In March 2026, the FCC designated all consumer routers manufactured outside the United States as a national security risk, banning new foreign-made models from sale.¹ Eero, NetGear, and Google Nest are all affected, not just Chinese manufacturers, because they all produce hardware overseas.

The reasoning in the FCC’s National Security Determination is specific. Three Chinese nation-state operations, Volt Typhoon, Flax Typhoon, and Salt Typhoon, used compromised consumer routers to build botnets targeting US critical infrastructure: communications, energy, transportation, and water systems. The FBI and DOJ shut down one of these botnets in 2024. The ban follows directly from those incidents.²

Three Production Apps, Zero Code: What Keip Actually Looks Like in Practice#

In the past month I shipped three integration apps to my home cluster: a Spanish translator that replies in audio, a health tracking bot I can query from any room in my house, and a camera alert system that decides for itself what’s worth telling me about. Each one took under an hour to have running. None of them required me to write a single line of application code.

I want to introduce a concept I’ll be coming back to throughout this blog: Personal Data Sovereignty, or PDS. It’s the idea that individuals can and should have meaningful control over where their data lives, who can access it, and what happens to it. Not as a legal right, as something you actually build.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, some of what follows will look familiar. I’ve written about the network setup, the GPU server, the second brain, the AI inference stack. This post isn’t about new technical ground, it’s more philosophical. PDS is the concept I’ve been building toward without naming it directly, and I wanted to put it in one place before the series goes any further.

Consumer routers frustrated me for years before I understood why. It wasn’t the hardware; my ASUS RT-AC5300 was perfectly capable for most tasks. It was the assumption baked into every consumer device: that I didn’t need to see what was happening on my own network.

At some point, I wanted my router to do something it wouldn’t do. I don’t even remember what it was now. I tried open-source firmware, which worked for a while, until I hit another wall. Underpowered CPUs, limited RAM, confusing web interfaces, and the general lack of configurability.

Two AMD MI60s from eBay cost me about $1,000 total and gave me 64GB of VRAM. That’s enough to run Llama 3.3 70B at home with a 32K context window.

When I started looking into running large language models locally, the obvious limiting factor was VRAM. Consumer GPUs top out at 24GB, and that’s on an RTX 4090 at the high end. I wanted to run 70B parameter models locally, on hardware I own.