Videos prove, the Russian army stays online in Ukraine using network equipment from American company Ubiquiti.
Worried customers have been discussing this in Ubiquiti’s online forums, but threads have been shut down for “violating community guidelines”.
Many companies see their products sold to Russia, but Ubiquiti products are actually online, which means Ubiquiti could trace the illegal use and intervene — so why don’t they?
@randahl these products being online does not imply things can be tracked. Various Ubiquiti models can be flashed with custom firmware, notably OpenWrt.
Only if they would backdoor the products and prevent users from installing their own firmware (which is ethically questionable) they could trace them everywhere.
They indeed could and should track sales as you mention, but that's not due to their online nature.
@randahl
Why?
As always, money.
Out of the box they should be able to see the IP address where any requests for firmware upgrades etc. comes from, yes.
However, anyone operating in a questionable environment would almost certainly throw a VPN connection in front of the equipment, and in that case tracing the origins may rely on tactics that could land Ubiquiti in hot water with other - legal - customers.
That being said, there sure seems to be a lot of shady shit going on with regards to selling and shipping Ubiquiti equipment to sanctioned buyers, if the article you linked is correct (and I have no reason to believe it is not).
@madsenandersc if you shut down sales in Russia, and suddenly your sales in Russia’s neighboring countries increase significantly, a responsible company would investigate why that increase happened.
Oh, for sure - like I said, there seems to be plenty of shady stuff going on, my main point was more to the question about tracking the use online.
@randahl I’m an American living in Moscow (my wife is Russian). There are SO MANY ways to get American products in the country. It’s silliness or plain hubris to anticipate otherwise.
@randahl can they actually trace it, though? I wouldn't be happy if they could if I had one
