Belkin

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For other uses see Belkin (disambiguation).

Belkin International, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	1983
Headquarters	Compton, California
Key people	Chet Pipkin, Founder and CEO; Mark Reynoso, President
Industry	Computer hardware
Products	Computer hardware
Revenue	unknown
Employees	unknown
Website	www.belkin.com

Belkin International, Inc. is a global manufacturer of computer hardware which specializes in connectivity devices. Belkin sells primarily in the consumer and home user market (as most items are unreliable or unsuitable for business), but they also make routers, switches, hubs (USB and computer network), cables, uninterruptible power supply devices (UPSs), KVM switches, and other peripherals.

The company was founded in 1983 in Hawthorne, California by current CEO Chet Pipkin. It has twice made the Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing privately held companies in the United States. At present, Belkin is headquartered in Compton, California.

[edit] Criticism

In 2003 Belkin released a home use wireless router which would occasionally replace user's HTTP requests with an advertisement for Belkin's filtering software. Belkin received some intense criticism for this from some people who described it as a man-in-the-middle attack or a form of session hijacking. Belkin initially treated this as a public relations problem rather than a highly inappropriate action on their part, but later relented and removed this function from its products. ^[1] ^[2] ^[3] ^[4] ^[5]