Netgear just informed users of its older Orbi mesh routers that the gear had reached "end of lifecycle" -- another way to say "arbitrary end of security updates". Options? None really, except to buy new routers or eventually be hacked.

Do you own an EV? It'll work until the car maker says it won't.

@dangillmor "Do you own an EV? It'll work until the car maker says it won't."

How is that an EV issue?

@Salty Same principle. EVs are controlled by software, and manufacturer controls the software.

@dangillmor which older Orbis? I didnt get any notices

@dangillmor
OpenWrt is the answer here. My last Netgear router (3-5 years ago) had plenty of ram and CPU to easily run openwrt but I chose to replace with ubiquity/unify gear instead of doing that because I wanted the flexibility and could afford the upgrade.

@dangillmor why would this be specific to EVs?

@Downes it isn't.

@dangillmor Why drag EVs into this? Virtually all cars are rolling computers today

@Salty
Because EV are especially heavy on software and remote control.

ICE vehicles do exist in offline versions, even if they are rare in the versions sold in the past decade. Because the manufacturers consider data mining to be an income stream that belongs to them.
@dangillmor

@dangillmor
> Do you own an EV? It'll work until the car maker says it won't.

That software can be riddled with holes so badly, that I expect custom firmware.

Today you can check if you can remove the modem.

https://arkadiyt.com/2026/05/13/removing-the-modem-and-gps-from-my-rav4/

@dangillmor @Salty so do petrol cars these days. In fact if anything is more so as there are no new petrol cars too cheap to bother including all that crap

@dangillmor @Salty

Not unless they secure the modem in a place I can't disable it

@TeflonTrout @dangillmor @Salty then it will put a fault light on and not work

@yacc143 @Salty @dangillmor EVs are much simpler on software and remote control. There's not a lot in an EV There are also low end vehicles where it's too cheap to afford to fill it with spycrap

@dangillmor @Salty The story of the reverse-engineering of the Fisker Ocean firmware is an encouraging point in all of this. The manufacturer disappeared, so the owners took things into their own hands.

https://electrek.co/2026/05/16/fisker-ocean-open-source-ev-story-after-bankruptcy/