Is it really worth 300 dollars though? I am happy with my cheapo TPLink. I could give 2 shits if China is spying on me.

Everyone is really readily accepting of china potentially spying on them whenever this topic comes up, and I’m just kinda curious why you think chinese companies don’t sell that user data to western companies just as western countries do for china?

spycloud.com/…/state-secrets-for-sale-chinese-hac…

China’s state-sanctioned data collection and intelligence apparatus is leaky. We have observed a vast ecosystem of corrupt insiders siphoning data from China’s state-sponsored data collections apparatus and selling it on the black market. This threat activity most acutely affects Chinese citizens, whose personal data is readily available to any paying customer.

Cybercriminals from the Sinosphere appear to be increasingly present in Western digital crime spaces. This trend seems to be somewhat driven by Chinese scam and smishing actors aggressively and successfully targeting overseas victims. We frequently observe Chinese-language actors re-sharing (or sometimes taking and attempting to re-sell) data breaches from English-language forums in Chinese-speaking communities.

Countries like China rely a lot of independent local groups doing the dirty job so they can shield their national reputation by “taking care of” individual groups as they become a liability. Russia and others do it too. Everybody hacks everybody. Some of these groups target both foreigners and their own. Sometimes for domestic spying, sometimes just for plain scams.

I could give 2 shits if China is spying on me.

Someone will figure out how to use the backdoor on the Chinese router. Then they can bypass your firewall. Now your router and all of your insecure IoT devices will be part of their botnet. They will sell your internet connection as a residential proxy or use it to DDoS websites.

Everybody hacks everybody

forbes.com/…/why-farmers-are-shielding-their-crop…

Man, the Snowden leaks had examples of 5th to 6th party docs retrieved from hacking intelligence agencies who had hacked intelligence agencies who… You get the point

You could also see if that cheapo TP-Link can run OPNSense or ddwrt, that way at least the software on the device has no chance of being compromised.