[sf-lug] Monday meeting and Bobbie Sellers' news

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> I was using the Netgear 54Mbsp Wireless ADSL Modem Router DG834G v3 on
> a filtered line from a POTS with connections to the current Dell
> E6520, the Epson Printer with a USB connected Scanner and Copier.     
> Absurdly over-featured" not to the the consumer level user or people
> with space and even shelf space limitations.

Care to explain that, Bobbie?  The above seems like a whopping
non-sequitur, for starters.

If you wish to argue otherwise, kindly go through the feature list I
posted upthread, and tell me which of those functions you actually need
and use.  Long experience suggests that a sober and thoughtful answer to
that is going to end up being a list of about three or four out of many
times that.

That would cover 'over-featured' in the sense of 'more than the user
actually has a practical use for', but also relevant is the additional
sense of 'tending to bloat the attack surface'.  Which was the _most_
important point.  Your so-called 'DSL modem' just got pwned:  How do you
figure that happened, Bobbie?

Dollars to donuts, it happened because the Netgear device was lit up
like a Christmas tree with publicly attackable code that you never
bothered (or, likely, even thought) to upgrade.  And the real question I
had was:  Are you trying to make that same mistake, all over again?

It's also troubling that you seem to think that the more a user is
'consumer level', the more that person needs devices with boatloads of
features that he/she has no plausible use for and serve only to create
weakness to attack.  This does not seem like a survival strategy, more
like a Darwin-client one, and moreover it's rather painful to see on a
Linux mailing list, given that doing Internet infrastructure is a core
Linux competency.

Shelf space?  Wow, remind me how big a Raspberry Pi is.  About 3" x 2",
right?  Just a bit larger than a credit card.  You're going with people
not having room for a credit card, then?



>     Is repair of this device possible?

Try to factory-reset it, and then reflash it.