this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
614 points (99.7% liked)

Not The Onion

20945 readers
1281 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 39 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] nonentity@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 minutes ago

This tells me any equipment that is classified as acceptable by these requirements is immediately suspect, and should not be permitted to connect to, or communicate with, equipment you need to trust.

[–] toiletobserver@lemmy.world 12 points 4 hours ago
[–] CobraChicken3000@lemmy.ca 142 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

It's the US. Anyone surprised?

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 68 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Well no, they tend to copy a lot from China these days.

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I’m starting to believe a lot of the bad we hear about China is at best overblown and at worst completely fucking made up.

Remember all the articles predicting their doom because they built “ghost cities” and “trains to nowhere” and now they’re all actual cities with employed populations and there is high speed rail everywhere?

Yeah since 9/11 we’ve only had liars in charge seeing how much they can milk all of us, and apparently America really does have great ties because they’re still honkin and we’re still letting em.

Anyway since we can’t tell what’s true and what’s a lie thanks to the “state dept” propaganda I’m just gonna go ahead and say that the most advanced country on earth is probably way ahead of the USA.

[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 13 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

With our current dotard leadership it's surprising they haven't banned routers completely.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 6 hours ago

At least one person probably

[–] Shirasho@lemmings.world 30 points 5 hours ago (4 children)

What happened to small government?

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 points 16 minutes ago

Small government meant, as usual, the other guys.

Their government can piss away as much money and get as big and invasive as they want.

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 points 14 minutes ago

It's always been imaginary. They think that private property is a natural right, so a government with lots of soldiers and police is small.

The founding fathers loved small government that defended their teensy little slave plantations. They passionately argued about freedom with other rich white men.

Everyone who honestly wants small government eventually realizes that none was ever necessary at all.

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 23 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I live in probably one of the reddest states, and it's always been hypocrisy. Republicans are lying out of their lower lie holes every fucking time they open their mouths.

Every single Republican politician and voter is a purely evil person.

[–] NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 15 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Politician, sure. But people are easily duped, especially when they're uneducated. That doesn't make them evil, especially when there's a multi-billion dollar disinformation network constantly trying to mislead them.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

At what point does ignorance cross into willful ignorance? And at what point does willful ignorance become malicious? It’s a blurry line, to be sure.

[–] HoopyFrood@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 hours ago

It crosses into willful ignorance once they reject an empathetic articulation of the information and they become malicious at roughly the same time. Though this is less “becomes” so much as “is revealed to be” i think

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Very true. Thank you for helping to ground me.

[–] foofiepie@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

And thank you both for reminding me why I like this place.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 hours ago

I dont know if I'd say evil but they're definitely uninformed and ignorant.

They've been fed nothing but lies and propaganda and taught that the other side is evil, and if they're religious it's exactly the same as being in a full on cult with no bearing on reality.

Sure, some of us like myself were smart enough to realize its a massive grift . not everyone has the brainpower.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 8 points 4 hours ago

Making the government small enough to fit into every aspect of your life. No crevice too small.

[–] REDACTED 48 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

There are routers made in US?

[–] ClipperDefiance@lemmy.world 28 points 3 hours ago

According to the BBC, the one exception is the newer Starlink Wi-Fi router, which the company says is manufactured in Texas.

This is exasperating.

[–] FE80@lemmy.world 11 points 3 hours ago

Cisco, Juniper, and Arista are US companies. The actual manufacturing is doubtlessly somewhere in Asia though.

[–] halcyoncmdr@piefed.social 66 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

No. Which is the point. Everything has to be approved manually with no specific criteria so they can arbitrarily make the decisions they want.

[–] Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 31 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

And in the trump economy, that includes paying a hefty bribe for approval

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Like how apple gates it’s App Store with high fees and developer licenses?

[–] spitfire@lemmy.world 2 points 37 minutes ago

I believe it is a little bit worse when a government does that

[–] Angrydeuce@lemmy.world 2 points 18 minutes ago

Yeah but I can just not use an Apple device.

What is someone supposed to do when the only routers available from coast to coast are the ones made by the companies that gave Trump his 30 pieces of silver and allowed his regime to install their NSA backdoor so they can use all the new data centers they're astroturfing the web in support of to create profiles of Anti-MAGA households for ease of persecution?

[–] hopesdead@startrek.website 12 points 6 hours ago

This affects firmware too. Not just the hardware.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 34 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

There is an exemption for products that the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security have granted "Conditional Approval" after finding these devices do not pose such unacceptable risks. Router makers can apply to the FCC to get on the approved list.

Wow, what an insane coincidence it's exactly those two departments and no one else. Golly, I wonder why. (Edit: To clarify, if you're going to do this stupid, posturing bullshit, I "get" the DoD because of the NSA, and DHS has CISA. Just really no one else? Seems like consolidating more control.)

[–] Almacca@aussie.zone 4 points 4 hours ago

Any word on what the fee for that application will be?

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 14 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I mean... supply chain hardening has been a concern for most of the three letter agencies (and governments around the world) for years. There are very serious concerns over how basically every NIC comes out of a factory in China and what the implications of that are.

If DoD actually do have a list of vetted and hardened products, that WOULD be a very good baseline for if you care about security at all. Less so from the US government, but that can then be compared against similar lists from other countries.

And considering that basically every TLA has the same concerns, if those orgs are willing to spend their budget? DoE and the like ain't gonna complain.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 14 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I do care about cybersecurity, but I'm well past a point with the Trump administration where it's possible to take even the few good-sounding things coming out of it at face value. I don't believe for a second Trump or anyone in his cabinet values cybersecurity over: jingoistic "Made in America" posturing to his audience, enforcing a monopoly on spying on US citizens, giving as much power as possible to the two departments he's most heavily and illegally abusing, and using this as more "trade war" bullshit where multinational corporations can personally bribe him to get whitelisted.

I might celebrate this if we had a POTUS who hadn't demonstrated over and over for a decade that everything they do is a ploy to turn the US into a kleptofascist hellscape.

I agree with you; your concerns are rational. I don't think you or I share them with the Trump administration.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 10 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

They are the defacto bones of the Internet purely for their legacy. The company is so glut with inefficiency.

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

My small (~100 employee) company that had nothing to with hardware got bought by a somewhat larger (~1500) mostly-Finnish company that was sort of a competitor with the much larger Cisco. Cisco bought that company and six months later laid off all of us except the C-suite types. I occasionally still talk to my manager who is still with Cisco and he says everyone he interacts with there is so far removed from any consideration of products or profits or that sort of thing that it never even comes up in casual conversation. I asked him what he actually does now and he said "I have no idea".

My favorite memory of that six months was the mandatory security training, which consisted of a series of badly-animated shorts featuring talking bears and a narrator who was clearly ready to kill himself over having to say "personally-identifiable information" over and over and over again.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 9 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Welp, so much for OpenWRT on cheap devices designed for routing (even though flashing the firmware to install it probably got rid of any backdoors anyway); now we'll have to resort to OPNSense on overkill PC hardware.

[–] nymnympseudonym@piefed.social 13 points 5 hours ago

Came here to say... US (and everyone else) would be way more secure if it mandated routers use OpenWRT and funded a few red/blue security engineers to work on it full time

[–] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 hours ago

There is an element of hypocrisy in all this because American intelligence agencies were previously caught intercepting Cisco-made routers on their way to customers and updating their firmware to deploy espionage tools.

It's not hypocrisy to try to spy on others while preventing them from spying on you.