Okie, so President Pee on Me has decreed that all new "foreign made routers" are banned from import or sale in the USA, showing exactly how utterly fking clueless they are.
Like dumb fks, fr? I'm not techie and even I know that u just banned all new routers bc Americans stopped producing anything but fascism and bad govt.
It's cool tho. I'll just ignore ur bs and do what I want whether u like it or not.
Where I spent a bunch of my childhood, that country inspects imports and filters for hardware that have dedicated asics that effectively create a backdoor. Naturally it's not 100%. I can understand that there is technically a security interest.
I'll note that they never put a blanket ban on imports for routing hardware, but did regulate them in a particular way. They also didn't always remove the asics, but sometimes rewired them to be the ones in control instead.
However, the policy that was adopted only bans newer hardware, not existing ones, or revisions of existing ones. And only for consumer grade products, not industrial or government supply channels.
My immediate instinct says that it's a way to create that "kill switch" that this regime has wanted, along with various other ways to block off control and communication channels that are currently used extensively by authoritative regimes (banning encrypted communication, banning VPNs, etc)
Diotima
BewilderedKat 