Caporegime
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Yea everyone is bahsing ASUS when other companies have similar issues/complaints
The ASUS Dumpster Fire
- Thread starter Ice Tea
- Start date
You still don’t seem to get it. America and British routers with no brand are irrelevant and have nothing to do with it, TP Link are probably the easiest OEM to get to fix or address anything, if they can replicate the issue or you can explain the need appropriately, they will often help you resolve an issue in a way ASUS just won’t, sometimes they will explain it’s not within the product scope, but you get an explanation, no waiting for years.
As to your quote, do you really need to quote someone saying the blatantly obvious? Yes, literally everyone has CVE’s because the underlying software used is generally traceable back to one of three OS’s and non is immune to CVE’s, also if a router manufacturer implements something a certain way and an exploit is found, that usually applies to any router on the same hardware they produce. Normal companies push an update and move on, ASUS didn’t for years. ASUS also sold routers with a NAS feature that let anyone who was bothered enough to look full access to your data from the internet. Again, it took years for them to patch that and only when they were being audited did they finally cave. They couldn’t be arsed to actually test hardware because it was expensive/took time, so they faked the test results to get certified by the FCC.
You keep peddling this idea that Merlin fixes bugs, but it’s clear that you have no grasp of what he actually does or how. He fixes things that are generally already fixed upstream. Let me explain it again, ASUS forked WRT, to create ASUS WRT, Merlin forked ASUS WRT to create Merlin WRT, he is literally at the end of the chain. If you don’t want to deal with ASUS garbage software and forced updates, run your chosen WRT distro, you just removed two layers of complexity and a whole load of BS from access to updates, fixes and improvements worked on by many quality devs.
If you aren’t sure ASUS are worse than literally everyone else at this point, then can you name a few of the other OEM’s that have ignored fixing CVE’s for years, exposed user data for years, faked test data to gain certification, sold user data to a 3rd party, forced updates on users and broken routers till they pushed another update? I must have missed them.
Soldato
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Why do you get so angry that someone has a different opinion to you?
I'm sorry, but you are not about to convince me that Asus are the worst company in the world and, honestly, you really need to stop trying. I have read your arguments and I don't agree with your conclusion. Yes, Asus do have negative points but they have positive ones too.
And I am not peddling anything, I am just stating my opinion. I'm not trying to convince you or change your mind. You don't have to believe it if you don't want to. Nor do you need to keep up the constant attacks for what is just my opinion. I mean, seriously, not everyone is going to agree with you in this world.
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Think about how ridiculous that is though. A multi billion dollar company has to rely on one person to make the router just okay.
It's also borderline crazy to put the faith of your router security into one person. What if they just die tomorrow? Loads of routers suddenly turn into bricks when more bugs/cves are found. You could argue that oh someone else will take that up or another group will but that's asking for trouble.
Soldato
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I never understood why so many router manufacturers just ignore their products once they are out the door. Maybe consumers don't upgrade them with firmware updates? But, yes, I have certainly waited years for known, serious bugs to be repaired to no avail. And I am not talking about Asus.
Why would a router die when a person does? That doesn't make any sense at all. If the person dies you are just in the same place that most other router buyers are in - no updates. It's not exactly the end of the world. Annoying, yes, but that seems to be the norm for routers.
Because you keep on attacking my posts, when all they are is an opinion about who is and who is not a good manufacturer, which is rather subjective. People tend to judge who is good and bad on based personal experience rather than the facts. Facts being numbers we don't posses. Once they've decided there are plenty of Youtube videos to support their ideas.
My personal experience is that Asus products have let me down far fewer times than any other manufacturer, and you can't argue with that, although you really seem to want to try. And I very much doubt that Asus are the only company that has dirty little secrets. Mind, it's not like I am completely happy with Asus, I'm not. But I see problems with all companies, and Asus, to me, while being rubbish, aren't much worse than anyone else.
Oh, and Steve Burke seems to be rather up himself these days. Like a multi-billion dollar corporation is going to listen to him. Not.
