Re: Ok, they spy on their clients
I guess that monitoring your "customer's" every damned move is now a case of "Everyone does it because everyone does it".
It's an achievement those router owners even got an update (yes, I know that's not the point). I swore off Netgear several years ago when my top of the range wireless ADSL router (DGND3700v1) was EOL'd 12 months after launch (i.e. 6-9 months after purchase) despite them knowing the firmware was still full of fundamental ADSL breaking bugs. The fixes only went into the v2 hardware. The only reason I got passable performance was because Support sent me three Engineering Beta versions of the firmware which resolved most of the ADSL problems. These updates were never released properly so I can only suspect they were made available on a "Keep people quiet who complain to support" basis but not released generally to ensure most people bought a new one to get the fixes.
I've not touched Netgear since. Their old Sparc based NAS boxes were pretty good (and still getting very occasional updates 5+ years later) but the current stuff is just junk.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
