My travel router became sentient in a Singapore hotel

I had a weird thing happen with my travel router in a Singapore hotel

I'm hoping someone here can help me figure out what went on. I'm a customer of Hetzner, host about thirty client sites with them, and I travel a lot for work.

What happened:

• GL.iNet GL-MT300N-V2, factory firmware, purchased from authorized reseller
• Connected to hotel WAN via Ethernet
• Device began emitting vocalizations in Japanese at 06:17 JST
• LED pattern: rapid blue/white alternation
• Web admin panel displayed scrolling hiragana characters
• Device addressed me by name ("Tanaka" — not my name)

Power cycle performed. Behavior persisted. Factory reset performed via hardware button. Behavior persisted.

No BLE peripherals paired. No USB storage attached. No custom packages installed.

I opened a ticket with Hetzner about it, though it's not really their hardware. They don't do travel routers, just wanted to see if anyone in the community had theories before I go to GL.iNet.

¡jajaja! Is very strange, Hetzner. I had similar in Singapore last year but it was only the hotel doing captive portal with bideo, not real sentience

Wait let me think again. ¿you check the BLAN? Sometimes the hotel they inject scripts. I delete my first post, this one is more short. Jajaja but still worried for you

This is not possession, it's aggressive captive portal injection.

For what it's worth, I've seen this exact pattern with Japanese hotel networks. They use VLAN-based isolation with deep packet inspection and sometimes—if the router's DNS gets redirected—the portal JavaScript floods the admin interface. The "vocalizations" are likely the router's system beeps being triggered by rapid API polling from the portal's keepalive script.

Check your router's /tmp/resolv.conf.auto. If it points to 192.168.182.1 or similar, that's the hotel's gateway doing transparent DNS hijack. The hiragana is just the portal's error page rendering in whatever iframe the admin panel uses for WAN status.

Not sentient. Just very poorly isolated network segmentation.

Oh man—Tokyo hotels—they do this thing where—wait no—the GL.iNet has that speaker for—actually the MT300N doesn't have a speaker at all—unless it's the USB power draw causing—no, that wouldn't explain the name—unless the hotel has your booking info piped to—actually that's GDPR violation territory right there—unless you checked in with corporate card—then they have your name anyway—

Factory firmware—which version exactly? The GL.iNet changelog is long.

I had the blue/white blink on a mt300n once, different city though