Texas is suing TP-Link Systems, a California-based maker of wi-fi routers, accusing it of concealing its ties to China and potentially exposing American users' home networks to hackers:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the lawsuit on Feb. 17, alleging deceptive marketing practices. Paxton first began investigating TP-Link in October 2025, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has since prohibited state employees from using TP-Link products.
TP-Link, founded in China in 1996, states on its website that it underwent a restructuring in 2024 that split the company into TP-Link Systems and TP-Link Technologies, which serves the mainland Chinese market, and that the two entities are no longer affiliated. Devices sold to U.S. consumers also carry "Made in Vietnam" labels.
Paxton, however, alleges that those "Made in Vietnam" stickers are meant to obscure a supply chain "deeply entrenched in China," where nearly all of TP-Link's components are sourced before being shipped to Vietnam for final assembly.
Those supply-chain ties, the lawsuit claims, leave the company vulnerable to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) counterespionage and national security laws, which require Chinese companies and citizens to assist state intelligence efforts, including providing foreign user data upon request. The complaint also alleges that firmware vulnerabilities in TP-Link hardware have already "exposed millions of consumers to severe cybersecurity risks."
Previously: FCC Orders TP-Link to Allow Third-Party Firmware on Their Routers
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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau has reached a $200,000 settlement with TP-Link in regards to selling in the US routers that could operate at output levels higher that allowed by FCC rules.
At the same time, TP-Link has also agreed to work with the open-source community and Wi-Fi chipset manufacturers to enable consumers to install third-party firmware on their Wi-Fi routers.
Source: Help Net Security
(Score: 5, Funny) by ikanreed on Friday February 20, @01:22PM (2 children)
You're supposed to sell equipment with NSA back doors not Chinese back doors!
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday February 20, @03:04PM (1 child)
You're supposed to sell equipment with NSA back doors not Chinese back doors!
You're quite right [fcc.gov]. However, it seems that those NSA backdoors are also doubling as Chinese backdoors [eff.org], too. And since manufacturers are as they are, salt typhoon [senate.gov] has gone global and is even in Europe [theregister.com] even though they know better and should be running routers with pure Linux or one of the BSDs.
It's good that Texas is suing, but their lawsuit is aimed at the wrong target, actually the wrong country.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by Undefined on Sunday February 22, @06:58PM
I get my CCP back doors from Alibaba. Doesn't everyone?
I use a dedicated preprocessor to elaborate abbreviations.
Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday February 20, @01:25PM (1 child)
The "good" news is the Vietnam is building its first chip fab right now.
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/viettel-begins-construction-vietnams-first-chip-plant-trial-run-targeted-by-2026-01-16/ [reuters.com]
The "bad" news is the people building it are "Vietnam's military-run telecom company Viettel"
So either they're importing all their chips, probably from mainland China, or in about a year they "could" be using fake-ish graymarket clones probably with "slight modifications" made by the Vietnamese military. Getting even for events a half a century ago, perhaps.
It is kind of funny that non-technical politician types would never bother to see if Vietnam literally has the capability to do what some corporate marketing scammer claims.
AFAIK the story about them building their first fab this year is true... or more likely to be true than TP-Link owning a secret fab in Vietnam LOL.
Making a small low performance fab is pretty easy and cheap. The big money (both in expense and income) is in cutting edge technology, but the world makes, uses, and needs a shitload of pretty basic semiconductors. This is a 32 nm facility according to press release bullshit. Which is not THAT low tech, thats like an intel core i7 from 15 or 20 years ago, a pretty capable chip. I'm sure you could build a rather impressive 2026 firewall using chips from Vietnam in 2027 or whenever it opens. Its not in production yet, AFAIK based upon probably somewhat inaccurate press releases.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday February 20, @03:00PM
My current (emergency) daily driver's cpu is a 28nm node cpu. It is certainly adequate for my purposes.
Previous was a 14nm node, which was fanless, so a bit underpowered, but both battery and charger died - I'd like to go fanless again, but I haven't found a fanless notebook PC that I like.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Username on Friday February 20, @03:18PM (3 children)
>where nearly all of TP-Link's components are sourced before being shipped to Vietnam for final assembly.
That's every piece of electronics made since about 2004. There isn't a single thing that I am aware of that isn't 90%+ Chinese components. To get 100% nonchinese it would have to be some kind of large crazy through hole resistor board.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 20, @05:42PM
"To get 100% nonchinese it would have to be some kind of large crazy through hole resistor board."
Or pay Rochester Electronics MIL prices.
Even then, you won't find any passives made in MAGAland
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday February 21, @02:08AM
There's the problem in a nutshell.
And I wonder how much of the current scrutiny originated as the CCP retaliating because TP-Link has been trying to at least partially divorce itself from mainland China.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 21, @02:52AM
>To get 100% nonchinese it would have to be some kind of large crazy through hole resistor board.
25 years ago, we were making a simple little controller, all it needed were four buttons and a power switch, we threw a couple of bar graph LEDs on it more for entertainment than need, it looked... lo-tec, but it was pretty much state of the art for our US based manufacturers... It controlled a moving bed thing, which we weren't very successful in selling.
5-ish years later, that company was bought by a Chinese national who took over manufacturing, redesigned the big aluminum frame to be a bigger steel frame (that her son could make in his factory), and they redesigned the controller in a remarkably short time, gave it a glass capacitive touch screen display with swipy controls - looks slick, didn't really work as well as the buttons and LEDs, didn't provide any additional functionality or information, but it looked cool. And.... they couldn't sell that turkey any better than we could, even at half the price we were trying to sell it at with American made parts.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]