The page says starting at 99 and I literally couldn't find a buy button fast enough. After landing on the Indiegogo page and seeing how much it would cost for a few of the features I'm interested in- yeah, I'll pass. It sounds like a heck of a router but it got spendy fast.
Out of curiosity, why would you want to reflash an Ubiquiti AP or router? They tend to be extremely feature rich, since they target enterprise and professional customers.
I got an Archer C7 during the Winter Shopping Season, that was affected by this. In the current revision, I got around the lock by booting into recovery mode and uploading OpenWRT via TFTP. I expect that future models will close this hole, and then I definitely won’t be buying TP-LINK devices in the future.
I think it’s a bit extreme to say the C7 is the best. It never was the best performer, and already 802.11ac Wave 2 devices with MU-MIMO are on the market, potentially outperforming the C7. Maybe it’s coincidentally the best value for the money, but that will not last.
Every generation, I wearily observe the large number of router models. I thought the Buffalo WZR-600DHP was a pretty good value late in the 802.11n generation, but now it’s retailing for more than I paid for it. WiFi routers are a lemon market.
It's somewhat ironic that the scary security issues could actually be the path to freedom, sort of like jailbreaking and rooting any other device.
Perhaps that's the way it should be, they come insecure by default and you're supposed to exploit that to enable installing your own, more secure, software...
It's definitely not the best in the whole market, but in the sub $100 consumer router area? I've not used anything better. I replaced a couple much more expensive routers with these and I've been very happy. I feel like it is such a praised model because it is such a value by being good, maybe not great in most important categories at such a low price.
When these die or get obsolete I think I'll finally just move up to the entry level business products a la Ubiquiti or the like.
Some people/organizations associated with this thread on ninux.org have a Gofundme page to collect funds supporting their efforts in persuading more coherent action from the FCC.
https://www.gofundme.com/save_wifi_round_2
So sad, I got a nice tplink for my mother and installed openwrt to gain some more control over the device. Unfortunate to see this support go away due to government.
Indeed. After much research I replaced my venerable wrt-54g with a tp-link, wrt-3600 or something like that, anyway due to the ath9k WiFi chip it's supported by Linux without any binary blobs. And of course I promptly replaced the stock firmware with openwrt. Sad if this is going away..
How many people do you actually think were doing this? It's not a common enough problem that it's worth killing open router software.
If the FCC wasn't planning to stomp on router manufacturers, they wouldn't be doing this. Make no mistake, it is the government killing innovation here.
I'd be hesitant to trust what comes from a CS rep regarding a manufacturer's policy regarding the interpretation/compliance of an FCC rule. TP-Link may have just decided to lock down their devices regardless.
I'm not saying this "report" isn't accurate... I'd just rather hear this from someone other than a random CS chat.
The FCC publishes a 90-page document on an extremely technical subject and required any comments to be submitted within 7 weeks. It would take the average aficionado several weeks just to find out about it.
The real issue here is that government agencies like the FCC are willfully excluding all but the best organized (read: best funded) groups from participating. And just like with Net Neutrality, no matter how many comments are submitted by poor people, only when the rich (the companies) and the powerful (President Obama) say something do they even bother to listen.
Also, the FCC should not be able to make rules like this. This is why we have a three branch system. Congress doesn't have the legal power, in the constitution, to give agencies the power to make laws (Even if they call them "Rules")
Increasingly over time these rules are becoming more and more draconian and including things that most people oppose.
For instance, there was an outcry about CISPA and COPA that killed those bills... so the FCC made an 800 page ruling on "net neutrality" and people accepted it, because they wanted net neutrality. (And who has time to read 800 pages?)
> Congress doesn't have the legal power, in the constitution, to give agencies the power to make laws (Even if they call them "Rules")
What? Sure they do; there's nothing in the constitution that forbids congress from making a law delegating its authority to the executive (the idea that all of administrative law is unconstitutional isn't supported by anyone in the legal community to my knowledge). Agencies can't just make up rules that say whatever they want, though; they're limited to being able to regulate the things Congress has empowered them to regulate, and they have to say what their authorizing legislation is in the text of the rule.