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Well, they have. He's had meetings with their executives over their questionable RMA process and other shoddy practices and changes were (allegedly) made.
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Did you really just try and claim you feel attacked and i'm angry because I posted about established and documented fact that goes against your personal opinion of a brand? That is hilarious and tragic, you aren’t 5, people are allowed to disagree with you and provide accurate information that contradicts your opinion, especially when you are choosing to voice an opinion that's so out of touch with those facts that it's up there with Comical Ali and the US tanks rolling past in the background as he claims no tanks have entered Baghdad. Ironically, you then go on to try to justify your opinion by citing your personal experience, after pointing out personal experience is a poor substitute for facts (that we have).
How about we do this the easy way, I think ASUS are a garbage tier OEM and can cite many documented examples unbelievably poor choices they have made over decades, prosecutions, fines, auditing, lies, shoddy practices, you say everyone else is about the same, so who has a worse track record than ASUS and more importantly, why? It should be easy for you with such a depth of knowledge that you clearly have acquired of the market and it's players over the decades.
Caporegime
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What facts? Do you have actual factual data that compares ASUS failed mono’s vs any other companies like for like?
Not sure where to start with this, firstly this is networking, not general hardware/motherboards, though sadly, they're equally shoddy. A brief history for you (avoiding the background 'CVE affecting XYZ routers, OEM advises everyone to update' routine, as everyone has that because most of them run on the same three underlying OS').
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GreyNoise Discovers Stealthy Backdoor Campaign Affecting Thousands of ASUS Routers
GreyNoise uncovers a stealth campaign exploiting ASUS routers, enabling persistent backdoor access via CVE-2023-39780 and unpatched techniques. Learn how attackers evade detection, how GreyNoise discovered it with AI-powered tooling, and what defenders need to know.
www.greynoise.io
Then we have the selling of hardware that violates FCC power level laws, on several occasions. Honestly, that's just two, I got bored after that.
Then they were caught not patching CVE's and leaving customers with data exposed to the internet because why bother updating something for years when you can just ignore it till your ability to sell in the US was threatened? Nominal fine and agreed to 20 years of external auditing.
Then there was that time they knocked everyone offline with the security update globally, but you can trust them to outsource your data to Trend Micro, it's not at all scummy, unless you define scummy as:
Product information, such as MAC address, device ID
• Public IP address of the user’s gateway to the internet
• Mobile/PC environment
• Metadata from suspicious executable files
• URLs, Domains and IP addresses of websites visited (which answers the question in the title of this article)
• Metadata of user/device managed by gateway Product
• Application behaviours
• Personal information contained within email content or files to which Trend Micro is provided access
• Behaviours of Product users
• Information from suspicious email, including sender and receiver email address, and attachments
• Detected malicious file information
• Detected malicious network connection information
• Debug logs
• Network Architecture/Topology
• Screen capture of errors
Yes, there’s quite a bit of info that can be collected by Trend Micro and you need to agree to it, so their services can work, which are described in detail here:
• Analyse data sent to/from the user’s device to isolate and identify threats, vulnerabilities, suspicious activity and attacks;
• Assess the reputation of a website, email sender’s IP address, device or file to advise the user on whether access should be granted;
• Analyse email to protect against spam, impersonation and other suspicious content;
• Virus protection;
• Intrusion detection, prevention and protection;
• Threat prevention and prediction;
• Network defence;
• Sand box testing (for certain cloud products);
• Storage of emails for back up purposes (certain cloud products);
• Identify, block and/or remove applications, messages, and files that may compromise productivity or the performance and security of computers, systems, and/or networks;
• Identify sources and methods of targeted attacks; and
• Deliver updated protection against malicious threats.
The collected information can also be used for other purposes such as:
• Internal record keeping;
• Compliance with the law and requests from government bodies;
• Product and Service development;
• Keeping existing and past Customers informed about our Products, Services and promotions;
• Providing Customer support;
• Managing subscriptions and billing; and
• Responding to requests, questions and comments.
