Cisco's Cloud Vision: Mandatory, and Killed At Their Discretion 307
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a number of Cisco customers began reporting problems with three specific Linksys-branded routers. When owners of the E2700, E3500, are E4500 attempted to log in to their devices, they were asked to login/register using their 'Cisco Connect Cloud' account information. The story that's emerged from this unexpected "upgrade" is a perfect example of how buzzword fixation can lead to extremely poor decisions."
Voting with wallet (Score:5, Interesting)
Will never buy from again...
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Well, as long as you buy from the remaining duopoly of router manufacturers.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why I build my own from a very basic Debian install. Since most of the routers out there are just embedded Linux boxes using iptables, why would I pay for what I can build for free. If I'm looking for high capacity stuff like Cisco's real offerings, I doubt I'll be running up against his problem anyways.
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(100 watts) * 1 year = 876.581277 kilowatt hours
Not free. Look for the routers that can run an open source platform out of the box.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Interesting)
What kind of box would run 100 watts as a router, no routers use zero watts, so you need a delta between the router and the PC, and 6 months out of the year I'm paying to heat anyway, so 100 watts of electricity merely means the equivalent of 100 watts less of natgas. If you go laptop I can't even find a laptop power supply that can draw 100 watts.
Also that ridiculous 100 watts would cost me about $5/month. Well worth the staggering expense to avoid Cisco.
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ThinkPad W Series power adapters can pull 170watts.
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product-and-parts/detail.page?&LegacyDocID=MIGR-76762 [lenovo.com]
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Yikes those watts are all going into heat, so programming with that on your lap must be very much like pushing a space heater onto your thighs. Ouch.
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It is to run the laptop full tilt and charge a 100% depleted battery all at the same time. It will likely never see that use.
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It likely will, but for most users only for brief durations and infrequently. However, people do run their battery down from time to time, and then plug it in and start doing something computationally intensive, so the power supply has to be able to handle that.
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Of course, if the W Series is just too wimpy for you, there is always the Eurocom Panther 3.0, available with 6-core Xeon processor and SLI or Crossfire dual GPU configuration... Having to use two 300watt power bricks for maximum performance is heavy; but surely you want the best?
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I don't know what part of the world you're in, but in mine 100 watts worth of heat from a gas-fired boiler costs a lot less than 100 watts worth of heat from electricity.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Funny)
I run my laptop with a stationary bike.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Interesting)
I just got* an Asus G75. Power supply is 150W. And yes, it has some crazy-sized fans to keep itself cool.
* Well, got, and then had to send back in for repair after only three hours, and now I've been waiting for weeks just to get an ETA. Long story short, fuck Asus, I'm never buying from them again.
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Not that it will matter, but here's a contrary anecdote about Asus. I purchased a refurb M70 from Newegg, wiped the OS, and used it for ~6 months before something started preventing boot. Probably bad ram, maybe a faulty mobo, don't know. I sent it to Asus' processing facility 900+ mi. away, and received the system back 4 or 5 days later with a brand new motherboard. They also replaced my screen because apparently it had a broken pixel or something I never noticed.
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You know, I was honestly expecting it to end with "but then I tried MyCleanPC and it fixed all my problems with my slow gigabits this minuteness!"
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Also that ridiculous 100 watts would cost me about $5/month. Well worth the staggering expense to avoid Cisco.
Few people live where electricity is that cheap. $5/month to run a 100 watt load means you're paying $5.00 / (0.1KW * 30 * 24) = 6.9 cents/KWh.
In California, I'd pay over twice that, or about $10/month. A year's worth of 100W power costs more than I paid for my Wifi router in the first place.
(I use a Linksys Wifi router, but I run dd-wrt on it. I use a low-power Atom based system running Ubuntu as my home fileserver / security camera DVR, the whole thing including UPS + Wifi + internet modem uses about 40W
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes freedom is not cheap. Would you rather buy a cheap router with this onerous shit, or roll your own, paying a bit more in the process, to end up with a device that you fully control?
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It's much more difficult if you want to run a router with modern features like Gig-E, wireless N, multiband, jumbo frames etc... I loved dd-wrt when I had a linksys 54g but that old beast was decommissioned from my home several years ago. Now I run a D-Link that supports all these things and was only $130 when I bought it... should be cheaper by now.
