On Jul 5, 2012, at 12:42, Jon Lewis wrote: > Routers are sometimes used on networks that don't have internet connectivity > [by design]. This seems amazingly short-sighted for a company that's been > around selling routing gear as long as cisco.
Not to defend Cisco's idiotic decision, but in this case the devices in question are extremely unlikely to be used in such a situation as they are consumer/SOHO products. The vast, overwhelming majority of these will be installed as the primary and/or only piece of network hardware other than the modem. I'd imagine that anyone who knows enough to care about a non-connected situation was never considering these devices in the first place. Frankly for the Joe Sixpack market I can't argue against the autoupdate idea itself, as outdated consumer routers probably account for a large percentage of the exploitable Linux systems out there, but the "cloud" tie in and privacy issues are clearly not well thought out.