In general, this is what we want. Congress should be deciding what gets regulated, and experts in the subject area should be deciding the specifics of the regulation. Example: Congress decides that not every quack snakeoil salesman should be able to put whatever he wants in a bottle and sell it as medicine, so medications should be regulated. But members of Congress, by and large, are not doctors or otherwise medical experts, so they should defer the business of deciding which medicines should be allowed, how they should safely be produced, etc., to experts. Hence, the FDA.
In the case of the FCC, Congress decided that, spectrum being a precious commodity, somebody needed to regulate how it should be parceled out so there was enough to go around and people didn't step on each other's toes. But again: they're not radio engineers, so they're not equipped to decide what the right power levels are, which parts of the spectrum should be used for what, and what the best enforcement mechanisms are to make sure people play by the rules. Hence, the FCC. In this case, they proposed a rule requiring manufacturers to put software safeguards in place that prevented end users from being able to make otherwise-compliant equipment exceed its legally-allowed broadcast power levels. You can think that's a bad idea (I do, too), but it's pretty clearly within their regulatory purview.
I agree with you that the system of federal administrative agencies is a mess. The top federal agencies hold amounts of power bordering on unconstitutional. They seem to represent a rogue branch of government, or at least artificially inflate the role of the executive branch. Of course, the point of the judicial branch is to restrict expansions of power from the other branches. Theoretically the judicial branch has the ability to restrict the capabilities of federal agencies, but it's extremely unlikely we will ever see a heavy ruling against them. There's wayyyyy too much special interest money entangled in the agencies for that to happen.
Still, to play devil's advocate, the agencies do have a purpose. They are able to regulate industries that move faster than real legislation. They can employ experts (as opposed to congressmen) to write the rules. Industries like tech and pharmaceuticals are governed by extremely complex market dynamics. The federal agencies that oversee them, such as the FCC (tech) and FDA (pharmaceuticals) employ dozens of experts who are familiar with how the industry actually works. They write the regulations because no other branch of government possibly could.
Federal agencies make it possible for congress to write laws with stipulations like "all matters pertaining to <EXTREMELY GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF INDUSTRY SUBTOPIC> shall be subject to the regulations of the <FEDERAL AGENCY> responsible for overseeing <INDUSTRY>." The agencies provide a way for congress to defer the details of lawmaking to a more flexible, adaptable agency that is actually familiar with the complex dynamics of the system being regulated.
..... in theory, of course. Whether this works in practice is another question. One could make the argument that no sufficiently complex market should be subject to any regulation other than the natural market rules. One could also argue that the ability of congress to defer lawmaking to agencies is tremendously unconstitutional and enables them to enact laws with greater breadth than should be possible.
> Of course, the point of the legislative branch is to restrict expansions of power from the other branches.
That's almost exactly the opposite of the point of the legislative branch, since the other branches have very little power not explicitly granted by the legislature, and the legislative branch principally acts by defining and granting functions to the executive and judicial branches.
> Theoretically the legislative branch has the ability to restrict the capabilities of federal agencies
More to the point, federal agencies only exist because they are created by Congress, and only have powers because they are given them by Congress.
Its not a theoretical power that Congress has over them, but a practical one whose exercise is the only reasons the agencies exist and have any power at all.
If Congress doesn't take action that you think it should against a federal agency, that's because a sufficiently large portion of Congress doesn't want to take that action, not because Congress has only a theoretical but not practical power over the agency.
> but it's extremely unlikely we will ever see a heavy ruling against them.
Congress doesn't make rulings, that's the judicial branch. Congress has substantially restricted the powers of commissions and even abolished them. (A notable example being the one that served as a structural model for pretty much all other "independent" regulatory agencies, the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose powers were stripped in a series of deregulation movements culminating in the abolition of the Commission in 1995.)
The judicial branch also has made fairly sweeping rulings against both individual regulatory agencies and the ways in which Congress structures (or, rather, has structured in the past, since those rulings stopped the particular practices at issue) regulatory agencies, their powers, and their relations with Congress in general.
Why do people /ever/ take anything said by support personnel seriously?
Support personnel do not know about technical details of a product. They don't know about legal regulation of their products. They certainly don't know about specific technical details of their products due to intricacies in the regulation of their product.
It's really annoying that Canadian policy on this matter is basically set by the FCC. It's not like we're going to get unlocked routers when the US gets locked ones, but we don't have a voice.
I'm been replacing ASUS RT-N16s with RT-AC56Rs. $50 refurbs in-store at Microcenter, $75 new from Walmart.com, well-supported by all the firmwares that have ARM builds.