You can still use dd-wrt and get modern features like Gig-E, Wireless-N, multiband. not sure about Jumbo Frames, but then again, nothing I run at home needs jumbo frames. dd-wrt is supported on some of Netgear's WNDR* series. (like the WNDR3700)
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That is what I adore about narcissistic and selfish behavior, it always has a rationalization. Your argument boils down an either/or scenario, we either preserve the park for future generations or we take what we want from the park regardless of consequence. Since 'these "historical places" aren't going to last forever,' makes the preservation option impossible, so we should take what we want. Since this is Slashdot, you should already know that the false dilemma is an invalid argument.
Preservation is about
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Informative)
My PC-as-a-router draws about 50 watts under load and 40 watts idle, so using your calculation above. Let's assume it's always under load, so that's 438 kwh. My last electric bill was about 11 cents per kwh, which comes to $48/yr to run it or about 13 cents a day. Considering it gives better performance than any dedicated consumer-grade router I've ever used, I'll glad shell out a dime a day for the upgrade. And that doesn't even account for the fact that I can set up my PC-as-a-router to go to sleep while I'm at work and at night, which drops its power usage lower than the dedicated consumer router. In the end, the energy cost increase is negligible as long as you're not using something horribly overpowered.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Informative)
http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Kits-C82.aspx [netgate.com]
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Informative)
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Well he never said he was running it on a big power hungry box...
You can get low power Linux boxes such as the Sheevaplug or OpenRD, which must be pretty comparable to common routers in terms of power usage, while being considerably more capable.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Informative)
876.581277 kilowatt hours for your debian router.
Minus
150 kilowatt hours for your consumer router
726 kilowatt hours times $0.11 dollars per kwh = $80 per year as your cost delta.
If you go with a standard intel atom platform, you can get that unit down to 50 watts, or $48 per year as your total operating cost.
At slightly hardware cost, you can buy a fanless nano-itx Atom pc that runs at about 13 watts. That's about $12 per YEAR. Make sure you use a USB flash drive as your storage media, for optimal energy usage.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Informative)
I can tell you from experience that an Atom D525, Core i3 550, and Core i7 2500 all idle under 20W at the wall when using solid state storage and a decent DC-DC power supply. The Atom tops out under 30W while the Cores obviously can go much higher.
A Soekris net5501 with SS storage and a PCI GBE card tops out around 17W, and an ASUS WL-520GU sits around 3-4W.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Interesting)
Until May, my router was a repurposed Dell Dimension 2100 with four PCI NICs thrown in it running ClearOS 5. Started having some hardware issues with it, so I built a new rack-mount box with a low-power Athlon II x2 and a small SSD with a quad-port NIC, threw ClearOS 6 on it and off to the races. Runs great and because it's a full PC, it can do a lot more than DD-WRT (my old router with DD-WRT is now just used as a regular WAP). Sure, it's overkill but it gives me a lot to play around with. You can easily pick up an PC for the price of a Linksys router that will do everything that Linksys could and more (at the expense of an extra dollar or two a month in energy costs)
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That's why I build my own from a very basic Debian install. Since most of the routers out there are just embedded Linux boxes using iptables ...
... which are never updated or only updated with security patches when shamed into doing it...
My debian based firewall is about 15 seconds of "apt-get update apt-get upgrade" away from the most recent security patches.
why would I pay for what I can build for free
A 486/50 clocked down to 25 so as to be fanless could run "a couple megs" with no serious bus or CPU issues about a decade ago. Pretty much anything made in the last decade has WAY more than enough "compute power" to be a firewall.
$100 of electricity instead of router hardware provides 25 wat
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Informative)
My latest builds were three Mini-ITX VIA boards; two are 1ghz VIA Centaurs and one is a 1.2ghz VIA Nano (the latter because I need to run a couple of KVM guests). They're fanless and I'm using 60gb SSD drives, because the idea is not only relatively low power, but no moving parts, as two of them are located about 60 miles away over some pretty nasty roads, so I want to reduce the likelihood of having to go out there to swap out power supplies or drives.
I did set up a WAN with three Tomato-upgraded Asus routers, and that worked very well, but because I'm running servers, I think they'd be a little under-powered for that purpose.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
You still need a wireless radio.
