And even if they did shut it down remotely, that could be construed as an unauthorized act of war.
Comment on Ubiquiti: The U.S. Tech Enabling Russia's Drone War
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Oh look, a hit piece put out by a media company that’s owned by a capital investment group that is shorting UIs stock…I wonder what this could be about?!
Ubi isn’t selling this stuff to the Russians and neither are their vendors. Their vendors, most of them in the article are from overseas, are selling them to middle-men who sell them to another middle-man who then physically gets the equipment into Russian hands where it potentially goes through ANOTHER middle man before its used by Russian troops. There’s almost no way to control that and if you read carefully the “legal experts” quoted toward the bottom of the article use some very careful language.
You can’t just “shut it down” either, although even the article notes that Ubi is trying. Most of the gear that’s getting into Russian military hands for use in the war is stuff that you have probably never used. It’s PowerBeam and NanoBeam product that’s most often used by WISPs, which makes sense because that’s precisely how Russian forces are using it. What the article isn’t telling you is that this stuff does NOT need hooked to the Cloud in order to function. In fact it doesn’t need Internet access at all and so there’s no way for Ubi to know where it’s being used or even that it’s been powered up!
Even if Ubi can tell that the equipment is powered on and in use they may not know where it’s at with sufficient accuracy or knowledge to do anything about it. The damn thing could be on the Internet via Starlink sitting in Pokrovsk. On December 1st, 2025 was a SL system with Ubi gear attached to it in Pokrovsk being operated by Russia or Ukraine? There’s literally no way for Ubi or anyone else to know.
As for Ubi doing more if you read the whole article you’ll find that more than a few of these bad distributors HAVE been caught and shut down across the globe which almost certainly means that Ubi is helping at some level.
In short the article looks bad but when you start breaking down the individual points it quickly falls apart, especially when the media company behind it has a monetary interest in sinking Ubiquiti’s stock.
PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
That’s not really true. If they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians. It’s not a priority for Ubiquiti.
It’s like with money laundering, it’s very difficult to control (I am talking in a general sense). Yet you’ll find that enabling money laundering for drug cartels is treated relatively seriously by major western financial institutions.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
That’s… difficult in practice. Especially since the people involved in trying to circumvent sanctions and get this sort of shit to the Russians don’t just order things directly. In the interest of confusing and delaying legal repercussions for anyone involved, there tends to be lots of misdirection. To your point around money laundering: you’re kidding yourself if you think that sort of thing has been completely quashed.
Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I understand. Nor am I naive enough to think it’s even possible to completely address money laundering or sanction workarounds.
It’s almost certain they have a lackadaisical (if not out right malicious) approach to limiting shipments that end up in russia. I am genuinely curious, is there a reason to believe otherwise?
rezifon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Show your work
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I’m curious on how?
Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Here is a high-level discussion:
https://piefed.social/comment/9903594
But going beyond that, forgot about Ukraine for a second.
Let’s say you are a competitor of Ubiquiti and you want to develop a bonus structure for your regional teams. You want to know the return on your marketing spend, how well the regional sales teams are developing relationship with retailers, B2B and other source of revenues.
To do that you need to know your real market share. You know your own numbers, but if share is a component of your bonus structure, you need to have accurate numbers for your competition (your sales going up by 15% is a massive failure if the rest of the regional market truly grew by 30%, it means your teams are failing).
To do that, you have several source of data. Roughly speaking you have two basic measures ([1], [2]): - [1] Shipments into a region/channel. Units that were sent to a geography (not sales, just shipments) - [2] POS transactions (syndicated providers offer this albeit it’s less comprehensive on a global geography basis than [1]) - [3] You’re going to always have a delta between the two measures ([1], [2]) above, because you have things like B2B sales, government sales, shipments into the regional distributor channel and so on. These numbers are also available on a regional basis from market data providers.
That being said, you have situations where ([1] - [2]) clearly does not equal anything close to even the highest estimates of [3]. That’s when you know shipments into a region are actually being diverted into another country (other countries?).
If the difference between ([1] - [2]) and [3] for your competitor is huge, you want adjust this in your regional market share calculations and bonus payouts. Because otherwise your regional team might be busting ass like no tomorrow and their performance is being undercounted because your competitor is not actually selling a large part of [1] in the given region, the units are going elsewhere.
Believe it or not, this can be a very sensitive topic. People tend to get very pissed off if their bonuses are impacted (especially if they work hard to grow their regional business).
And that’s if you don’t have access to Ubiquiti datasets; our thought experiment positions us as a company that is trying understand shipment to POS/sales transactions for our competitor; Ubiquiti.
If you are Ubiquiti, I assume (this was true in tech product segments where I have worked) you also have the benefit of being able to track geographic activation of your products (I am assuming it’s possible to update Ubiquiti devices?) and potentially their serial numbers; so you can track which shipments are being diverted to which geography. With some more work and tracking, you can figure out what’s going.
There are some other approaches to triangulation that are used that I am not going to cover here (assuming you are a competitor of Ubiquiti).
Do you see why I said what I did?
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I’m curious on what your solution to the Nvidia problem is? Just stop selling to the market whose sales increased? Then the next, and the next?
Knowing where the hardware is getting in from isn’t a solution. How do they know which orders are legit, and which are meant to go to the restricted area?
And it’s already been pointed out that the Ubiquiti hardware in question requires no activation at all. In fact I don’t believe any Ubiquiti hardware inherently needs internet, never mind activation.
Some features may, but that’s different than requiring activation for the device to work.