If you can't buy them that cheap the TP-Link Archer C7 has been a better value... well, up until now.
The BCM4352 (AC/AN chip) is not supported, which is part of the reason to get one of these routers. Broadcom router chips are usually MIPS based, and also heavy on the binary blobs (which may allow for dd-wrt support).
Edit: In fact, I can't find any image that supports this BCM4352 on dd-wrt either:
There are no 802.11ac radios that are as well-supported as the ath9k 802.11n radios. All 802.11ac radios require closed-source firmware. Qualcomm-Atheros, MediaTek, and Marvell 802.11ac platforms are getting the most open-source attention. QCA chips are really popular and the drivers are pretty mature, MediaTek's firmware is flexible enough to make it one of the more hacker-friendly platforms, and Marvell's radios are often paired with their really powerful (by router standards) processors.
Unless you really need the throughput of 802.11ac or a more powerful processor to keep up with faster WAN speeds, ath9k 802.11n devices are still a pretty good choice.
A lot of community meshnet projects rely on their hardware because of the stability and low pricing. NYC Mesh is a great example, but there are dozens more that aren't known as well.
The problem is that this is a short-term solution. Yes, existing routers aren't going to magically stop working, as long as some moron doesn't reflash them with the latest TP-Link firmware for some dumb reason. And for a while, at least, people can buy current models off Ebay or whatever.
But eventually the supply will dry up and all that'll be available will be these locked-down routers, unless you're happy to use 10-20 year old hardware, which (if it even still works) will leave you out of whatever modern, advanced features routers have in 5-15 years. If some other frequency band becomes popular with mobile devices, or some new 802.11* standard comes about that's a big improvement somehow, then you won't be able to use that. Open-source projects like dd-wrt and OpenWrt will die out; who wants to keep working on a project that only works on ancient hardware?
There seems like a fairly large opportunity for manufacturers willing to release products with sufficiently locked down baseband but a hackable host OS.
Also, amateur radio operators are legally allowed to operate these devices with modified firmware (including baseband). So why am I no longer allowed to buy these?
Is this limited to devices sold in the US? They are going to impose it on every other place that sells them?
Afiu tp-link has no obligations to manage two devices trees for a niche community. Stubborn minority effect at play here.
[1] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
IIRC, the first thing my stock WDR3600 firmware asked me about was which country I am in, which means that frequency locking can be easily bypassed (not power levels, though).
To make this as bulletproof as FCC wants they would have to make separate firmware image for the US and prevent US firmwares from being "upgraded" to non-US.
edit:
And this is exactly what they did:
Recent US firmware (e.g. Archer C7 v2 151014 US) do not install unsigned firmware, including earlier versions of firmware and international versions. Thank you, FCC.
Question: if a manufacturer has their radios/devices blessed by the FCC are they blessing the software the comes a long with it?
Would there be a gray market for international versions of routers because they're the exact same hardware and not as locked? If I'm a manufacturer I certainly don't want a whole new BOM variation just for US devices if I can solve the problem with software.
That stubborn minority chapter is really quite interesting, shame the book isn't available yet. Think I'll look into some of the authors prior books when I next run out.
My assumption: it's cheaper/easier for TP-LINK to disable all flashing of 3rd party firmware than it is to implement restrictions based on the FCC's narrowly-focused instructions.
Probably means that there is now a restriction on the firmware upload page of the router, so that it won't accept any arbitrary image, most likely implemented via signing.
Doesn't necessarily mean you can't load your own firmware in, but it would raise the difficulty of doing so. Finding a serial console on the board, vulnerabilities in the software, things like that - more akin to jailbreaking/rooting your phone.
Its also the same argument regarding the war on drugs. It never works but thats not really the point. The point is to create options to apply pressure whenever government decides it wants to.
As your link says, they intend to prohibit selling hardware which can be modified to violate FCC regs. Since 3rd party firmware allows such violations, devices get locked down.
How else are you going to explain the existence of separate US firmware which refuses to upgrade to international firmwares?
The link does not say that. The FCC is gathering information for a proposed rule that could potentially impact hardware sold in the future. Nobody is being forced to do anything yet. There is no rule that prevents DD-WRT from being installed on a device.
So why is TP-Link locking down their firmware even though they aren't required to? You have to ask them.
