Which dickhead at Cisco thought up this idea?

[Agent24]

http://boingboing.net/2012/07/03/cisco-locks-customers-out-of-t.html

 

[Rerouter]

wow, so this is what anti-piracy / anti-pornography?? acts are coming to...

[madires]

Hi!

Must been a very clever MBA ;-) In some countries that cloud service is completely illegal.

Cisco is screwing up the high-end Linksys stuff anyway. For example they're removing some features from the Linksys ethernet switches, because they're afraid of loosing revenue in the classic Cisco SMB sector. But the clever MBA didn't consider other vendors selling low-price switches with the same features as the old Linksys ones. If a customer has budget restraints (who does not?) he will choose another vendor. No revenue for Cisco and a lost customer. Great strategy :-(

Cheers
 madires

[RJSC]

It's just a tiny part of the coming war on general purpose computing I've posted about, yet, no one seem to be interested...
From now on, the most common thing will be that Big Companies will try to force the hardware you bought do what they want, an not what the user wants.
Guess we better stick to generic, open, or no name brands while they're still on the market.

[Ferroto]

I'm feeling perty smug with my fedora 14 router and netgear switch right now

[G7PSK]

I simply would not buy a router that tied you to a cloud service for any reason, if I had a router and the manufacturers uploaded new firm ware that did so I would discontinue its use and buy another make. I do not want to download porn or pirated films, I just don't like to be told what I may or may not do if it is otherwise legal to do it.

[BravoV]

Actually this is a really great news for ...  arrhmm...  Huawei and some shady character standing behind them from China politbiro, and definitely with a big grin at his face. 

[madires]

Hi!

It's just a tiny part of the coming war on general purpose computing I've posted about, yet, no one seem to be interested...
From now on, the most common thing will be that Big Companies will try to force the hardware you bought do what they want, an not what the user wants.
Guess we better stick to generic, open, or no name brands while they're still on the market.

They're copying Apples walled garden because Apple is making tons of money. Also consumers don't complain about that. Give them shiny devices and make more money ;-)

Cheers
 madires

[AntiProtonBoy]

Ironically you can buy a Chinese made router of reasonable quality with none of these problems.

Cisco went to shit on all fronts years ago. Screw them.

[olsenn]

I do not want to download porn or pirated films, I just don't like to be told what I may or may not do if it is otherwise legal to do it.

Bullshit! We all know you are downloading pirated porn films right now But that's okay... I don't like being told what I may or may not do even if it's illegal! Screw em' and buy from a competitor.

[T4P]

Ironically you can buy a Chinese made router of reasonable quality with none of these problems.

Cisco went to shit on all fronts years ago. Screw them.

Taiwan is nothing like china ...
But TP-Link proved worser than Linksys for me, only lasted 1 year for the wifi
died way earlier than my aztech 3.5G full featured router (Tried using this router and it's wifi died at the same time ...)
My linksys (that was on discount) router is still going strong after 1 year

[saturation]

This is pretty awful, but I have abandoned Cisco/Linksys years ago when they were unnecessarily obtuse to configure.  Many cable and fiber optic modems come with only boot software, that requires full firmware be downloaded and registered to a specific user by say, Comcast or Verizon; stops theft or resale of modems, but also threatens privacy from the IP providers.

We have 100s of Cisco routers maintained by Cisco on contract, I presume that's how they got this idea a similar task could be used for consumers.

I recommend the Taiwan firm, Engenius, all the benefits but none of the quality control headaches of China.  Chinese routers are firmware trim, cheaper, as well made, and easier to work with for small business and personal users.   It goes by different brand names in Asia and EU, so check if the parent is Senao.

http://www.engeniustech.com/networking/productsdatacom/home-networking/routers

[RJSC]

They're copying Apples walled garden because Apple is making tons of money. Also consumers don't complain about that. Give them shiny devices and make more money ;-)

The typical apple buyer doesn't have the slightest idea about how a device can restrict or spy on them because they don't even know how to install third-party software/firmware on their device of fiddle with the configurations. They just want to buy something, power it on, and as long as it works, they don't even think if they can do something with it that the manufacturer didn't thought of, and as long as it works they don't even think if its spying on them or not.

[M. András]

haha i bought a linksys e3k router 1.5 years ago. in the first year i flashed it to a ddwrt firmware. fuck the cisco software on it and the connection thing on that. what i really like about the ddwrt fimrware on it, it has a full system information page no temps unfornatly but memory cpu usage etc access/processing times. and i dont like the idea of a product i buy its cant be controlled by me. and taken ower by the manufacturer. what i buy its mine and thats it. some peeps on a hungarian forum and tech site wrote this "we dont pay for 0,1," aka for software or digital data like music or film, in response of a new law

[hans]

This is quite a horrible privacy statement.

