It is a little disconcerting that Foxconn (subject to deep Chinese government overreach) will now own Linksys
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.
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.
> > 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
[1] https://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/not-all-802-11ac-aps-are-cr... [2] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-compu... [3] https://www.design-reuse.com/articles/20671/security-embedde...
[1] https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope... [2] https://github.com/facebook/fboss
The chassis may be open-source but the guts of that thing is a (high-end Broadcom chip, just like everyone else.
Much easier than flashing cell phone and the open source version normally has more features also.
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).
Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations
I'm not saying that Trump's executive order is justified (and the market predicted that Qualcomm would reject a hostile takeover attempt) but you have a few things wrong there.
1. The acquisition would be the other way around (as in Broadcom taking over Qualcomm)
2. Broadcom's parent company is a Singaporean entity. So yes, it's an American company but its parent company is Singaporean.
3. Broadcom's M&A strategy is very short sighted. It usually strips the acquisition target's R&D costs and improves its bottom line in the short term.
4. Qualcomm has a pseudo monopoly on mobile chips. All high end mobile phones use their chips. If it loses out on its future 5G technology due to a shrinking R&D budget, US loses its market dominance possibly for good.
But, doesn't Foxconn already manufacture a bunch of American products?