> So why is TP-Link locking down their firmware even though they aren't required to? You have to ask them.
If you read TFA you'll learn that somebody did just that.
Adam Longwill 09:26:19 pm Wow. Thank you. I'm impressed with your digging
And this limitation is due to FCC rule clarifications in 2015?
And not some other reason
Camille 09:28:15 pm Right, due to FCC
You mean the original submitted article? Because in that article the person asks IF they locked them down, not WHY. There's still no answer as to why TP-Link thought it necessary to react to a nonexistent rule.
> And this is why, in a nutshell, linux should switch to GPL3.
Unfortunately, given the number of developers that would have to agree, the fact that early contributions weren't attributed and the can of worms that defining what a derivative work is opens, makes relicensing very unlikely.
Not really. Think about it. Only to remove restrictions from a license do you need permission from the existing developers. To introduce extra restrictions you don't need anyone's permission. If Linus chooses to accept a single patch that's GPLv3, the kernel is GPLv3 from that point forward.
Linus has in fact done this to quite a bit of MIT licensed code.
Of course it only applies to future versions, and you could conceivably make versions that have those patches removed.
It's quite likely that they would prefer violating the GPL (nothing particularly unusual) or licensing VxWorks/Windows/whatever over risking being banned in the US.
TP-Link started doing this months ago, and as far as I can tell they did so before the FCC proposed regulation. Considering the time that it takes for a company like this to start acting, I would be very surprised if the FCC regulation has much to do with it at all.
It does make a good excuse for them, though, I guess.
On the OpenWrt wiki for the C7[0], which was last modified Jan 13, there is this note:
"Recent US firmware (e.g. Archer C7 v2 151014 US) do not install unsigned firmware, including earlier versions of firmware and international versions. Thank you, FCC. You need to use TFTP Recovery method to install OpenWRT until somebody replicates what DD-WRT’s KrypteX is doing."
So, it certainly seems like this has been known for at least a month.
I needed to put together a VPN router because of an upcoming trip. Since I didn't want to bring a "giant" 4 port router, I went looking for an OpenWRT-compatible travel router. The TP-Link TL-WR710N and D-Link DIR-505L were my two candidates. :)
I setup OpenVPN as a bridge and configured an SSID on it so when I connect to it, it'll be as if I were still at home. (Same subnet so I have access to all my printers, tv tuners, etc).
This is disappointing news. What I just did would not have been possible for $15. I've been using OpenWRT for over 10 years and can't imagine ever using a router without some sort of customizable Linux on it. I've learned so much about Linux, networking, VPNs, etc from OpenWRT.
76 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadI think it’s a bit extreme to say the C7 is the best. It never was the best performer, and already 802.11ac Wave 2 devices with MU-MIMO are on the market, potentially outperforming the C7. Maybe it’s coincidentally the best value for the money, but that will not last.
Every generation, I wearily observe the large number of router models. I thought the Buffalo WZR-600DHP was a pretty good value late in the 802.11n generation, but now it’s retailing for more than I paid for it. WiFi routers are a lemon market.
I suppose people will start rooting these devices. It's not like consumer routers have particularly impressive security track record.
Perhaps that's the way it should be, they come insecure by default and you're supposed to exploit that to enable installing your own, more secure, software...
When these die or get obsolete I think I'll finally just move up to the entry level business products a la Ubiquiti or the like.
This support went away because people were abusing it running their routers on forbidden bands at higher than allow transmission levels.
The vendors are doing what they can easily do now and it's block the firmware modification since they can't replace the baseband/wifi cards as easily.
If the FCC wasn't planning to stomp on router manufacturers, they wouldn't be doing this. Make no mistake, it is the government killing innovation here.
I'm not saying this "report" isn't accurate... I'd just rather hear this from someone other than a random CS chat.
The FCC publishes a 90-page document on an extremely technical subject and required any comments to be submitted within 7 weeks. It would take the average aficionado several weeks just to find out about it.
The real issue here is that government agencies like the FCC are willfully excluding all but the best organized (read: best funded) groups from participating. And just like with Net Neutrality, no matter how many comments are submitted by poor people, only when the rich (the companies) and the powerful (President Obama) say something do they even bother to listen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11125543
Increasingly over time these rules are becoming more and more draconian and including things that most people oppose.