I've found the internal wireless NICs have a range equal to the radius of a swung cat.
This has forced me to get a cheap wifi access point, (or a router that can be told to just run as an access point) and use it for
its radio only. I run my own DHCPD, DNS, Nat and IPTables, NTP, (etc) in a Linux box, and bridge my network onto a cheap ($25) ap that can do WPA2.
Since I run it in access point mode, it does nothing but handle wifi authentication and wifi access, it remains rather simple, and I really need only watch for bug fixes to WPA2.
I've been looking into various Open Router distributions [wikipedia.org] for the radio side of things, but most are overkill for what I do.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Interesting)
Get some USB wireless cards such as those from alfa networks along with a decent antenna...
A long USB cable means you can site the wifi card and antenna away from the system itself (which is a source of interference).
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Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Informative)
Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.
Well, you asked for it. I've been a happy customer of these guys no financial gain. This is buying a complete system with case and everything although you get to purchase drives and possibly RAM separately.
http://www.zotacusa.com/ [zotacusa.com]
The zbox makes a great, ridiculously overpowered mythtv frontend.
http://soekris.com/ [soekris.com]
This box is commercial / semi-industrial grade and is basically a router platform ready to go.
You have to carefully avoid google to avoid finding "single digit wattage" PC-like hardware.
Only on /. would a guy paying $75/month for cablemodem to connect to a $2000 gaming PC that gets a new $500 graphics card every couple months worry about 5 watts of electricity, considering that in a civilized area 1 watt costs about $1 per year.
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Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.
Why build it?
http://www.fit-pc.com/web/purchase/order-fit-pc2i/ [fit-pc.com]
It's actually 6 watts. So, you've got me there.
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Duopoly?
There are at least 30 brands listed at Best Buy and New Egg. Some of these may be re-badged, but there are far more than two or three alternatives.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Informative)
Dd-wrt and tomato-USB firmware builds run on several buffalo and asus brand routers.
Buffalo even ships dd-wrt on select units.
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You'd be well advised to go get your own dd-wrt rather than accepting one from the router manufacturer. Sort of defeats the purpose of dd-wrt and puts the fox on guard at the hen house door to use their version.
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I think the point is that because the manufacturer ships dd-wrt, you can probably run your own dd-wrt/openwrt/tomato without too much fuss.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
Sticking with a duopoly brand is no assurance of them being secure. This story should have made that patently obvious to you.
Moving everything off the router except the secure wifi functionality and putting it into my Linux machine running IPTables means that I can use any of these cheap routers that is able to function as an Access Point, and never expose them to the internet.
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Oh, I see. You want secure things, like the CISCO models on TFA?
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Interesting)
Not if you don't want to get a cheap and/or gigantic piece of shit that can't even keep things secure, want actual functionality, etc.
Tell me, which consumer-grade routers *don't* fall into the "gigantic piece of shit" category? (when running the stock firmware)
On my list so far:
Linksys - a number of the Linksys routers do crazy stuff like limiting your total number of outgoing connections to about 10.
Netgear - My Netgear router has more bugs than you can shake a stick at: it hard crashes when it receives certain UPnP packets (even when the UPnP server is turned off!). The extent of its logging is "Connected" or "Not Connected" - good luck figuring out why it won't connect. Last time I had to debug a connection fault I had to connect a laptop between the router and DSL modem to see that the PPP stream said "authentication failure" - would it kill them to put this stuff in a log file? The wifi also periodically drops a machine off the network at random for no obvious reason, requiring a reboot of the router. The web interface also doesn't accept CHAP usernames longer than 16 characters, so to enter these you have to dump the config to an XML file, hack it and then upload the XML file again. This router also has a habit of mangling the port numbers in SIP traffic from being correct (determined by the SIP endpoint using the rport extension so it matches the port in the router's NAT table) to being incorrect (doesn't match the port in the router's NAT table so the router ends up dropping the return traffic).
