At least the foreign country wont use the data to arrest and make laws against you.

Yeah, the worst case is they use it to influence elections. US surveillance will do that and look for "illegal" activity —for some fucked up definition of illegal.

For example, in my state you need to give your ID to sites to look at porn. Fuck that. I don't trust those sites with that kind of data, even if I trusted that they were trying to keep it private (which I don't). I use a VPN to avoid this, but I'm not really sure on the legal status of that.

Also, my political views don't really align with the current administration (or any for that matter, but especially the current one). They've already made indications they'd come after people who hold opinions like mine. I trust China won't send people after me, but I'm not sure about the US.

It's kinda like my google ethos, Google are already spying on me, I might as well use their phone and then Samsung aren't spying on me as well.

For me it will depend on what that foriegn country is, how it is governed, its cultural norms, things like that.

I don't have more trust in Chinese government than I do American.

How about some real privacy rights instead of making me choose my surveillers.

Don't worry you can just subscribe monthly to delete me and they will ask nicely for it to be removed.

Oh wait it doesn't actually work. Imagine if the people in charge weren't a thousand years old.

This actually reminded me of an actual instance of this I discovered for a family member.

Their 2.4Ghz devices would just randomly drop connections at seemingly random times, and changing the router didn't fix anything.

So I fired up bettercap to take a look, and lo and behold it was a GE "smart" oven that would spam advertise its SSID with beacon frames on an interval and would block traffic because all the other devices would see a busy channel.

The funniest thing is said family member specifically decided against using the oven wifi feature because he already knew it was not going to be useful or even reliable, but he had no idea the wifi feature was left on which was causing all the packet drops.

Upon further investigation, we realized he actually did turn it off, but because the tap button was basically at elbow height, it was super easy to accidentally bump and flick back on.

Conclusion is that some GE ovens double as a crappy WiFi jammer lmao.

One of the few companies that I still "fanboy" for. The functionality and value are unbeatable. You can get most of the features of a $10k Cisco router in a 80$ SoHo Mikrotik. POE in and POE out for cheap so your APs don't have dangling power adapters. It's also a Latvian company which to me is a plus over both American and Chinese options

Or Gl.iNet

OpenWRT

I've got an Asus that's pretty good still. Just prior to Wifi 6, but the newer variants should have it.

5G as in cellular?

I use MikroTik with a USB CAT 20 modem.

Here are two new vulnerabilities from this month.

Here are some more exploits from 2023

Here are all the TPLink vulnerablies known publicly

Am I really at risk, and anymore than I would be with something from Linksys or Netgear?

As always, depends on your threat model. I have cheap TPLink switch in my home network because its cheap and kept behind a pfsense firewall. The TPLink switch is not allowed to talk to the internet. This is good enough for me as I don't have a threat model where something attacks the switch from inside my network.

For completeness here are Cisco's and Netgear's vulnerabilities. Infosec security is a journey, not a destination.

Replace the firmware on your current TPLink devices with OpenWRT, for a temporary solution.

If you can, look for a mikrotik device, especially if you are in Europe. They are well established, not hard to use, but have extreme depth of features for advanced users, and they are not expensive.

Nope there wasn't anything visible, I've been scrolling up and down to verify. Unless the video was somehow truncated or scaled to 1x1 px or something.

I used the volume controls for the website in my phone's pulldown menu to stop it, then the music player resumed. Still very much unwanted behavior. Will dig into the page source and see if there's anything hidden.

I'll do some digging in the code and see if I can come up with a custom filter for ublock.

It's a clone of the official Firefox repo stripped of all telemetry.

Will this still allow a mesh setup?

OK, if it runs OpenWRT, what is their problem?

Depends on CPU, not all of them supports out of box nor have upstream