For instance, there was an outcry about CISPA and COPA that killed those bills... so the FCC made an 800 page ruling on "net neutrality" and people accepted it, because they wanted net neutrality. (And who has time to read 800 pages?)
What? Sure they do; there's nothing in the constitution that forbids congress from making a law delegating its authority to the executive (the idea that all of administrative law is unconstitutional isn't supported by anyone in the legal community to my knowledge). Agencies can't just make up rules that say whatever they want, though; they're limited to being able to regulate the things Congress has empowered them to regulate, and they have to say what their authorizing legislation is in the text of the rule.
In general, this is what we want. Congress should be deciding what gets regulated, and experts in the subject area should be deciding the specifics of the regulation. Example: Congress decides that not every quack snakeoil salesman should be able to put whatever he wants in a bottle and sell it as medicine, so medications should be regulated. But members of Congress, by and large, are not doctors or otherwise medical experts, so they should defer the business of deciding which medicines should be allowed, how they should safely be produced, etc., to experts. Hence, the FDA.
In the case of the FCC, Congress decided that, spectrum being a precious commodity, somebody needed to regulate how it should be parceled out so there was enough to go around and people didn't step on each other's toes. But again: they're not radio engineers, so they're not equipped to decide what the right power levels are, which parts of the spectrum should be used for what, and what the best enforcement mechanisms are to make sure people play by the rules. Hence, the FCC. In this case, they proposed a rule requiring manufacturers to put software safeguards in place that prevented end users from being able to make otherwise-compliant equipment exceed its legally-allowed broadcast power levels. You can think that's a bad idea (I do, too), but it's pretty clearly within their regulatory purview.
Still, to play devil's advocate, the agencies do have a purpose. They are able to regulate industries that move faster than real legislation. They can employ experts (as opposed to congressmen) to write the rules. Industries like tech and pharmaceuticals are governed by extremely complex market dynamics. The federal agencies that oversee them, such as the FCC (tech) and FDA (pharmaceuticals) employ dozens of experts who are familiar with how the industry actually works. They write the regulations because no other branch of government possibly could.
Federal agencies make it possible for congress to write laws with stipulations like "all matters pertaining to <EXTREMELY GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF INDUSTRY SUBTOPIC> shall be subject to the regulations of the <FEDERAL AGENCY> responsible for overseeing <INDUSTRY>." The agencies provide a way for congress to defer the details of lawmaking to a more flexible, adaptable agency that is actually familiar with the complex dynamics of the system being regulated.
..... in theory, of course. Whether this works in practice is another question. One could make the argument that no sufficiently complex market should be subject to any regulation other than the natural market rules. One could also argue that the ability of congress to defer lawmaking to agencies is tremendously unconstitutional and enables them to enact laws with greater breadth than should be possible.
Some reading I dug up on the subject:
http://heritageaction.com/2011/11/issue-profile-unconstituti...
http://www.jpands.org/hacienda/comm19.html
tl;dr "Thanks, Roosevelt!"
That's almost exactly the opposite of the point of the legislative branch, since the other branches have very little power not explicitly granted by the legislature, and the legislative branch principally acts by defining and granting functions to the executive and judicial branches.
> Theoretically the legislative branch has the ability to restrict the capabilities of federal agencies
More to the point, federal agencies only exist because they are created by Congress, and only have powers because they are given them by Congress.
Its not a theoretical power that Congress has over them, but a practical one whose exercise is the only reasons the agencies exist and have any power at all.
If Congress doesn't take action that you think it should against a federal agency, that's because a sufficiently large portion of Congress doesn't want to take that action, not because Congress has only a theoretical but not practical power over the agency.
> but it's extremely unlikely we will ever see a heavy ruling against them.
Congress doesn't make rulings, that's the judicial branch. Congress has substantially restricted the powers of commissions and even abolished them. (A notable example being the one that served as a structural model for pretty much all other "independent" regulatory agencies, the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose powers were stripped in a series of deregulation movements culminating in the abolition of the Commission in 1995.)
Support personnel do not know about technical details of a product. They don't know about legal regulation of their products. They certainly don't know about specific technical details of their products due to intricacies in the regulation of their product.
Anyway, this was expected: it's the cheapest way to comply with the regulations.
If you can't buy them that cheap the TP-Link Archer C7 has been a better value... well, up until now.