Dlink - My Dlink router has a firewall that periodically starts blocking legitimate traffic after it has decided it is malicious, even though the firewall is completely disabled. The web interface also doesn't support CHAP usernames with a dot in them (luckilly you can get around this by turning off javascript in the browser while entering the username)
TP-Link - Ok, I'll admit that this is a dirt cheap box, but on the face of it it seems to be pretty feature rich. I'm using it as a DSL bridge (the PPP session is terminated on another machine). Unfortunately in the evening the SNR drops on my DSL and the router never bothers to retrain. Eventually all the traffic is arriving at the router as a CRC error and you have to powercycle the router to get it to retrain the connection. The manufacturer tells me that this is the "expected behaviour". I'm guessing they weren't expecting anyone to actually use the "bridge" feature and were relying on the internal PPP daemon blowing up and triggering a retrain if the SNR got too bad - this doesn't work so well when you're not using the internal PPP daemon.
So as yet, I've not found anything that I would describe as fit for purpose at the consumer end of the spectrum (and all these, except TP-Link, are "big name brands"). Billion seem to get good write-ups, but at £150 a pop, I'd hardly call that consumer equipment.
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Well, as long as you buy from the remaining duopoly of router manufacturers.
Maybe in Ruritania where you live, but here in Australia we have one to two dozen to choose from. I have a Draytek Vigor (fabulous gear) with an uptime of "since I first plugged it in several years ago". My Cisco-branded Linksys (free from my ISP) in contrast needs rebooting roughly every 1-2 weeks to restore functionality, and it fails in bizarre ways with random bits of functionality locking up while other aspects keep working. There's also my Cisco-branded PAP2 (ditto) which needs rebooting about once
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Since nobody buys support contracts on $40 plastic shitboxes, they had to 'monetize' them somehow.
Thank you (Score:3)
Re:Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the word the wonderful MBAs use these days. The real meaning of course, is a small short term increase in profit, and a long term effect of turning your former customers against you. They're not concerned about that last part, as they've generally moved on to 'help' the next company.
What instead of monetize? (Score:2)
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Rent-seek?
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Re:What instead of monetize? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Generate direct revenue from some aspect of a project or service that we previously overlooked or were giving away free." The problem is that this is too long and does not adequately hide the actual meaning.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Interesting)
I took the replacement unit out to the site and went to set it up. The VLAN option was gone, and was actually necessary at that site. When I tried to access the help file I found that the new switch no longer had an on-board set of help files, but insisted on phoning back to the mother ship in California. Several other options had been changed or crippled. Fortunately I had a backup of the original configuration stored on a local server, and when I uploaded the config file my VLANs returned (although I still couldn't access their interface).
Last one of those we installed.
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:4, Insightful)
I, er, think I can guess why Cisco may have "simplified" the interface of certain linksys products...
Re:Voting with wallet (Score:5, Interesting)
It would explain why they bought linksys in the first place too. Just before they got bought, you could get stuff off of linksys 'pro' hardware that would cost about 10 times more for the equivalent cisco product. They quickly discontinued/crippled those.
They'll probably buy Netgear any day now, some of their switches have some pretty nice 'pro' features and are very cheap.
Sure, you might not want them in a datacenter, but the small/medium business has no use for a cisco support contract, can't justify cisco prices, and have needs that fit right in the offered feature set.
Buzzword fixation? What buzzword fixation? (Score:5, Funny)
After all, with outside-the-box thinking, we can proactively re-prioritize synergies to get cloud-based enterprise solutions that go viral in mobile social media.
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Don't you worry about Planet Express, let me worry about Blank.
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And if you prefer engineering buzzwords, there's always this [youtube.com].
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After all, with outside-the-box thinking, we can proactively re-prioritize synergies to get cloud-based enterprise solutions that go viral in mobile social media.
Bingo, sir!
Don't confuse malice for stupidity... (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like this would be a very good time for owners of cisco-branded routers to start hitting the OpenWRT, assuming that Cisco hasn't also locked-down or VXworks-ed all of the linksys routers by this time...
Re:Don't confuse malice for stupidity... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, most folks won't even know about it (or they will have had it sold to them as a good thing(TM, pat.pending). )
This means that most folks will happily continue buying the stupid things as if nothing at all is wrong with doing so. Your only hope os to persuade otherwise, word-of-mouth.
Of course, if you spread this news on enough pr0n sites ("Cisco collects all your browsing information!"), I'm willing to bet that Cisco would likely have their small routers division go bankrupt almost overnight...
I'm just waiting for... (Score:5, Funny)
... my FaceBook router. (Hopefully a FaceBook branded Cisco device.)
