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Comment by josho | Hacker News Reader

Why? Are these possibly unsafe because consumer safety tests are not verified? Is this more likely to fail early in its lifecycle?

I suppose I’m seeking to understand if the low prices are from cheaper manufacturing or if they’ve taken shortcuts. And as a consumer how are we supposed to become informed?

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The switching ports are probably fine.

I wouldn't trust the power-over-ethernet at any distance where I couldn't still read the UL approval sticker.

(Which it does not have.)

Most networking equipment doesn’t have a UL or other NRTL listing. I don’t think any Ubiquiti product includes a UL mark. Even their power bricks and devices that take line voltage lack a listing.

Even if a product does have a listing it’s prob just for the power supply and not for the PoE circuitry.

Copying IP and designs from others is an unethical practice. As such, the people conducting this practice are not going to be trustworthy for creating a reliable quality product.

Then, the customers who buy this stuff: Instead of paying a share of the R&D costs and the costs of quality, customers who cheap out on this kind of cargo cult product are instead saving a few bucks short term, only to pay the price later when the unit fails to perform long term.

Reality I think is much more bad: big name players buying cheap stuff from a catalog rebranded while sacking or not replacing good engineers at home.

It’s obvious: Networking equipment is responsible for transferring your personal data. Especially in home network where it might not be encrypted.

Hell, I don’t even trust most big brands. Run my own FreeBSD + pfsense + well known NICs from Intel sourced from Provantage or other data center distributor. Not eBay or Amazon.

That's... not obvious at all, no? Even if it's a rando-brand, you're going to have to dig deep to show these things actually phone home. Because so far that's been a lovely little tinfoil hat conspiracy theory that just doesn't hold up to reality.

Hilariously lawful intercept^1 is a baked-in Backdoor on many US branded devices like from Cisco. It taps ports and exfils data surreptitiously.

Not just legal but legally required.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

Only on equipment an ISP would use.

I am responding to GP's skepticism of random Chinese networking equipment in your home and their skepticism is obvious; that's what I meant. Then I proceed to explaining my own reasons at home. Now whether you agree with GP or my statements is entirely orthogonal and up for debate. There were a number of responses asking "Why?" so I took a stab at the obvious.

Sure for most people, it is a pain to dig into these things. I can negligible sometimes too. And it can be just a woo woo conspiracy in my brain, possible.

what personal data is transferred in plaintext nowadays?

really the whole "trusted/privileged network" thing is outdated. your life will be much easier if you don't trust any network.

SMB isn't encrypted by default

Maybe for ancient versions on out-of-support Windows OSes or the odd appliance but SMB has been encrypted by default since at least 2016.

In Windows 10 and 11 file sharing is strongly encrypted by default. I don't even know how to turn it off; only an option to degrade to 40bit DES for old devices.

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