Ubiquiti, a $33 billion tech empire, is led by Robert Pera, owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. He pledged to tighten controls on his products years ago — so why are Russian military units sending Ubiquiti vendors thank-you notes?
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?!
Ubiquiti may not be blameless but this article is ridiculous.
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 in order to not tell you this.
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.
There’s almost no way to control that
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.
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.
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?
It’s almost certain…
Show your work
That’s a fair question.
Look at say Nvidia and import controls of enterprise GPUs into China. A highly politically and PR sensitive topic. Something that is arguably a bigger deal (for Nvidia) than breaking sanctions/restrictions on russia.
And yet it turned out that Nvidia had knowledge that around the same time that export restrictions on China were implemented (with their “topline” China shipment numbers declining), there was a massive increase in shipments to Singapore (a trade focused polity with a long history a ethnic-Chinese presence in local business communities).
Did Nvidia act upon this or did just decided to assume that “goly gee, it just so happened that our Singapore shipments started massively increase at exactly the same time we had implement export restrictions into China”.
The people behind Nvidia might be cruel, corrupt and regressive, but they are not stupid.
And I have no reason to believe Ubiquiti is any better from a moral perspective.
EDIT: More details from a similar question to yours (but much more polite): https://piefed.social/comment/9904032
And even if they did shut it down remotely, that could be construed as an unauthorized act of war.
Is this why there’s never stock? It’s going to Russia?
I read the same about the OPi 5+. Apparently it used the Rockchip RK3588 which has a decent NPU for self controlled drones, so russia bought most of the stock. Their price went from ~150$ to infinite in a month.
Nah, according to the article this is mostly the WISP type stuff, particularly the Power and Nano beam products meant for Long Range Point to Point / Multi Point connections. This isn’t routers / switches / etc.
yeah are there any big tech companies that aren’t full of authoritarian shit bags?
Increasingly, seems like no. :(
Line go up.
Actually, TFA is specifically intended to make line go down enough that the authors make a pile of cash.
Unfortunately almost nobody cares about what UI and others are doing.
I’ve not heard bad things about Mikrotik yet.
So, US both started their proxy war against Russia, and are now helping Russia winning it ?? I call propaganda on this ‘article’…
What the fuck
Ubiquiti makes fucking trash.
I bought one of their more expensive switches recently, and you can’t mirror more than one port to another port. Also, only half the ports can be mirrored.
They are expensive toys for people who want EZ (basic) networking setups.
Do their switches still stop forwarding traffic when you make changes for 10-30 seconds?
Interesting if true…
Please no….
here before .ml