The thing I ask myself, when does a user 'agree' to this user statement. When I get this router 2nd hand from a friend, apply power, plug in my network and let it do the configuration (trusting solely on routers firmware, oh yes!), when do I say "Yeah Cisco, this is your router"

It sounds so contradicting to me, and really really strange. Luckily we also run modded firmwares on any of our router, except for the one provided by the ISP (which they can monitor and control if you call them up to complain the internet is not working AGAIN).

[ampdoctor]

Time to get a subscription to a Swedish VPN and browsing the web with tor!  It also begs the question as to whether or not the router gives somebody outside access to your filesystem irrespective of your firewall settings.

[gtsili]

OpenWRT FTW 

[T4P]

OpenWRT FTW 

BEST FIRMWARE EVER!

[westfw]

FWIW, I think a lot of the people overreacting to this are misinterpreting the license and privacy agreement of the cloud service thing with the ones on the router itself.  So the anti-porn and privacy stuff is probably about misusing your cloud account (and you probably agreed to something very similar in order to post here on EEVBLOG; it's pretty standard stuff), rather than download stuff through the router.

Not that it isn't ambiguous, and not that THAT isn't cisco's fault too.  I worked for cisco for a long time, and didn't see any reason to stick with the Linksys home routers (I miss IOS (cisco's "enterprise" router software), though... (which is too bad; I think one of the more stripped-down versions of IOS would run pretty nicely on modern home router hardware.  No one in the target market would be able to USE it, but it would run OK!))

[gtsili]

Running IOS on a home router? This is what we call overkill. It is not like you will ever need EIGRP on your home LAN.

[madires]

Hi!

Running IOS on a home router? This is what we call overkill. It is not like you will ever need EIGRP on your home LAN.

I prefer IS-IS, since it converges faster in large networks :-)

JunOS for DSL routers would be fine also, if the DSL router would have the same ASICs ;-)

Cheers
 madires

[gtsili]

When I was living in Athens I was part of the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) community. This is the only reason I can think of for someone on a home LAN to use any kind of dynamic routing (that and of course experimentation or plain masochism). The norm for a backbone node is to use BGP and in some cases, a group of people will form a ring of backbone nodes and use OSPF with mixed results. Groups have also experimented with OLSR and BATMAN. I do not doubt that EIGRP and IS-IS will converge faster, scale better and will deal with route flapping and multi-path situation a lot better but you will never need any of this, neither other features IOS or JunOS in a home environment.

More info about AWMN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Wireless_Metropolitan_Network
Neuro, AWMN Node: #4260

[madires]

Hi!

When I was living in Athens I was part of the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN) community. This is the only reason I can think of for someone on a home LAN to use any kind of dynamic routing (that and of course experimentation or plain masochism). The norm for a backbone node is to use BGP and in some cases, a group of people will form a ring of backbone nodes and use OSPF with mixed results. Groups have also experimented with OLSR and BATMAN. I do not doubt that EIGRP and IS-IS will converge faster, scale better and will deal with route flapping and multi-path situation a lot better but you will never need any of this, neither other features IOS or JunOS in a home environment.

I was just kidding. The average user doesn't need such features. The classic routing protocols aren't well suited for meshed WLAN networks anyway. You need something simple, lightweight, low mem, low CPU but fast. Otherwise the whole network would be pulled down by just processing routing updates. Such a protocol might be also interesting for semi-AI µC/bot stuff. But now I take a break, before we start a NEVblog :-)

PS: It looks like Cisco understood the feedback.

Cheers
 madires

[baljemmett]

Running IOS on a home router? This is what we call overkill.

Oh yes, but it is a lot of fun   My home router is a SR520 I picked up on eBay for £30.  Admittedly I did start out looking for a typical cheap plastic consumer router, but after discovering that HP discontinued the one I was looking for after they bought 3Com and spending ages researching the alternatives (which fell into two camps: don't do everything I want, or relatively expensive) I figured I'd take a punt on running some proper hardware.  Brilliant stuff; the only disappointment has been the lack of IPv6 over WiFi (bizarre).

[On the other hand, it can just be a silly idea: my project for the weekend is to build a little fan speed controller board to hack into the 2924 that's currently doing temporary switching duties in my AV stack.  It's a far-too-noisy way to get extra Ethernet ports but the only other device I found in the pile o'spares was the VAXcluster's 10baseT/10base2 hub, and I'd hate to think how well that'd work for streaming media.  If I can't quieten the fans down I guess it's time for a cheap plastic jobbie...]

[gtsili]

Ohhh well, it must be me and my Linux upbringing then. Everybody seems to prefer a Jaguar than a Subaru for going to the supermarket to buy milk.

For fun and for simulations with IOS or JunOS I can always use GNS3 
http://www.gns3.net/