squarefoot 2y ago
Mikrotik sells also bare boards. They come with their RouterOS platform (Linux based, closed) but some can run OpenWRT. Also Olimex has really interesting and open products, but they're not primarily aimed at networking. https://mikrotik.com/products/group/routerboard https://mikrotik.com/products/group/routerboard https://www.olimex.com/ https://www.olimex.com/

walterbell 2y ago

> hits a somewhat odd note Thanks be to karmic disclaiming transparency.

3np 2y ago

I'm less concerned with their jurisdiction and company profile than their absent software/firmware maintenance. I have a bunch of their different models and in practice most of them are unusable today (based on ancient upstream with missing important updates; their sources are a huge mess with scarce and out-of-date docs so have fun resolving that yourself; device dtb/driver require unavailable patches; IIRC their stock vendor firmware phones out and they seem to be pushing towards a centrally managed cloud platform I wouldnt trust) It really is a shame as on paper and out-of-box-right-after launch their devices seem great but after spending too many days failing to get working builds for in particular the Mudi/E750 while realizing that stock firmware is unsafe in untrusted networks, I've given up on them until I see some drastic change in maintenance culture. The collaboration with OpenWrt might make the "Two" an exception, I guess, if the OpenWrt people are involved and demanding enough.

simoncion 2y ago
You should be aware of how much collaboration the OpenWRT folks have with -say- Ubiquiti Networks. [0] And yet, OpenWRT runs fine on the UAP-AC-LITE and -LR. I'd wager there's nearly zero collaboration between the overwhelming majority of the hardware manufacturers that create hardware that OpenWRT runs on and the OpenWRT folks. Your concern is entirely unwarranted and -if I might be a little uncharitable- seems to come from a position of ignorance (whether actual or feigned, I cannot tell). [0] Less than zero.
- 3np 2y ago
  What does that have to do with anything? I'm speaking about experience of deploying existing gl.inet devices, marketed as "fully open source" with OpenWrt being front-and-center in marketing, as well as being promoted on the OpenWrt wiki. That someone from the community has made OpenWrt run fine on Ubiquiti gear has nothing to do with my comment and is not indicative of anything (if anything perhaps supporting the notion that glinet should be able to do better). > Your concern is entirely unwarranted and -if I might be a little uncharitable- seems to come from a position of ignorance (whether actual or feigned, I cannot tell). Yeah, that's quite uncharitable. Did you read the last line of the comment you replied to? Speaking of ignorance... How many new embedded devices have you personally ported OpenWrt (or any Linux dist for that matter) to? How many glinet devices do you have experience deploying self-compiled builds to? How much time have you spent digging through their sources and patches?

Havoc 2y ago

You’re not making those specs for 250 bucks without shenzen being involved

moffkalast 2y ago
This is honestly a fantastic deal for both sides, we get cheap hardware, they get working software. We're both terrible at doing the other bit and all governments are gonna have backdoors regardless.

phantomathkg 2y ago

The address you mentioned is Hong Kong not ShenZhen.

martinsnow 2y ago

I don't understand this comment. All electronics assembling happens in Shenzhen. Be it Apple, Cisco or Microsoft. If anything this is par for the course. What I personally would have liked to see was an EU based entity overseeing and taking responsibility for the project since neither US nor China really should be trusted with privacy these days.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]