I suspect this is an internal sabotage from devs not agreeing with it - plaintext is easily observable and people can figure it out, causing a PR damage; encrypted passwords are basically untraceable.
After that point, the outcomes are not my problem. It is less work to do it this way.
The most you can expect from PR damage like this is that maybe an update goes out faster that fixes the problem (or at least hides it better). Nobody is afraid of bad PR. The most hated companies in the US are also massively wealthy and successful. If people refused to by routers from companies that pulled shit like this, nobody could buy a router. You can enter pretty much any major brand of wireless router into google next to words like "hardcoded" "backdoor" and "plaintext" and get results going back decades.
Next step is trawling procurement records for public purchasers of their products, and prompting their return.
You must live in an unbelievably beautiful world to consider that comment to be "hate speech".
I wonder what term you would use to refer to actual vile racist speech? And how you would differentiate between them when you use the term so freely?
Not Wi-Fi routers, but I don’t see why those developers wouldn’t be able to slowly churn through Jira tickets for a router software.
No, it's probably devs not even caring about it (or not caring enough to push back on deadlines). It's surprising what people will do if they aren't forced to do the right thing (passwords checked to version control, proprietary code pasted in Stackoverflow) and so on.