Source: https://www.mbreviews.com/trend-micro-aiprotection-asus/#:~:text=If you log into the Asus router web-based,processed (or if it’s being shared with third-parties).
When it comes to motherboards or GPU's:
This was the guy who's grounding pads had whitness marks from a motherboard screw literally doing what it is designed to do:
Warning for all motherboard owners
Just wanted to share my experience I've recently had with my motherboard kicking the bucket and the rma being denied due to "user damage". Ive only ever done the screws up to hand tightness with a mini screwdriver so no real strength can be applied, im not sure if this is due to asus...
forums.overclockers.co.uk
Or perhaps direct from Gibbo himself:
** ASUS TURBO 3YR RMA SERVICE: OcUK CUSTOMERS ONLY!! **
Hi there Though Asus is always in our top three of VGA brands and regular in no.1 position simply due to the quality of their product one issue for a lot of customers has being perceived RMA service being poor. Asus generally offer great service for the reseller the issue being is your then...
forums.overclockers.co.uk
Another classic was an RMA refused because the back plate had been removed and the same thread details the old wait 28 days and then send something that's in a worse condition than when you sent it back.
Then we have the previous warranty call out:
and predictably ASUS did a PR 'we are sorry and won't do it again'.
Asus' tone deaf response to ongoing RMA support issues isn't going to encourage me to keep recommending Asus tech
Asus has apologised 'for any confusion' RMA customers might have experienced and is implementing three 'actions to optimize the customer repair experience' effective from today.
Then they did it again as per the video in the op. Admittedly this is only US/Canada, but I assure you the UK warranty system was running a similar way at one point if you went direct, they charged you if something was missing, they charged you if you didn't have the original receipt, they charged you for faster shipping, they then often sent you a really poor condition 'replacement', and if it didn't work, you had to pay to send it back again.
Now take all of the above and combine it with a little insider knowledge on the way ASUS 'promotes' itself via third party content creators with 'free' hardware or 'sponsorship' (aka pay to shill). I know such a person personally and have done for decades, I read the contract they sent him as he wanted an opinion on it and I happen to know a very good contract lawyer, to say it was restrictive would be an understatement. It specified how many 'features' he had to do on/with/involving each product and severely limited what he could say that was less than positive if he wished to continue to be part of the program. I used to do a few bits of work for him from time to time, and he'd always try and palm off his ASUS hardware as part of the payment because he knew how much I wasn't a fan. Also behind the scenes ASUS weren't used for anything other than GPU's in builds, and rarely made it to anything that was crucial to his channel workflow or family builds that weren't featured. In fairness this was a good few years ago now, and I would hope with the focus on sponsorship and paid advertising/promotion on various platforms, things have changed. My friend is also no longer shilling for ASUS or anyone else that I know of.
I used to love ASUS products, there was a time they were top tier for quality and support, but that was the P2/P3 days, it's sadly been down hill ever since in terms of service, I now stick to MSI and Gigabyte as a backup, at least if something dies (thankfully rare) I get an RMA in a reasonable time, or a beta BIOS is required to fix an issue, both of them have less awful history in this respect.
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Soldato
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Yes, fine, I get the message. You think Asus are rubbish. That's your opinion, and not one that is shared by millions of Asus customers.
When people come here to the forum they want answers to their questions, not an anti-Asus campaign.
I mean, have people here stopped to consider that this just drives others away from the forum? The come here to get questions answered and folk are all over them, telling them the bought the wrong product. That is not what people want to hear. They want an answer to their question, not to be told to throw their product in the bin.
This is by far and away the worst sub-forum for elitist nonsense.