Why wouldn't I want FaceBook to intercept all of my Internet traffic? It would allow FaceBook to provide better services and targeted ads just for me. This would be the best solution, until I get that FaceBook brain implant installed.
You don't have a facebook brain implant? (Score:2)
Re:You don't have a facebook brain implant? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm using a Google+ brain implant, you insensitive clod!
Re:You don't have a facebook brain implant? (Score:4, Funny)
Kind of a drastic solution to get rid of the voices in your head but hey, if it works for you...
Another lousy company (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Terms and Conditions of using the Cisco Connect Cloud state that Cisco may unilaterally shut down your account if finds that you have used the service for 'obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes, to infringe anotherâ(TM)s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights, or⦠to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.'" ---- So basically they'll be watching what we do, and if they don't like it, then they turn-off your Cisco account. Time to add Cisco to my ever-growing list of bad companies:
- Cisco
- Microsoft
- GM
- Ford
- Toyota
- et cetera
Re:Another lousy company (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow:
"IIn some cases, in order to provide an optimal experience on your home network, some updates may still be automatically applied, regardless of the auto-update setting." --- So Cisco will install some updates even when you specifically say no updates. I hope Microsoft or Google doesn't see this, and start updating Windows or Chrome w/o my permission.
Re:Another lousy company (Score:5, Interesting)
"Whoever...knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer...the term 'damage' means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information;..shall be punished..." - 18 USC 1030 (a "protected computer" includes any involved in interstate commerce - ever used eBay or Amazon?)
Before someone says that users somehow agreed to upgrades, think again. User buys AP/router which has auto-upgrade on by default. Plugs it in and uses it. Upgrade gets automatically applied without authorization, impairing the availability of the system (the article describes how features are removed). Cisco is in criminal violation of federal law.
The described tracking of browsing behavior is another crime - a violation of the ECPA.
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The rules don't apply to the 1%.
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...some updates may still be automatically applied, regardless of the auto-update setting.
Which means they're monitoring your router no matter the local settings.
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I guess you now need to put a firewall in front of your router.... (or buy a more consumer friendly device)
Of course maybe I'm just seeing this from a skewed perspective in my part of the world, but I suspect that the market for stand alone consumer grade routers has probably plummeted recently. All consumer internet packages from any of the major carriers include a "gateway" device instead of a simple modem, these include firewall, NAT, and wired and wireless routing. This means the only people who still h
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All consumer internet packages from any of the major carriers include a "gateway" device instead of a simple modem...
I'm a CS professional and only a minor geek, but I purchased not only my own router but cable modem rather than renting or obtaining one "free" from my ISP (Cox). I recommend this approach to friends that ask - and help them with setup if asked. I also don't (and won't) do wireless here at home and have wired my own coax and CAT5 to the TV and to each bedroom - though I only have one TV in the house, I have multiple computers w/Windows, Ubuntu and MythTV....
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What did Toyota do? (Score:2)
Re:What did Toyota do? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious. The worst thing they do is phone me up and ask when I would like to book my car in for servicing.
My guess was a couple years ago there was that big scandal where everyone who got themselves into a car crash claimed the car accelerated all on its own, because on TV the night before they saw someone get away with the same story. Once the TV newsies tired of the stories, the "incidents" stopped happening.
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That will work out well when the federally mandated steering wheel lock kicks in.
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Next Step is to PS3 Them... (Score:3, Insightful)
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The local FBI, Police, NSA, ....IA,...AA ...will now subpena Cisco for your routing history to convict you of crimes....
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Except where the ISP has joined the group that only keeps 2 weeks of history........Cisco will have more because it's all marketing data.
EA, not E (Score:4, Informative)
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The version numbers are the LINKSYS-prefixed ones
FTFY
It's Belkin all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
It's Belkin all over again [slashdot.org]
The marketing geniuses at Belkin, the consumer networking vendor, have dreamed up a new form of spam - ads served to your desktop, by way of its wireless router. [theregister.co.uk]
Cisco's statement, straight from the horse's ass (Score:5, Insightful)
Cisco's Vice President and General Manager of Home Networking, Brett Wingo said, "Cisco Connect Cloud was delivered only to consumers who opted into automatic updates. However, we apologize that the opt-out process for Cisco Connect Cloud and automatic updates was not more clear in this product release, and we are developing an updated version that will improve this process."
