Based on an analysis of Telegram posts and materials from open sources, HunterBook journalists identified at least nine Russian military units accused of war crimes, or individuals linked to these units, who are using Ubiquiti equipment.
…
A reporter posing as an officer responsible for military procurement contacted Russian suppliers and several official Ubiquiti distributors in various countries worldwide.
Nearly a dozen sellers agreed to sell the banned export equipment. One supplier even provided letters of appreciation, which, according to him, were received for supplying Ubiquiti equipment to the Russian military.
edit what is the big gotcha about HunterBooker shorting the company it is writing articles about and doing an investigation into? Of course that should be taken into account, but so should the seriousness of evidence here independent of the grey areas of HunterBooker. If the evidence is substantial, that line of response is tangential to the point.
related links on this developing story I have collected
https://www.truehoop.com/p/thinking-like-robert-pera
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1qptq67/ubiquiti_the_us_tech_enabling_russias_drone_war/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1qp6ot4/investigation_80_of_russian_troops_linkups_on_the/
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1qq9w3i/memphis_owner_allegations_getting_buried/
Ok, so it’s not necessarily directly ubiquiti but it is their official distributors who either have an official policy from ubiquiti or are all making policy themselves to bypass the export to Russia.
I found this interesting:
This is part of what makes ubiquiti so “ideal” is that they don’t have a monthly subscription cost and I’m not sure how much power they have to lock down remote devices completely, just the updates. That isn’t a huge loss immediately since most devices are pretty powerful out of the box, but it would be punitive if any security vulnerabilities were found and those updates got blocked.
This would be the real key to see if ubiquiti is complicit. Do they take action against their official distributors or is this just their policy the official distributors are following?
Either way i hate to see it, but i am eager to see if ubiquiti does anything about it
There is a MUCH more in depth article available and I wrote a comment that addresses most of your points. You can find it here: https://lemmy.today/post/46512183/21904347
One of the MANY things this article isn’t telling you is that the source is Hunter Media, which is owned by Hunter Capital who has shorted Ubiquiti’s stock.
They have zero ability to shut them down and that’s if they can even tell they’re being used. These aren’t the “normal” Ubiquiti products that most people use, they are WISP type equipment meant to be used for long range Point to Point or Multipoint connections. They can easily be run without internet access at all.
Considering more than a few of their global official distributors have been shut down by US authorities I’m confident in saying that they are already taking action. They’ve also taken action to ban updates to Ubiquiti equipment that is in use inside Russia but even that is of limited value when geo-location is impossible or wildly imprecise.