Let me get this straight, I literally link to multiple examples independently documented from multiple sources, settlements ASUS have agreed to and allegations they have admitted, apologies they have made and then done the same thing again, showing an obvious pattern of behaviour over at least a decade, and you think that’s opinion? Fair enough 
How are we doing on examples of other OEM’s with a worse or even equally bad history? *crickets and tumbleweed*
Now you want to blame people calling out unacceptable behaviour with the decline in forum traffic? Not sure if you noticed, but 30 years ago newsgroups were king, then forums took over, then Reddit became a thing, Discord became the new IRC and then other social media platforms took over. It’s the natural flow of things, you lower the entry requirements and make a nicer UI and people use it, even if it’s inherently flawed, especially if they already have to use it for other reasons. As to recommendations, you’ll generally find that if an OEM produces a decent product, they get discussed and recommended, just as the not so decent products get called out. I mean TPLink, GL.inet, Ubiquiti etc. are all regularly mentioned, usually with caveats explained, and Intel for example is called out over the i225 or Puma fiasco or it’s poor handling of the Linux driver issues if appropriate. We even differentiate between good and bad products from the same OEM, Realtek for example made horrible choices in the gigabit NIC chipset era, literally nerfing hardware and making software NIC’s via drivers with highly questionable Linux/BSD drivers, then they got it together and the 2.5Gb stuff is actually better than Intel managed for years, as are the drivers for both OS’ now.
So, if by ‘elitist’ you mean it’s the sub forum of a store what was founded for enthusiasts where literally from day one they focused on bringing good products from reliable brands and giving honest impartial advice because it mattered, then that’s what many of us do, or at least try to do. As to telling people to throw a product in the bin, I recall one of the threads I linked to about motherboards documents someone so sick of multiple ASUS RMA’s they binned the hardware
Unfortunately, sometimes the correct advice is: ‘You bought the wrong product for your needs, return it or sell it, and buy something suitable.’ and thats’s not just reserved for ASUS owners.
You are less than happy with ASUS, but still defend them for some reason, it’s a classic example of an abusive relationship, it’ll likely take multiple attempts for you to break free and you’ll keep going back because you think they’ve changed. It’s OK, this is a safe space, and when you are ready, we’ll be here for you
You can do it!
How are we doing on examples of other OEM’s with a worse or even equally bad history? *crickets and tumbleweed*
Now you want to blame people calling out unacceptable behaviour with the decline in forum traffic? Not sure if you noticed, but 30 years ago newsgroups were king, then forums took over, then Reddit became a thing, Discord became the new IRC and then other social media platforms took over. It’s the natural flow of things, you lower the entry requirements and make a nicer UI and people use it, even if it’s inherently flawed, especially if they already have to use it for other reasons. As to recommendations, you’ll generally find that if an OEM produces a decent product, they get discussed and recommended, just as the not so decent products get called out. I mean TPLink, GL.inet, Ubiquiti etc. are all regularly mentioned, usually with caveats explained, and Intel for example is called out over the i225 or Puma fiasco or it’s poor handling of the Linux driver issues if appropriate. We even differentiate between good and bad products from the same OEM, Realtek for example made horrible choices in the gigabit NIC chipset era, literally nerfing hardware and making software NIC’s via drivers with highly questionable Linux/BSD drivers, then they got it together and the 2.5Gb stuff is actually better than Intel managed for years, as are the drivers for both OS’ now.
So, if by ‘elitist’ you mean it’s the sub forum of a store what was founded for enthusiasts where literally from day one they focused on bringing good products from reliable brands and giving honest impartial advice because it mattered, then that’s what many of us do, or at least try to do. As to telling people to throw a product in the bin, I recall one of the threads I linked to about motherboards documents someone so sick of multiple ASUS RMA’s they binned the hardware
Unfortunately, sometimes the correct advice is: ‘You bought the wrong product for your needs, return it or sell it, and buy something suitable.’ and thats’s not just reserved for ASUS owners.You are less than happy with ASUS, but still defend them for some reason, it’s a classic example of an abusive relationship, it’ll likely take multiple attempts for you to break free and you’ll keep going back because you think they’ve changed. It’s OK, this is a safe space, and when you are ready, we’ll be here for you
You can do it!