Cisco Angers A Lot Of People By Outlawing Porn On Home Routers

Cisco Systems told users of its new high-end home routers — in a roundabout way — they couldn’t use their routers for porn or to send certain types of e-mail and a whole list of other things.

This has made a lot of people angry. Here’s what happened.

Last week, Cisco sent out an upgrade to the software that make its routers work, called firmware. The upgrade affected two models, the EA4500 and the EA2700.  Without asking, Cisco moved them to its “Cisco Connect Cloud” service. This software does things like let you set up a password for the device, or otherwise dink with it.

The supposed main benefit of Connect is that it will let you dink with the device over the Internet, when you are away from home, instead of having to use a PC that is directly connected to the router.

Here’s the catch: the Cisco Connect Cloud Terms of Service forbids a whole bunch of things including porn, sending advertising e-mails — it won’t even allow you to “encourage any conduct” that would violate the law.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-home-routers-rule-change-2012-7#ixzz1zlyPfzlK