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ac56u
The BCM4352 (AC/AN chip) is not supported, which is part of the reason to get one of these routers. Broadcom router chips are usually MIPS based, and also heavy on the binary blobs (which may allow for dd-wrt support).
Edit: In fact, I can't find any image that supports this BCM4352 on dd-wrt either:
http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices
Unless you really need the throughput of 802.11ac or a more powerful processor to keep up with faster WAN speeds, ath9k 802.11n devices are still a pretty good choice.
https://omnia.turris.cz/en/
Won't all of those existing TP-Link routers continue to work and be unlocked to flash whatever you like on them ?
Further, aren't there sufficient TP-Link parts in the supply chain from the last 4-5 years that you'll continue to be able to source them ?
Genuinely curious...
But eventually the supply will dry up and all that'll be available will be these locked-down routers, unless you're happy to use 10-20 year old hardware, which (if it even still works) will leave you out of whatever modern, advanced features routers have in 5-15 years. If some other frequency band becomes popular with mobile devices, or some new 802.11* standard comes about that's a big improvement somehow, then you won't be able to use that. Open-source projects like dd-wrt and OpenWrt will die out; who wants to keep working on a project that only works on ancient hardware?
Won't all of those existing TP-Link routers continue to work and be unlocked to flash whatever you like on them ?
Further, aren't there sufficient TP-Link parts in the supply chain from the last 4-5 years that you'll continue to be able to source them ?
Genuinely curious...
Also, amateur radio operators are legally allowed to operate these devices with modified firmware (including baseband). So why am I no longer allowed to buy these?
Afiu tp-link has no obligations to manage two devices trees for a niche community. Stubborn minority effect at play here. [1] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf
IIRC, the first thing my stock WDR3600 firmware asked me about was which country I am in, which means that frequency locking can be easily bypassed (not power levels, though).
To make this as bulletproof as FCC wants they would have to make separate firmware image for the US and prevent US firmwares from being "upgraded" to non-US.
edit:
And this is exactly what they did:
Recent US firmware (e.g. Archer C7 v2 151014 US) do not install unsigned firmware, including earlier versions of firmware and international versions. Thank you, FCC.
Source: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer-c5-c7-wdr7500
Would there be a gray market for international versions of routers because they're the exact same hardware and not as locked? If I'm a manufacturer I certainly don't want a whole new BOM variation just for US devices if I can solve the problem with software.
It's a trap-door upgrade.
Doesn't necessarily mean you can't load your own firmware in, but it would raise the difficulty of doing so. Finding a serial console on the board, vulnerabilities in the software, things like that - more akin to jailbreaking/rooting your phone.
TP-Link may well be locking down firmware, but it is NOT because the FCC is forcing them to.
As your link says, they intend to prohibit selling hardware which can be modified to violate FCC regs. Since 3rd party firmware allows such violations, devices get locked down.
How else are you going to explain the existence of separate US firmware which refuses to upgrade to international firmwares?
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=990535
So why is TP-Link locking down their firmware even though they aren't required to? You have to ask them.
If you read TFA you'll learn that somebody did just that.
Right now there is no issue for TP-link to "preenmptively" block their hardware. If there was, they would think twice about it.
Unfortunately, given the number of developers that would have to agree, the fact that early contributions weren't attributed and the can of worms that defining what a derivative work is opens, makes relicensing very unlikely.
Linus has in fact done this to quite a bit of MIT licensed code.
Of course it only applies to future versions, and you could conceivably make versions that have those patches removed.
It does make a good excuse for them, though, I guess.
"Recent US firmware (e.g. Archer C7 v2 151014 US) do not install unsigned firmware, including earlier versions of firmware and international versions. Thank you, FCC. You need to use TFTP Recovery method to install OpenWRT until somebody replicates what DD-WRT’s KrypteX is doing."
So, it certainly seems like this has been known for at least a month.
[0]http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer-c5-c7-wdr7500
I setup OpenVPN as a bridge and configured an SSID on it so when I connect to it, it'll be as if I were still at home. (Same subnet so I have access to all my printers, tv tuners, etc).
This is disappointing news. What I just did would not have been possible for $15. I've been using OpenWRT for over 10 years and can't imagine ever using a router without some sort of customizable Linux on it. I've learned so much about Linux, networking, VPNs, etc from OpenWRT.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/dmca-anti-circumvention-co...