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Ubiquiti: New Firmware 4.0.69 Makes Phone Home Opt-In by Default

13 points by luckman212 ↗ HN
The recent crash reporting/data collection aka "phone-home" features that were enabled for Ubiquiti Unifi devices caused quite a controversy[0]

New firmware 4.0.69.10871 out today makes this opt-in by default[1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21430997

[1] https://community.ui.com/releases/UAP-USW-Firmware-4-0-69-10871/37101df7-b0b4-482b-968f-27633f3daf91 (may require login to view)

4 comments

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kadoban
The wording of this headline could be confusing, depending on how closely you've been following these developments.

What actually changed in this exact version sounds like there is now an opt-out, though it is by default opted-in of course.

Before this version, there was no opt out at all. So this is an improvement from the last release, but still worse than a few releases ago before the phone-home.

I don't think I'll be purchasing any more Ubiquiti gear myself, and what I have I should probably sell off. Network gear is something I want to be able to trust, not wonder what new thing they're trying to sneak in, and the communication on this issue from Ubiquiti has been pitifully bad.

beatgammit
Eh, it's pretty hard to find quality wireless gear, so I may continue to buy APs until I can find a suitable replacement, but I absolutely won't be buying any of their other products. I was considering getting a router from them, but I'll instead roll my own or use pfsense or something. That way I can at least trust my edge, and I can configure the router to treat the wireless gear as untrusted.

Setting up a DMZ and some firewall tweaks is a lot easier than finding a good AP.

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mrmacedonian
https://community.ui.com/releases/UAP-USW-Firmware-4-0-69-10...

"[HW] Default disable crash and critical event reporting."

I've installed and personally bought a lot of Ubiquiti gear and this was an unwelcome change. However, this certainly qualifies as an appropriate response and there's no reason to start dumping hardware over a software change that's been reverted.