OK, so if I don't buy a Cisco router, do you consider that opting out . . . ?
The bleeding edge of technologypushing ads (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a knee-jerk "if you're in advertising you should kill yourself!" reactionary, but damn...how is that that the bleeding edge of technology and innovation today, some of the most valuable companies in the world like Google and Facebook...they're not sending men to mars to building flying cars. The best and the brightest and "most innovative" go to work...figuring out better and better ways to sell advertising. It's kind of depressing.
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Maybe I should just give up on the whole country and retire to Peru.
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Why do everybody assumes that spying is about ads? Is your atention the only valuable thing you have on your mind?
"Upgrade" (Score:5, Informative)
This "upgrade" that they performed for me last Tuesday, prompted me to perform an upgrade myself -I installed DD-WRT on my router.
Well Cisco (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to thank you for making my next router decision easier. This time around, I had to consider a number of options, your E4200 one of them. In the end, I chose to get it. The combo of simplicity, high speed, and generally low cost made it a winner rather than trying to hack together my own or something like that.
However next time around, you are out of the running. I won't look at your products as this kind of setup is completely unacceptable to me.
So thanks for making my choices simpler. Less options can actually be much easier.
End run. (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is nothing but a shameless attempt to cash in on the popularity of cloud computing, and it comes at a price. The Terms and Conditions of using the Cisco Connect Cloud state that Cisco may unilaterally shut down your account if finds that you have used the service for "obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes, to infringe another's rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights, or... to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.""
This is an end run by the RIAA/MPAA, with the participation of CISCO, to bring anti-piracy measures to your router. Your own router can/will now be used against you to collect evidence of infringement (and who knows what else), as well as giving CISCO full rights of enforcement. Fuck that.
In the future, I will be looking carefully for CISCO branding on products, the sole intention being that of avoidance--CISCO will not be getting any money from me again...ever.
Re:End run. (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering how paranoid most network admins are if it does end up that Cisco is spying for whomever pays them then Cisco will lose the majority of their customers and probably end up sued to hell and back.
As far as I can tell there is no upside for Cisco in this.
Re:End run. (Score:5, Interesting)
"As far as I can tell there is no upside for Cisco in this."
You're just not looking at things from their perspective. Would you like to? Here. This pretty much sums up today's Cisco.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/ps7045/ps6129/ps6133/ps6150/prod_qas0900aecd8041c9d4_ps6151_Products_Q_and_A_Item.html [cisco.com]
As you might notice (it isn't that hard to read between the lines in the Q & A), they are discussing a solution to control our connections to the internet--as opposed to merely facilitating it--and do so purely in terms of monitization. Cisco no longer just sells routers, they sell the people using them. There is also stated concern for the interests of both the RIAA and the MPAA on the part of Cisco in that Q & A I linked to.
Time to urge retailers to stop selling these? (Score:2)
Is it time to urge retailers to stop selling a router that spys on you?
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If people stop buying, they'll stop selling.
Is Cisco can do it, who else can? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since experience tells us that mechanisms like this are rarely, if ever, properly secured, this seems like a major security catastrophe in addition to a privacy debacle. Even if sound cryptography and digital signatures are employed to make sure the updates are valid, there may be implementation flaws in the routers, vulnerabilities in Cisco's upgrade servers, key leakage, bad protocol design, etc.
Wow.
dd-wrt (Score:3)
Just flashed the last of my routers with dd-wrt today. Will be doing the same with the handful of routers I maintain for others over the next few days. Goodbye, Cisco crap.
Cisco is now on my permanent boycott list, right alongside Belkin [slashdot.org].
Re:is this legal in the US ? (Score:5, Insightful)
It may not be legal, but if the rewards outweigh the fines then companies really do not give a shit if it is legal or not.
The fines are most likely less than the fine for illegally downloading music.
Re: (Score:2)
offensive purposes,...
Hmm. After the update, I can't reach any GOP campaign or PAC websites.
Re: (Score:2)
The shareholders.......duh.
Who runs it? The board. http://investor.cisco.com/directors.cfm [cisco.com]
But Cisco is the top-level company....not a subsidiary.